Picasso
Picasso’s Transformations
New York Review of Books
With numerous exhibitions and publications marking the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973, 2023 has been a year to reconsider the most famous artist of the 20th century. Reviewing a number of these shows and books about the artist, Jed Perl laments that for all this attention and celebration, “Picasso, a titan among […]
Alan Gouk on Key Modernist Paintings
AbCrit
Alan Gouk presents his thoughts on great modernist paintings by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Gauguin, Monet, and Braque. Gouk remarks: “What painting is about is claiming the surface – making it real to you, palpable, physically present, and tangible almost. At its best it is the expression of one’s involuntary response to surface, but without resorting […]
Death, Destruction and Deity: Painting Guernica
The Art Newspaper
Gijs van Hensbergen considers a panoply of sources and influences on Picasso’s Guernica (1937) on the occasion of the exhibition Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path to Guernica at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, on view through September 4, 2017. Hensbergen writes: “Picasso’s magpie instinct and voracious visual memory is legendary but there is […]
An Embarrassment of Riches: The Shchukin Collection
ARTnews
Maika Pollack reviews Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection at The Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, on view through March 5, 2017. Pollack writes: “A single room in which 13 vast Matisse paintings hang is the highlight of the exhibition. These are only a fraction of Shchukin’s 43 Matisses, but each is a knockout: In […]
The Shchukin Collection at Fondation Louis Vuitton
AbCrit
Alan Gouk reviews Icons of Modern Art. The Collection Shchukin at The Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, on view through March 5, 2017. Gouk writes: “This is what was so apparent in the confrontations afforded here, however many times one may have seen some of these pictures in different contexts and settings; how solidly and succulently […]
Picasso & Rivera: Conversations Across Time
LA Times
Christopher Knight reviews Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), on view through May 7, 2017. Knight writes: “In 1915, Pablo Picasso acquired a small Cubist still life painted by his casual friend and acolyte, Diego Rivera… The small painting’s admixture of traditional and avant-garde French, Spanish […]
Cubism & War @ the Museo Picasso
The Artblog
Justin O. Walker reviews Cubism and War: The Crystal and the Flame at the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, on view through January 29th 2017. Walker writes: “The exhibit reveals the cubists in Paris were never far from the external specter of ruin, and evidently leery of the internal one. The war to end all wars was […]
Picasso and the Fall of Europe
London Review of Books
T.J. Clark reflects on Picasso's mural Fall of Icarus (1958). Clark writes: "My argument, then, is that it was only in the real-size, forty-piece Fall of Icarus that Picasso escaped from Cubism – from the studio, from ‘viewpoint,’ from proximity and tactility, from the whole spatial and figurative world of Guernica – and showed us […]
Cubism, Technology & Abstraction
Henri Art Magazine
In part two of his series of essays titled Untethered (part one is here), Mark Stone looks back to how the cubism of Picasso and Braque paved the way for abstraction by creating an art that could bridge the history of painting and the rapid technological advancement of the early 20th century. Stone writes: “Abstraction as […]
Flowers for Summer @ Michael Werner Gallery
16 Miles of String
Andrew Russeth reviews the exhibition Flowers for Summer at Michael Werner Gallery on view through September 10, 2011. The show features paintings by Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Sigmar Polke, Peter Doig, Eugène Leroy and others. Russeth writes that the "… simple title and self-explanatory premise [belie] the high quality of work on view. That Schwitters, for […]