In his 1932 "Reclining Nude," Pablo Picasso portrays his voluptuous young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter with ripe, curvilinear forms and rich pastel colors that convey her sensuality and fertility. Her breasts are likened to fruit. She has a crescent-moon-shaped face, and the sun, matching the yellow of her hair, appears in the window.
"She is literally the sun and the moon," says Fine Arts Museums curator Timothy Burgard, who helped select the works in "Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musée National Picasso, Paris," a marvel-filled and revelatory exhibition that opens Saturday at the de Young Museum.
"Picasso was driven by his personality and artistic sensibility to see the world metaphorically," says Burgard, who has published scholarly essays about the protean Spanish master who shaped 20th century art and changed the way we see the world. "It's much more compelling to see the people around you and events - the bombing of Guernica or World War II - in terms that are metaphoric or symbolic. Picasso's works are always multivalent. There's often a deeply personal element, which is then enlarged to take on more universal meaning."
The 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and collages in this bountiful exhibition - the first full-scale Picasso retrospective ever shown in San Francisco - held great personal meaning for the artist. They were among thousands of works he kept in his private collection (he liked to say he was the world's greatest collector of Picassos). He saw them as pages of his diary, a vital visual record of his creative process, his thoughts and passions.
Several years after Picasso died in 1973 at 91, his heirs gave many of the works to the French state in lieu of inheritance taxes, and later donated and sold others to the state-owned Musée Picasso, which opened in a Baroque mansion in Paris' Marais district in 1985. It now contains an incomparable collection of more than 5,000 works spanning the artist's astonishingly prolific eight-decade career.
"This gives visitors an incredible overview of Picasso's work," Buchanan says, "from the Blue and Rose periods into Cubism, Neoclassicism, Surrealism and Expressionism. You see him either inventing the style or engaging with the style or heightening the style."
The first work in this show is "The Death of Casagemas," a potent 1901 picture of Picasso's Spanish painter friend Carlos Casagemas, lying in his coffin. He'd killed himself after being spurned by a Parisian woman. Picasso - whose deep sorrow over his friend's suicide led to the mournful melancholy of the Blue period paintings that followed - painted the picture with the Expressionist brushstrokes, flickering candlelight and reds, greens and gold of van Gogh, who'd also shot himself.
"He challenges every artist of the past and present. He wants to conquer them and triumph," says Burgard, who's struck by the freedom and vitality of the works Picasso painted at the end of his life, with their slashing brushstrokes, dripping and smeared paint. They bring to mind Picasso's famous quote that it took him four years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.
"Picasso was truly the first artist who said anything is possible in art. He set up the modern paradigm, which is that the artist is permutable, he can metamorphose into something else. He gave artists permission to be and do anything. And I think that's really his greatest legacy."
Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musée National Picasso, Paris: Sat.-Oct. 9. M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, S.F. $10-$20. (415) 750-3600. www.deyoungmuseum.org.
This article has been edited since it appeared in print editions. Edited further for brevity.
Jesse Hamlin is a freelance writer. E-mail him at pinkletters@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page P - 14 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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