Some of the most important work of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, better known to us today as Picasso, is coming to the Seattle Art Museum.
Picasso's is the most famous name in 20th-century art, and whether one celebrates or bemoans his influence on modern painting, there's no denying either his importance as an innovator nor his universal influence.
He first visited Paris, appropriately enough, in 1900, and under the Parisian influence his painting began to take on the pictorial characteristics most associated with the name Picasso. The general public often didn't know what to make of him at first, but nobody familiar with his abilities questioned his right to make portraits in which both a woman's eyes and both her nostrils were on the same side of her face, for Picasso had already demonstrated a mastery of conventional representational painting, during his youthful "blue" and "rose" periods in the late 19th century.
This 1941 portrait enshrines of one of his many lovers and is entitled "Dora Maar au chat." The cat is on the back of the chair, by the way, not in her lap as you might get fooled into thinking at first. Picasso was like that.
This exhibit is a very big deal. It might be the most important one-man show since the ground-breaking Van Gogh traveling exhibit of forty years ago. That one set attendance records wherever it went, and this one might do the same.
The Seattle Times announced today that ""Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris," an exhibit of more than 150 works of art, from paintings and sculptures to prints, drawings and photographs, opens at SAM on Oct. 8 and will be on display through Jan. 9, 2011."
The works will be drawn from nearly every phase of the artist's long career, and are sampled from every decade of the 20th century up until the early 70's when Picasso died.
"SAM director Derrick Cartwright calls this 'a once-in-a-lifetime chance for a large public to view these important objects in Seattle.'"
The Musée National will close for renovations in August. It has room to show only a limited number of its 5,000 or so Picasso works at any one time. The show slated for Seattle in October is already circulating through European museums, and is currently in Helsinki. It will visit Moscow next, then, after leaving Seattle will probably visit two additional American cities.
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