Pablo Picasso: Girl before a Mirror (One on One)

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism

Pablo Picasso: Girl before a Mirror (One on One) Details

“Girl before a Mirror” (1932), one of several standouts in MoMA’s vast collection of Pablo Picasso’s work, takes the traditional artistic theme of a woman before her mirror and reinvents it in radically modern terms. The girl’s profile and blonde hair identify her as Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist’s lover, muse and a profoundly transformative presence in both his life and art, but the painting is far from a conventional portrait. Its dazzling jewel-like colors, boldly contoured shapes and surface patterning transform the girl and her shadowy reflection into a deeply mysterious image that is both captivating and strange. In her essay, MoMA’s Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Anne Umland, explores this work in depth and describes the circumstances of its creation: the artist’s private life, his practice as a sculptor, his rivalry with other artists both living and dead and his concern, at the age of 51, about his contemporary relevance and artistic legacy.

Reviews

This is a volume in the "One on One" series published by New York's Museum of Modern Art, a collection of short monographs--or "sustained meditations," as the jacket text has it--by MoMA curators on some of the Museum's best known works of art. Anne Umland, the curator responsible for last year's "Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914" exhibit and the author of its accompanying catalogue, here explicates Picasso's famous painting and places it in the context of his life and work. In late 1931, Picasso began an intensive painting campaign to produce work for his upcoming first great retrospective show at the Galeries Georges Petit in Paris, scheduled to open in June 1932. Just a year before, Matisse had had a major retrospective at the same gallery, and it had been roundly criticized by the press for containing too many older works "recycled" for the new show. Picasso, who had just turned 50, desperately wanted to avoid a similar embarrassment and began turning out paintings at a furious pace, including "Girl Before a Mirror," which he finished and dated on March 14, 1932 and which, as he told Alfred Barr, the MoMA's first director, was his favorite in that long series (5). The "Girl" is, of course, Marie-Therese Walther, his mistress and model for so many of the paintings and plaster sculptures of those years. Dr. Umland succeeds very well in indicating the profound influence the three-dimensional work he undertook at his Boisgeloup sculpture studio had on his practice in those paintings for the Petit exhibition, which, as she notes, are "among the most Matisse-like of his works" (29). An X-ray of the painting enables us to see how extensively the artist reworked his original rather naturalistic composition to create a fascinatingly complex version of a traditional artistic theme. This is a small volume (46 pages), but it is very clearly written, excellently illustrated (there are over a dozen full-page reproductions of Picasso's plaster busts and riotously colorful canvases, with many other illustrations), and in general beautifully designed, and of course the discussion is completely authoritative. There are some photographs, too: by Brassai (of the work), by Man Ray (of Picasso), and by Picassso himself (of Marie-Therese). If you don't already love the painting, you probably will after reading this thoroughly delightful little book.

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