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Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso's granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist's narcissism. "No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius," she wrote in her memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather. "He needed blood to sign each of his paintings: my father's blood, my brother's, my mother's, my grandmother's, and mine. He needed the blood of those who loved him."

After Jacqueline Roque, Picasso's second wife, barred much of the family from the artist's funeral, the family fell fully to pieces: Pablito, Picasso's grandson, drank a bottle of bleach and died; Paulo, Picasso's son, died of deadly alcoholism born of depression. Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso's young lover between his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and his next mistress, Dora Maar, later hanged herself; even Roque eventually fatally shot herself."Women are machines for suffering," Picasso told Françoise Gilot, his mistress after Maar. After they embarked on their affair when he was sixty-one and she was twenty-one, he warned Gilot of his feelings once more: "For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats." Marina saw her grandfather's treatment of women as an even darker phenomenon, a vital part of his creative process: "He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them."

It is curious then that a new exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Paris, just off the Champs-Elysées on the nightclub-laden rue Ponthieu, called "Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter," is full of heartfelt wood sculptures and paper cutouts Picasso made for his daughter Maya, loving and colorful portraits of his shy mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, and a wall full of rarely seen family photographs: Picasso with his children at the beach, at Christmastime, at a bullfight; Picasso and Maya sitting together, looking at a camera; Picasso and Maya with their dog, Riki, on a Parisian balcony. A flip-book turned into a video has Walter posing and smiling for him. A pencil drawing of a childish Maya has her cheeks red with crayon, as if blushing.

Diana Widmaier-Picasso, who is the daughter of Maya Widmaier-Picasso and Pierre Widmaier, a shipping magnate, and the granddaughter of Picasso and Marie-Thérèse, curated the exhibition. She is well aware of the usual misanthropic, misogynistic characterizations of Picasso. "He's a man of metamorphoses," she tells me carefully in Paris, a few days before the vernissage of her exhibition. "A complex person to grasp."

Maya Widmaier-Picasso, on whom the show centers, was born in a suburb of Paris on September 5, 1935, just before a time of great social and personal upheaval. The Spanish Civil War was only months away, World War II was looming, and, although Picasso initially proved to be a present father-doing his share of the cooking and housekeeping-he was introduced to Maar at a movie premiere by the poet Paul Éluard (thus beginning their affair) only two months after Maya's birth. But, for a brief honeyed moment, Picasso chronicled his family life with Maya and Marie-Thérèse in portraits and drawings. Out of his four children, Picasso most frequently depicted Maya-no less a muse than her mother-continuing to portray her consistently for nine years, from her birth until 1944, and off and on for years after that.

"Maya symbolizes hope in a world that is kind of collapsing," Diana Widmaier-Picasso says. "She is also a reflection not only of his beloved muse Marie-Thérèse-my mother-but also of himself. So you see in the portraits that he's projecting himself and Marie-Thérèse onto Maya. I find it fascinating to see the exploration of the mirror of yourself within a daughter."

When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, recently stopped by the gallery to look at the works with Maya, who is now eighty-two, he asked her how it felt to be portrayed so frequently by her father. She merely shrugged. "She thought it hardly felt like her at all," Diana explains.

"Sometimes, you see that he's clearly doing a self-portrait through the features of his daughter," she says. "It's not a portrait of a child, you know? She's meant to be three years old, and there is something very severe about the way she looks ... Certainly, he found a feminine projection of himself within his daughter."

The works on display also mark a stylistic shift for the artist. His series of portraits of three-year-old Maya in 1938 show a rare gentle but physical energy-Maya playing with a toy boat, Maya holding a doll against her cheek in a way that recalls the Virgin and Child.

There are some who see Picasso's treatment of women in a relatively positive light: the women in his life enriched his art and, in turn, he depicted them in loving portraiture and artistic allegory. The classic example given for Picasso's respectful relationship with women is his friendship with Gertrude Stein, which Stein fondly recounted in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

But Picasso's relationship with Stein and his gentle portraits of Marie-Thérèse and Maya don't change the fact that Picasso cheated on nearly all of his lovers and, at least indirectly, drove two of them to suicide. Perhaps the nuance is to be found in the types of love he doled out-that is, between the type of love that he showed Stein and certain friends and the type of love he showed his wives and lovers like Jacqueline Roque and Marie-Thérèse.

Marie-Thérèse was ready to be "crushed" into his art, as Marina Picasso says. "She had no social aspirations whatsoever," says the art historian John Richardson. "Her entire life was devoted to being the artist's great love and muse." Maya, too young to have any agency of her own, was also easily ground up into her father's art: her youthful girlishness provided a new avenue for Picasso to explore his femininity. But Maya is special because although she too was crushed into his art, she was too young to be entirely hurt by it. Picasso's depictions of Maya are a testament to his genuine happiness at her birth but they are also, psychologically, some of his clearest self-portraits.

The evening of the exhibition's vernissage is warm and a line snakes through the gallery's vestibule and out onto the street. Inside, Widmaier-Picasso balances on Louboutins while adjusting the pink bow on the front of her cherry-red dress. After an hour or so of glad-handing, Widmaier-Picasso is tired. She sits down on a circular cushion in the middle of the gallery's second floor. On one wall next to her are dozens of photos of her mother, her grandmother, and Picasso, living what appears to be a fashionable but relatively normal life-restaurants, holidays, work. Earlier, Widmaier-Picasso had told me that her favorite artwork in the exhibition was Maya, dans ses cheveux une poupée en tissue, a drawing of Maya in which Picasso placed a cloth doll in her hair, adding a rare physical dimension to the artwork. Now, Widmaier-Picasso turns from the photographs to stare at it on the opposite wall.

Picasso was a womanizer who left most of his lovers in emotional shambles. He was not, by most stretches of the imagination, a moral or "good" person. And yet, two generations on, his granddaughter, who now specializes in his art and is even working on a catalogue raisonné of his sculptures, has organized a show feting his relationship with one of his daughters. What we are willing to look past-Picasso's indiscretions, cruelties, and emotional bloodletting-is just as telling of the viewer as of the artist.

Today, Picasso is, seemingly, safely ensconced in the canon. And, as one gets to know his art and his life more intimately, it is a balm to look at works like that of little Maya with a cloth doll in her hair. Maya was not destroyed in Picasso's artistic process, because the face he depicted of her wasn't her own face so much as a portal for him to find-for a moment-his innocence, his childishness, and his goodness.

Because so few other women in his life made it out unscathed, that wall will always be the easiest one to look at, which Widmaier-Picasso does, until, finally, she musters the energy to get up and start chatting and cheek-kissing with strangers once more.
Cody Delistraty is a writer and historian based in Paris.

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How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art

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Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso's granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist's narcissism. "No one in my family ever managed to escape from the stranglehold of this genius," she wrote in her memoir, Picasso: My Grandfather.

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Robert Cumming, Dorling Kindersley LTD, 1915, page 98

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Guernica: What inspired Pablo Picasso's masterpiece? BBC News

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Why is this painting so shocking? - Iseult Gillespie

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The first composition for the mural — drawn the very day word of the bombing reached Picasso in Paris — introduced characters that had recurred in the artist's previous work. Picasso shaped and reshaped these figures over the next weeks in a series of preliminary sketches. He brought out the vulnerability of the bull and the agony of the horse. He drew screaming women and children, perhaps inspired by his fear that harm might come to his own baby daughter. He seemed haunted by the many faces of anguish.though he was not at all certain the mural was complete, Picasso delivered

"Many of the drawings are much more expressive than the final painting," says art historian Tomas Llorens. "But that is inevitable because Guernica to the Spanish Pavilion.

Guernica was conceived as a very public image. And some of the meanings and emotions that you can convey on a piece of paper cannot be conveyed in a mural that is seven meters wide. For instance, in one of the drawings there is hair — perhaps the hair of Dora Maar — pasted in a kind of collage. So, you would lose that meaning in a large public mural. But in a sense the energy, the emotional energy that comes from those experiments, is not lost. Picasso was always synthesizing in each image a lot of different possibilities."

On May 11th, just fifteen days after the bombing, Picasso stretched a canvas for the mural. It stood eleven-and-a-half feet tall by almost twenty-six feet wide - so large, he had to brace it at a slant to fit under the ceiling of his studio. He then began to lay out the images in full scale - a woman wailing over her dead child... a warrior clutching a shattered sword as his horse drops in torment to its knees... a jumble of bodies lying trampled on the ground — all part of Picasso's vision of the holocaust at Guernica.

According to art historian, Patricia Failing, "Picasso was very properly trained in the grand tradition of painting, allegorical painting about universal themes: the horrors of war, the massacres of the innocents. Characters that typically appear in these paintings reappear in Picasso's paintings as well. There's usually quite clearly a suffering woman, someone who's screaming, a woman with a child who's been injured, or may even be dead. And to see that Picasso was able to take that traditional academic motif and actually rework it and make it relevant again to this particular time and this particular circumstance, I think is really one of his great achievements in this painting."

With Picasso as he painted was his latest lover, Dora Maar, a young photographer who also became his collaborator. Dora's photographs of the work in progress documented Picasso's creative process and his struggle between political imagery and artistic merit.

As the focal point of the painting, Picasso initially drew a boldly raised arm and clenched fist, the familiar salute of the Spanish Republican forces. But the artist was dissatisfied with the obvious symbolism. Over the next several days, he created a more hopeful message of victory, the raised fist clutching stalks of grain in front of a blazing sun. Still, Picasso's artistic sensibility was in conflict with the political sentiment of the canvas. "The stand of Picasso was quite clear," says Llorens. "A work of art, in order to be really effective in political terms, has to work first of all as a work of art."

A week later, the arm was completely painted over. But the center of the painting had lost its focus. To solve the problem, Picasso moved the body of the bull near to the woman and child, lifting the head of the horse to a place of prominence and making the spear more obvious. No longer was the battle between the horse and bull of the ring. Clearly, the mortal wound was caused by an act of man.

Picasso's inventiveness took him in many directions. He added color, pattern and texture with scraps of wallpaper; he gave the weeping woman a blood-red tear. Later, Picasso removed all color. Earlier in his career, in his Blue Period, Picasso learned that using a monochromatic palette could produce powerful imagery. He suppressed color because he felt color would distract from the impact of the painting. "There was certainly a long tradition that equated line with intellect and color with emotion," adds Failing. "And so, to not bring in the whole element of color and its associations with emotion and the sensual, in a way makes it a tour-de-force on another level."

Picasso then sketched possibilities for the warrior. Not the heroic figure of patriotic fantasy — lifeless, broken, weapons shattered — the warrior in Guernica is no match for the engines of modern warfare. "It's not the clenched fist with the upright arm at the end that becomes such a moving part of the picture, but the outstretched hands with the kind of flayed fingers and the deeply crossed palm," explains Failing.

As Guernica neared completion, Picasso added a single image of twentieth century technology. According to Llorens: "In Spanish, an electric bulb is called 'bombia,' and 'bombia' is like the diminutive of 'bomb.' So, 'bomba-bombia' is a verbal poetic metaphor for the terrifying power of technology to destroy us."

Shortly after, al

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The first composition for the mural - drawn the very day word of the bombing reached Picasso in Paris - introduced characters that had recurred in the artist's previous work. Picasso shaped and reshaped these figures over the next weeks in a series of preliminary sketches.

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This search engine has heaps of resources on Picasso

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This search engine has heaps of resources on Picasso

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Cases for Political Art | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios

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The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

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Search | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Met's Timeline of Art History pairs essays and works of art with chronologies and tells the story of art and global culture through the collection.

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We discuss Picasso's great image of Guernica with help from a Subscriber, Andy Hess. Check me out on Patreon, a voluntary online subscription service: https://www.patreon.com/AmorSciendi Script written by James Earle, Andy Hess, and Carrie Clark Edited by James Earle and Hannah Baker Music provided by JinglePunks The Raft of Medusa is by Gericault, not Delacroix.

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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent m...

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Picasso's Guernica:  The world's most famous anti-war painting

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Lots of resources to search through here

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pablo picasso paintings pablo picasso pictures biography information gallery galleries

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Pablo Picasso [Spanish Cubist Painter and Sculptor, 1881-1973] Guide to pictures of works by Pablo Picasso in art museum sites and image archives worldwide.

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1907. Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" (243.9 x 233.7 cm)

Pablo Picasso: Modern Artist, Master Innovator
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), the Spanish-born, Paris-based painter, sculptor, draftsman, printmaker, decorative artist, and writer, influenced the course of 20th-century art with almost unmatched magnitude. His passionate and often provocative life, his unfettered embrace of experimentation, and his drive for re-invention fed into his prolific production of works, upending notions of what art was supposed to look like.

Picasso's numerous inspirations ranged from history, politics, and current events to the work of fellow artists, to the world outside of his studio. In his dynamic body of work, such opposites as intellect and emotions, forms of classicism and expressionism, and the conscious and the unconscious simultaneously clashed and coalesced.

He was known for his fascination with so-called "Primitive" art, a term typically referring to African masks and statuary, which for Picasso also encompassed ancient carvings from the Iberian Peninsula, the landmass that eventually would be divided into present-day Spain, Andorra, and Portugal. The blocky, pared-down forms and forceful, angular planes of Primitive art ignited the artist's imagination. Its striking shapes and contours made their way into his own compositions and contributed to his radical restructuring of the formal characteristics and visual impact of the work of art. Together with fellow artist Georges Braque, Picasso pioneered Cubism, a visual language of planes and compressed space that splintered subjects-like the human figure, a landscape, or a still life scene-into multifaceted pieces, causing them to appear partially abstracted, flattened, and fragmented, as if reflected in a shattered mirror.

Picasso's influence stretched well beyond Cubism. Over the course of his career, he produced works that significantly shaped Surrealism and Expressionism, not to mention the ongoing resonance of his legacy still felt by artists working today.
Of Primal Instincts and Formal Innovations: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Among Picasso's profuse output of more than 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets, and costume designs is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). In this painting, he did away with pre-existing artistic conventions, like naturalism and perspective, hurling even the most forward-thinking viewers into a future they weren't quite ready for.

Picasso was a 25-year-old Spanish immigrant to France when he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, working in a cramped warren of studios on the Parisian hill of Montmartre. The story of its making begins with hundreds of preparatory paintings and drawings, which he generated over an intensive six-month period, working out his ideas. They reflected Picasso's responses to Paul Cézanne's structured, almost sculptural depiction of objects and figures and his prismatic structuring of space in his still lifes and scenes of bathers. They also reflected his fascination with the African, Iberian, and Oceanic masks and statuary populating France's ethnographic museums, as well as the lusts and anxieties wrapped up in his own, complex relationships with women.

Out of this intellectual-emotional tumult came a painting in which form and content were equalized. Its title, which translates to "The Young Women of Avignon," refers to Avignon Street in Barcelona, home to the prostitutes the artist frequented. The five women's pinkish-peach-colored bodies, appearing larger than human-scale, fill the space of the painting, which is eight feet high by just over seven feet wide. The women's shoulders, hips, and limbs are depicted with angular lines and flat, geometric planes. Cubic shapes or, in the case of the woman standing left of center, half-circles, form their breasts. Their faces, too, are sharp-edged and radically simplified, especially those of the two women at right, which he modeled directly after African masks.

As his preparatory studies reveal, Picasso initially conceived of the figure at the left of the painting as a male medical student, in the act of entering the brothel. Deciding that such a narrative detail would interfere with the work's visual impact, he ultimately transformed the figure into a fifth prostitute. The women emerge from brown, white, and blue curtains that look like shattered glass, their bodies thrust forward toward the viewer by the scene's lack of depth. Their eyes-enormous and almond-shaped, and inspired by African and Iberian carvings-are fixed daringly on the viewer. Near their feet sits a small arrangement of fruit, with a scythe-like sliver of melon set behind a bunch of grapes, an apple, and a pear, and which, like the women's bodies, seems too sharp to touch.

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MoMA | Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Paris, June-July 1907

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1907. Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8" (243.9 x 233.7 cm) Pablo Picasso: Modern Artist, Master Innovator Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), the Spanish-born, Paris-based painter , sculptor , draftsman , printmaker, decorative artist , and writer, influenced the course of 20th-century art with almost unmatched magnitude.

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Picasso Exhibition in Victoria Australia

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Picasso Exhibition in Victoria Australia

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Gippsland Art Gallery, Victoria
1 February - 6 April 2014

Picasso s Women, Gippsland Art Gallery, 2014.

For over one hundred years the regional galleries of Victoria have significantly enriched Australian cultural life. The first galleries were established in the 1880s, and whilst there was a hiatus between the two world wars, from the 1960s they expanded with the institutionalisation of public advocacy for contemporary art, with the network significantly consolidating during Sir Rupert Hamer's government. During the 1970s, the Victorian galleries set the benchmark for other states by documenting historic artists and simultaneously presenting contemporary art and craft of national significance. In the new millennium the Bendigo Art Gallery pushed the envelope further by beginning to stage international loan exhibitions of significant art and design and making a measurable impact upon the local economy against the general trend of economic precariousness in country Australia. Bendigo's global vision emphasises Eurocentric, aristocratic content. This initiative has stood distinct from the Australian focus of most regional galleries. Although the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery has also launched an entrepreneurial exhibition policy, mounting international content is a challenge.

Recently the Gippsland Art Gallery ported a small slither of the Bilbao effect to East Gippsland with a pleasing and plausible collection of Picasso prints overviewing his easy mastery of many graphic techniques. Foregrounded is the implicit succession of overbearing relationships to the women in his life and how he mined their presence and personality to the point of exploitation. Well may the Guerrilla Girls say that the only way that a woman can get on the walls of major galleries is to be naked. Yet as curator Simon Gregg notes there are occasions where an individual woman impresses herself with such emotional force upon Picasso that his own careerist and formalist needs are totally subsumed by the intensity of that female presence. So often in Picasso's private life, from the moment of the éclat of that first impact and ensuing obsession, things went rapidly downhill with repercussions upon his partners' mental health. Picasso's women are as familiar as if their stories were read to us at bedtime, or they had flickered on the cinema screen or been danced and sung upon the stage. Françoise, calm and assured, her round face framed by brown hair is equally recognisable. She survives Picasso better than many of the other women to become an icon through her memoir Life with Picasso. Dora Maar was intellectually the most talented woman in Picasso's life: the weeping woman who brought Picasso in contact with a younger generation of creative artists - fashionable, worldly and stylish - her singular character and public strength are encapsulated in the rapidly sketched in details of her necklace in a drypoint - the antithesis of the passive Marie Therese Walther, who made few demands on Picasso and frequently appears as a sleeping nude.

The blue period is represented by the iconic Le Repas Frugal - the gaunt mannerist exaggerations of the body that also launch Picasso's gifting of the commedia dell'arte to high and popular culture of the first six to seven decades of the 20th century - think of the musical Carnival or the floppy clown dolls of 1960s living rooms. Lithographs reveal his mastery of the textures of strokes on the stone -the portrait of Paloma and Dove being a particularly rich compendium of black and grey shades, form created through tone, line and texture, drawing with line and with the negative technique of white on black, and all effortlessly combined within one picture space but never contrived and overloaded. Many of the works are from the post 1945 period when, assured of his iconic status as genius artist and male archetype, Picasso calmly made informative meditations upon classical white male art history and studio practice. This conventional art history remains steadfastly embedded in the mind of the general public, and still substantially shapes the international art market's preference for dead white males. No one is the master of self-quotation, self-parody, art historical insight and dexterous slipping in and out of his own symbolism as late Picasso. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge with their fantasies of bohemian life are not too far away. Remarkably all these graphics are from several unnamed Australian private collections, bucking stereotypes of an Australian nationalist focus in private buying as well as public.

This exhibition was curated by Brett Scott and Simon Gregg.

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Gippsland Art Gallery, Victoria 1 February - 6 April 2014 For over one hundred years the regional galleries of Victoria have significantly enriched Australian cultural life. The first galleries were established in the 1880s, and whilst there was a hiatus between the two world wars, from the 1960s they expanded with the institutionalisation of public advocacy for contemporary art, with the network significantly consolidating during Sir Rupert Hamer's government.

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Article - Picasso retrospective Exhibition

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Article - Picasso retrospective Exhibition

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The Museum of Modern Art's Pablo Picasso retrospective of 1980 attracted over a million visitors, putting an unprecedented strain on the museum's finances, physical plant and staff. In A.i.A.'s December 1980 issue, dedicated to Picasso, Roberta Smith reported on the how the museum coped with "ultimate blockbuster show-simultaneously elitist and popular in its appeal." In conjunction with the "Picasso Sculpture" exhibition at MoMA today (Sept. 14, 2015-Feb. 7, 2016), we present a transcript of Smith's article. -Eds.

Not everyone who saw the Picasso show will want to read this article. The show itself offered so overwhelmingly much to look at and think about that the behind-the-scenes details of the exhibition-what it meant and means for the institution that brought it all off-fade by comparison, as well they should. Nonetheless, for perennial MOMA-watchers like myself, the Picasso show was a time to become, once again, mesmerized with the inner workings of the place itself, often at the most mundane levels, and also to experience those wild swings between MOMAphilia and MOMAphobia which are endemic to MOMA-watching.

The idea for this article came to me as I was battling the crowds at the Modern one Monday afternoon last July, trying to get something more than intermittent glimpses of Picasso's Analytic Cubist works. In a gallery full of shimmering gray and tan canvases, I was mostly seeing red-and it wasn't oil paint. There were people everywhere, and visibility was about 18 inches. Robert Rosenblum's voice on the Acoustiguide-which I hadn't rented-was frequently audible, while the loud clicks the machines made when being turned on or off offered a constant accompaniment to the show.

Under these circumstances, I suddenly found myself thinking not about art, but about money, ticket sales, attendance figures and other salient facts. The Modern, which was undeniably giving us all a once-in-a-lifetime experience, loomed briefly as a greedy, manipulative ogre. An aberrant flash of anger, largely undeserved? Perhaps. But in the meantime, I remained curious about the flow of cash and people, and about whether the Modern's staff felt the "quality of the viewing experience" had been maintained.

Two months after the close of the Picasso show, the facts and figures slowly being totaled up are revealing and often unprecedented. (That is, when you can get them. MOMA's sense of cooperation is equaled only by its sense of privacy.) A total of 1,021,000 people passed through the special revolving door (knocked through the wall between the Sculpture Garden and the d'Harnoncourt Galleries), which brought the public in from West 54th Street during the show's four and one half months' run. This attendance total, almost equal to the museum's usual annual attendance, was also close to the attendance for the Metropolitan Museum's Tut exhibition, but, as Jack Limpert, director of membership and development, stressed, "Don't forget, Tut was a small exhibition in a vast museum. This was a vast exhibition in a small museum."

This single fact is all-important. The show placed an unprecedented strain on MOMA's physical plant, its financial resources and, above all, on its staff. Specifically, the time, effort and planning involved in bringing 970 paintings and sculptures together from around the world, and then moving over one million people through 30,000 square feet of galleries to view them, was considerably more than that required to get roughly a million visitors past the Tut show's 55 items. The Modern brought it off through a combination of careful planning, flexibility and good, if not excellent, luck. "We knew it was a terrific undertaking," says director Richard Oldenburg, "but probably none of us realized how many new issues would have to be coped with. I think we came away feeling much better about our ability to be flexible."

The Modern was braced for the onslaught. In addition to crowd-density and traffic-flow studies, and nationwide advance Ticketron sales, the museum supplemented its 50-person security staff with 120 temporary guards so that 105 guards could be stationed throughout the galleries at all times, instead of the usual 35. A second water tower was built on top of the building to insure that its water-cooled air-conditioning system could take the strain. Instead of the usual 200 press kits, 7,500 were made up. Two days of press previews saw 4,000 members of the media troop through, including 21 film crews in one 30-hour span.

The exhibition brought the museum worldwide press coverage, and also gave its switchboard a 4½-month busy signal. It put Picasso's bristling 1937 image of Dora Maar on the cover of Time magazine, making him the only artist to have four Time covers and the first to have a cover after his death. It put the museum on a 24-hour schedule: public hours were longer, evening events more frequent; the need, and time required, for cleaning, touching up and other repairs multiplied geometrically because of such heavy use. Each weekend, senior curatorial and registrar's staff were present during public hours. The show also brought new anxiety levels to the departments most intimately involved with the care and handling of the works of art-painting and sculpture, the registrar, conservation. "We were so nervous something would happen," said Eloise Riccardelli, the museum's registrar, who had much to do with the elaborate logistics which brought the show into the museum in a record 2½ weeks in April and out again in October without a single accident. Receiving of art works, which couldn't begin until blasting for the foundations of the new wing next door was finished, was accomplished without benefit of the museum's loading dock (it had been taken over by construction). During the exhibition itself, the condition of each work was checked every day of the week by five people, and the humidity level monitored on a twohour basis. Generally, museum personnel felt lucky it wasn't a rainy summer, for both the art's and the public's sake.

In spite of detailed advance planning, as soon as the show actually opened it became clear the galleries were much too crowded. Pre-show traffic studies-which allowed for 7,800 people to spend an average of two hours in the show per day-turned out to be way off. "We thought two hours would be the limit and nature would take its course," said William Rubin, director of the department of painting and sculpture (and organizer of the exhibition with Dominique Bozo, of the Musée Picasso in Paris). Instead, people tended to stay longer, replenishing their energies at one of the museum's restaurants and returning to look some more. The narrow galleries and hallways built into the first part of the first floor-where Picasso's immensely popular early work was installed-posed a particular problem.

The museum immediately cut back ticket sales where possible, although certain days were already sold out. Ultimately the overall daily average was reduced to 7,100 visitors-still twice the museum's norm of 3,500 visitors per day-and sometimes attendance dropped to 6,800, or even the low 6,000s. Overcrowding also led the museum to tear down two small walls creating bottlenecking in the Blue Period area; it also installed protective guard rails wherever possible and covered major works with plexiglass where it was not. "It seems many people still don't know you're not supposed to touch paintings," remarked one administrator. (This precaution leads one to surmise there may have been some damage-a possibility on which strict silence is maintained.)

It's impossible to calculate precisely the costs of a show like this, considering that for at least six months it required the undivided attention of 90 percent of the museum's staff, and for the two years prior to its opening, had roughly one-third of the staff working from one-third to full time on its preparation. James Snyder, coordinator of planning at MOMA, puts the final out-of-pocket expenses at between $2.5 and $2.8 million, up from a pre-show estimate of $1.9 million. This does not include production costs of the highly successful catalogue, nor the $200,000-$300,000 lost in admissions revenues while the museum was closed for six weeks before and three weeks following the show.

Of the $2.5-2.8 million cost figure, 30 percent went to pay for additional security staff; 25 percent went for transportation-collection, packing and dispersal of all loans, plus airfare and hotel rooms for couriers from other museums (a total of 35) and the museum's own staff (who, in keeping with the indemnity agreement which insured the show, made condition checks on all but three of the loans both before they left their owners' premises and after they were returned). The new revolving door, the canopies and coatcheck booth in the garden, extra lobby personnel and the Ticketron setup in the 53rd Street lobby and other "staging" expenses took another 15 percent of the budget; extra commercial insurance took 11 percent; and installation, painting and carpentry, 5 percent. Around $38,000 was spent on advertising in Eastern seaboard newspapers, a few magazines and on the radio, although there was no advertising once the show opened.

The museum's out-of-pocket expenses were defrayed by around $650,000 in grants from the NEA, the Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Charitable Trust and IBM; IBM also paid for the 10-page floor plan/brochure handed out as people entered the show (this also advertised all the Modern's Picasso-related publications). But the most important outside help came from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities in the form of U.S. Treasury indemnity, which provides coverage on the first $50-million worth of damages on foreign loans. If the size and scope of the exhibition were unprecedented, so, obviously, was its monetary value, which people at the Modern are, again, reluctant to discuss. As Richard Palmer, coordinator of exhibitions, discreetly put it, "This may have been the most valuable exhibition that one ever had to arrange insurance for." Palmer suggested that the show might not have even taken place without the government's indemnity. Insurance costs would have been exorbitant (up to $1 million); in addition, the concentration of valuables in a building as small as the Museum of Modern Art created a risk no private underwriter would have been willing to cover. As it was, the museum added a few hundred thousand dollars worth of its own commercial insurance on top, to cover American loans and loans which came in after the indemnity agreement deadline-and "just for good measure."

Clearly, the Modern put an extraordinary effort into the show; but it didn't do all that badly from it, either. Long-term benefits, like indirect expenses, are probably incalculable, but the museum's already high profile is higher than ever, as are its corporate and private membership rolls, the first up 20 percent to 197, the second up 20 percent to 48,000. As for the short term, the 930,000 tickets sold through Ticketron brought in $2.5 million, according to James Snyder. This number includes as yet unspecified amounts of adult ($4.50), student ($2.50) and senior citizen/ children (75¢) tickets, as well as 170,000 tickets to members, who received theirs free and had the show to themselves every Wednesday-when they kept it as crowded if not more so than on public days. The museum also did very well by its corporations. Twenty-six corporate evenings-where a corporation picked up the tab for keeping the museum open (ca. $5,000 per evening; higher if a reception or dinner was involved) and also paid $20 per guest-were enjoyed by 21,000 guests, netting the museum over $400,000. Other evenings which neither cost nor made the Modern any money were four hosted by IBM, two hosted by Mayor Koch for city employees, and one hosted by the city and the museum to honor Vice President and Mrs. Mondale and various delegates to the Democratic convention, paid for by the Democrats. Mrs. Reagan came during regular hours with some Secret Service men, attracting a bevy of onlookers. Mick Jagger, who also came during public hours, had his shirt torn off by admirers. (He was later given a private viewing.)

The museum itself absorbed costs for four evenings run by its department of education for various art professionals: artists in the collection, New York area museum professionals, New York area art and art-history college teachers, and New York area high-school art teachers. There were also advance ticket sales to members of the College Art Association.

The show's biggest money-maker of all, however, was and still is its catalogue, which Rubin characterizes as "art history without words" and which is undeniably a very good buy (464 pages, $19.95 in paperback, $45 in hardcover). It reproduces almost everything in the show, along with other major works in its chronology, written by Jane Fluegel of the museum's publications department. This book is turning out to be a MOMA best seller, second only to its 1955 Family of Man, which has so far sold over three million copies. By the second week of the show, the museum realized it would have to run a second 150,000-copy printing in order not to sell out. The MOMA bookstores alone sold 140,000 copies during the show: one out of every seven visitors purchased a copy (the norm is one out of every 25 or 30). Sales through distribution (at this writing) put the total catalogue sales at more than 215,000. The Modern also sold the rights to foreign language editions in German, Spanish and Swedish which will run to about 50,000 copies total. In keeping with its firmly self-protective style, the museum staff is reluctant to discuss exactly how much profit has been made on the book. Sales also zoomed up on other MOMA Picasso publications-Rubin's 1972 Picasso in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and Alfred Barr's 1939 classic Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art.

Rubin points out that the money is badly needed, since the next two years, with the museum concentrating on its building program, will be "lean" in terms of attendance, membership, etc. Rubin himself will make a sizeable amount of money from royalties on the book (a practice which dates back to the 1940s at MOMA, at least with curators; Jane Fluegel received a flat fee).

Unlike the Picasso publications, the Acoustiguide tour was not a museum-run venture. Although 24 percent of all visitors used them at $2.50 a shot, the Modern's share in Acoustiguide's profits will be only $100,000-$200,000. The museum deliberated about using the Acoustiguide at all, since it hadn't used one since the Matisse sculpture show eight years ago. But finally three tapes were made at the last minute (written as well as narrated by Robert Rosenblum, who received a fee and a few cents royalty per guide used), when the museum recognized, as one staff member put it, that "a lot of these folks weren't going to be our normal visitors."

To what extent might the Picasso show affect the museum's public and its future in general? "Coming to one show doesn't make a habit. Major shows draw a crowd that is not a museum crowd," said Bill Rubin; he added, "Rousseau [a forthcoming big MOMA retrospective] or Matisse don't pull like Picasso." Rubin, famous for a headlong energy which often verges on the compulsive, is busily involved with his next projects and says he's somewhat "talked out" on the Picasso exhibition. He laces his conversation with references to the layout of the new building, the articles he plans to write on specific works in the Picasso show, and upcoming exhibitions at MOMA. Like other members of the staff, however, he stresses the uniqueness of the Picasso experience, for the museum and its public: "I can't imagine we'll ever have to face a thing like that again, and we don't want to." Were there any disappointments, anything he would have done differently? Two disappointments were that the major paintings owned by the National Gallery in Washington couldn't leave the building (a fact Rubin wasn't apprised of when he started working on the show), and that, due to the Afghan crisis, 12 highly important loans promised by the Russians were cancelled by the State Department. "We did what we could to get them to change their minds," Rubin said, "wheat could go back and forth, but art was cut out." He noted that Mme. Gromyko, visiting the show, asked where the Russian paintings were; her translator smoothed over the question.

"In my mind, extensive as the show was," continues Rubin, "it didn't conform to my original vision because these two groups of works were absent." And his only change would have been to eliminate the final gallery of "Paraphrases of the Masters" (an aspect of the show that was frequently criticized), instead integrating the works chronologically into the body of the show. This would also have strengthened the final years of Picasso's career. Acknowledging the "aura of evil attached to the notion of a big show," Rubin is gratified that no "serious critic" found the exhibition too large, that everyone seemed to realize that the span of Picasso's career necessitated such size.

Rubin did regret the size of the crowds-"More people than I would have wished"-and also the addition of the guard rails and plexiglass. "If you saw [the show] with a lot of people, certain aspects of the relationships that were set up in the installation were invisible," he says, citing as an example the vista through two successive doorways which progressed from the 1915 Harlequin to the 1918 Harlequin with Violin to the Modern's Three Musicians of 1921. But this is not considered a major loss in an installation as straightforward and "homely" (Rubin's own term) as this one was.

If the pre-show crowd estimate had been lower-say 5,000 to 5,500 per day-would the museum have been satisfied to sell fewer tickets? Rubin thinks so, as does Luisa Kreisberg, director of public information. Oldenburg rather optimistically sees the attendance, after ticket sales were cut, as "a good compromise between maintaining a decent viewing experience while responding to the demand." And everyone stresses that the museum didn't exploit a highly exploitable situation it might have: twice as many tickets could have been sold, as well as many more memberships (sales of which were suspended twice during the show). "We didn't sell knick-knacks either," asserts Rubin. The Modern was extremely sensitive to the complexity, as well as the size of the constituency it served, making sure that professionals saw the show, that a certain number of school and museum groups received blocks of tickets, that the handicapped were accommodated.

So this article, which started out as a complaining one, has turned into something of a valentine: the more you know about the museum's task and how it was handled, the most impressive its accomplishment becomes. I would still have preferred a more spacious view of the show, unregimented by Ticketron, but it was worth the struggle. The degree of concentration required almost seemed appropriate to the intensity of Picasso's art.

Picasso was the ultimate blockbuster show-simultaneously elitist and popular in its appeal. It had something for everyone, from the most seasoned Picasso scholar down to people who only knew his name. And while "blockbuster" usually connotes a rather unscholarly exhibition inflated by hype to draw in the public, the Picasso exhibition demanded a lot from its viewers-and more or less hyped itself, via the artist's mythic stature, the size of the show and its total takeover of a famous museum. Thus the Modern could maintain its usual degree of intense, slightly genteel professionalism, and for the most part accommodate the public on its own terms. Make money, enthrall the general public, astound the art world all at once-perhaps that's what makes the Museum of Modern Art, periodically, a place you have to hate a little.

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The Museum of Modern Art's Pablo Picasso retrospective of 1980 attracted over a million visitors, putting an unprecedented strain on the museum's finances, physical plant and staff. In A.i.A.'s December 1980 issue, dedicated to Picasso, Roberta Smith reported on the how the museum coped with ultimate blockbuster show-simultaneously elitist and popular in its appeal.

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Understanding Picasso, How To Read Guernica? - Smart Art History #5

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26th April 1937: The Bombing of Guernica

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Much of the painting's emotional power comes from its overwhelming size, approximately eleven feet tall and twenty five feet wide. Guernica is not a painting you observe with spatial detachment; it feels like it wraps around you, immerses you in its larger-than-life figures and action. And although the size and multiple figures reference the long tradition of European history paintings, this painting is different because it challenges rather than accepts the notion of war as heroic. So why did Picasso paint it?

In 1936, Picasso (who was Spanish) was asked by the newly elected Spanish Republican government to paint an artwork for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. The official theme of the Exposition was a celebration of modern technology. Yet Picasso painted an overtly political painting, a subject in which he had shown little interest up to that time. What had happened to inspire it?

Later, in the 1940s, when Paris was occupied by the Germans, a Nazi officer visited Picasso's studio. "Did you do that?" he is said to have asked Picasso while standing in front of a photograph of the painting. "No," Picasso replied, "you did."

This painting is not easy to decipher. Everywhere there seems to be death and dying. As our eyes adjust to the frenetic action, figures begin to emerge. On the far left is a woman, head back, screaming in pain and grief, holding the lifeless body of her dead child. This is one of the most devastating and unforgettable images in the painting. To her right is the head and partial body of a large white bull, the only unharmed and calm figure amidst the chaos. Beneath her, a dead or wounded man with a severed arm and mutilated hand clutches a broken sword. Only his head and arms are visible; the rest of his body is obscured by the overlapping and scattered parts of other figures. In the center stands a terrified horse, mouth open screaming in pain, its side pierced by a spear. On the right are three more women. One rushes in, looking up at the stark light bulb at the top of the scene. Another leans out of the window of a burning house, her long extended arm holding a lamp, while the third woman appears trapped in the burning building, screaming in fear and horror. All their faces are distorted in agony. Eyes are dislocated, mouths are open, tongues are shaped like daggers.

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Guernica by Pablo Picasso (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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Podcasts :: Picasso: masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso :: Art Gallery NSW

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Picasso: masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris represents every period of Picasso's long career and almost every medium to which he turned his hand. In this series of podcasts, we look closely at 12 artworks from the exhibition which cover the length of his endlessly inventive career.