Day 333 - Picasso


 February 20, 2023

Gallery 830 brings us securely into the 20th century; the last-executed canvas on display is a 1923 Picasso from his so-called neoclassical period.  The works set me up for the “modern” paintings in the 900s galleries and raise the question: When does the modern period begin? All the paintings in this gallery are at least somewhat representational. They include well-know works by Picasso (among them his portrait of Gertrude Stein, “Seated Harlequin,”  and “The Actor”) but also paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Umberto Boccioni, and, to my surprise, Vanessa Bell. (The last, entitled “Duncan Grant With a Cold,” shows a man seated in front of a mirror, a towel draped over his head; was it intended for public perusal, I wonder, or as a private joke?)

Today’s work is a Picasso painting I’ve never seen before, “La Coiffure.” Measuring about 64 inches high and 48 inches wide and painted in 1906, the painting reflects a traditional theme: a woman seated and gazing into a mirror as another woman stands beside her and arranges her long tresses. In the foreground, a nude young boy sits on the floor, one leg bent at the knee, the other outstretched. The boy’s lightly outlined body demonstrates Picasso’s skill as a draftsman in depicting the human form, but the painting's geometric shapes - the oval heads that resemble the oval of the mirror, the cylindrical limbs - seem to presage cubism. All in all, it feels like an up-to-date rendition of a subject we might find in Titian and Degas and many painters in between.



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