Picasso's genius revisited as Met shows strength of its collection

The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has put its entire collection of Picasso works on show, revealing a landmark collection of the artist's work, writes LARA MARLOWEin New York

IN 1900 a young painter held his first solo exhibition in the Els Quatre Gats tavern in Barcelona. The small paintings are simple, cartoonish portraits of the 19-year-old and his friends. All are signed P Ruiz Picasso, but one, the most arresting, of a bohemian dandy with thick hair and an intense look, is inscribed with the first person pronoun “Yo”. Picasso’s “Yo” was the egocentric “I” of genius.

In a career spanning most of the 20th century, he would represent himself as Harlequin, the seducer from the commedia dell'arte,as a lascivious minotaur, and later as a diminutive musketeer frolicking with voluptuous women.

Carles Casagemas, the son of the US consul general in Barcelona and Picasso’s closest friend, had travelled with him to the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900. Casagemas became obsessed with a woman he met there, Laure Gargallo, known as Germaine. When she spurned him, he tried to kill her, then killed himself in a cafe. Picasso painted his friend’s funeral in the style of El Greco.

It was Casagemas’s suicide that precipitated his Blue period, Picasso insisted. More than a decade later, when he and Georges Braque began using newspaper cuttings in what they labelled “synthetic Cubism”, Picasso completed a collage with an article about a Parisian salesman who stabbed his fickle lover, a singer, in the arm, then shot himself in the head. It was Casagemas’s story all over again.

In the autumn of 1901, Picasso painted Seated Harlequin,regarded as his first masterpiece. Art historians believe it was a tribute to Casagemas. Picasso gave Harlequin the whiteface and ruffled collar and sleeves of Pierrot, the sad clown who always loses Columbine.

Seated Harlequinis the signature painting of the exhibition Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first time the Met has exhibited its entire Picasso collection at once. The Blue, Rose and neo-Classical periods – those most pleasing to the public – are especially well-represented, but the show is weak on the less accessible Cubist period.

Picasso returned to the Harlequin theme in At the Lapin Agile(1905), which he painted for the owner of the famed Montmartre cafe in exchange for meals. This time, Harlequin is Picasso's self-portrait, sitting beside Germaine, the woman who drove his best friend to suicide.

The American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein believed Picasso was the greatest living artist, and it was largely through her salon in the rue de Fleurus that he became known. Stein wrote that Picasso’s portrait of her (1906) marked his passage from the Blue and Rose periods to Cubism.

Picasso aspired to be the 20th century Ingres, and there is a hint of Ingres’ portrait of the newspaper editor Louis-Francois Bertin in Stein’s hulking figure as painted by Picasso. With her dark eyes and long nose, Stein’s face looks strangely like Picasso’s, and like the African masques that Picasso sought out in museums and antiquarian shops.

When she died in 1947, Stein bequeathed Picasso’s portrait of her to the Metropolitan. It was the first Picasso acquired by this prestigious but conservative museum, and remains the Met’s most celebrated Picasso.

Picasso's Cubist drawing Standing Female Nudewas included in his first show in the US in 1911. The painter said it was one of the most beautiful things he ever created, but a critic referred to the zig-zagging vertical figure as a "fire escape, and not a good fire escape at that".

As the Met’s exhibition makes clear, Picasso never crossed the line into pure abstraction. His Cubist paintings may be difficult to decipher, but they always purport to represent something.

In 1917, Picasso met his first wife, the Russian dancer Olga Kokhlova, while working on a ballet with Sergei Diaghilev in Rome. The Renaissance art he saw in Italy, and Olga's classic features, prompted Picasso's neo-Classical period, which lasted until 1925. Woman in White(1923) is a particularly lovely neo-Classical Picasso. Historians are not sure whether this pensive woman in a diaphanous dress is Olga or Sara Murphy, the wife of a wealthy expatriate American painter. Like Harlequin/Pierrot, she may be a hybrid.

Picasso’s women were his models and inspiration, but he repeatedly drained lovers of their life force before discarding them. Olga became mentally unstable when Picasso left her for Marie-Thérèse Walter, an innocent 17-year-old whom he approached one morning outside the Galeries Lafayette department store, saying, “Mademoiselle, you have an interesting face. I would like to make your portrait. I am Picasso.”

When his marriage to Olga disintegrated, Picasso painted her as an amoeba-like creature with a gaping mouth filled with teeth. He usually painted the blonde and curvaceous Marie-Thérèse with a small head, sleeping or dreaming. From 1936 until the second World War, Dora Maar, the Franco-Croatian photographer who chronicled the painting of Picasso's Spanish civil war masterpiece Guernica, was his public mistress, while Marie-Thérèse and their daughter Maya remained his hidden family.

Picasso’s portraits of Dora convey her highly-strung intelligence. She, like Olga before her, would have a nervous breakdown when Picasso left her for a younger woman, Francoise Gilot. In 1955, Picasso began living with Jacqueline Roque, who was 45 years his junior. Until his death in 1973, Picasso would represent Jacqueline, whom he married in 1961, in hundreds of paintings, prints and drawings.

Picasso’s output was always prodigious. In just six months at the age of 87, he produced the 347 intaglio prints which comprise the final room of the Met’s exhibition. “I spend hour after hour while I draw. . . observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to,” Picasso said of the 347 Suite. “Basically, it’s my way of writing fiction.”

The prints are salacious, humourous and erudite. Throughout his life, Picasso remained a sexually-charged artistic powerhouse, but the brooding young Spaniard evolved into a happy and fulfilled old man.

Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Artcontinues until August 15. See metmuseum.org