1 pce.: Love

“Picasso and Marie-Thérèse” comes two years after “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” which similarly filled the same Gagosian space to overflowing and presented, Picasso-wise, a hard act to follow.

It is the largest exhibition yet devoted to works that Picasso made from the late 1920s through the ’30s under the spell of a young mistress — the voluptuous, Roman-nosed, level-eyed, full-limbed Marie-Thérèse Walter — and it is a wonderfully motley, almost scattershot affair, brilliantly installed. Ranging through mediums and styles as it explores this single if constantly evolving subject, it confirms that when Picasso told Walter she had saved his life, he meant that she had also saved his art.

John Richardson is again the organizer, this time in collaboration with Diana Widmaier Picasso, an art historian whose mother, Maya Widmaier Picasso, born in 1935, is the only child of Picasso and Walter. There could be a better exhibition on the topic, I’m sure, going by paintings not in the show but reproduced in galleys of the catalog, due out in May. In addition, there are occasional small paintings and drawings that seem knocked out. But given the scope of what’s here, such shortcomings barely matter.

That Walter was the great passion of Picasso’s life is borne out by the erotic frisson that suffuses much of this exhibition. But l’amour fou — mad love — was also clearly productive, inventive love. As seen here, Walter is in constant flux, mutating throughout the show’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, occasional prints and even photographs. She appears actually to move in a tantalizingly brief video based on a flip-book Picasso made of her from photo-booth pictures.

More important, she inspires Picasso to review and preview nearly all the phases of his long career, up to and including his wild-style late paintings. These are presaged in some of the looser, small works and, with imposing monumentality, in a bright, bristling image of Maya, a dead ringer for her mother, fervently clutching a doll to her face as if it were a lover.

via: Roberta Smith Review -- The New York Times