“Picasso and the Allure of Language” opened on Aug. 20 and examines how language shaped Picasso’s vision after he moved to the Montmartre section of Paris and became friends with the artists residing there. It features 60 works spanning from 1900 to 1969.
“It was organized by Susan Fisher, the curator for Yale’s art gallery,” Sarah Schroth, Nancy Hanks senior curator at Nasher, said. Fisher collaborated with Patricia Leighton, professor of art, art history and visual studies at Duke, in formulating the exhibit. Leighton’s specialty is Picasso and modern art.
“There was a dialogue to create a Picasso exhibit that combined what Yale had with contributions from Nasher,” Schroth said.
Nasher loaned the sculptures, while Yale provided Picasso’s poetry.
“Picasso has never been studied in this way before, with his relationship to writers and writing. It’s a new lens through which Susan [Fisher] looked at Picasso,” Wendy Hower Livingston, manager of marketing and communication manager, said.
Livingston said that people who have studied Picasso previously will learn something new, as well as those who are unfamiliar with the majority of his works.
Schroth said the exhibit has taken at least three years to curate. It opened at Yale in Jan. 2009 to great reviews, including one from the New York Times. The exhibit won’t travel anywhere else after closing at Nasher.
Picasso wrote from 1925 to 1959, concentrating mainly on poems and plays. According to the Nasher Web site, he wrote “Beginning” in 1930, he began developing a cast of characters for use. In April 1935, he took a year off from painting to dedicate himself to writing. During this time, Picasso produced over 100 poems in Spanish and French before resuming painting in April 1936.
Three themes play out in the museum space. These areas include conversation and collaboration, fiction and inscriptions and handwriting.
The works shown demonstrate the range of people Picasso worked with. He collaborated with Dada leader Tristan Tzara and fellow Cubist Georges Braque. Picasso also worked with classic texts from Aristophanes and Balzac. His drawings for the latter writers ranged from simple line drawings depicting realistic events to connected dots-and-lines resembling celestial constellations.
According to information at the exhibit, Picasso said that he’d probably be recognized as a writer after his death. This exhibit proves him correct.
The exhibit runs until Jan. 3, 2010, and costs $5 for students. Visit the Nasher Web site for more details.
