Picasso Portraits

There a number of big shows in London at the moment.  This is one at the National Portrait Gallery until the new year.   Picasso is always going to bring in the punters but is it a good show? The pictures are from the NPG website. 

There is lots in the exhibition to admire and it is interesting to see the changing influences of a painter who was both very prolific and long lived.  Changing from the young man far right, broody and influence by Munch to the more robust simpler muscular style of the figure on the left.  
However, perhaps inevitably there are some things in this exhibition that if they had not been by Picasso would probably have long since been dismissed. 

There is also the downright rude, a sketch of one of Picasso's friends being pleasured by a naked drunk prostitute being the foremost example of this.  
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These niggles aside there was much here I liked and much I did not know.  For example how caricature played a prominent part in Picasso's early life the humorous mustachioed gentleman on the below left being one such.  It is a tiny tiny sketch but I am glad I saw it.  The exhibition then neatly demonstrates how this then ledt to much more abstracted portraits like the one on the right where, like with charicature features but also themes of the personality of the sitter in question are exaggerated.  Can you spot the wrist watch? He was a punctilious gentlemant apprently. 

This being Picasso the numerous women in his life loom large. The picture on the left is of his first wife, Olga,  painted on the occasion of the finalisation of their divorce.  It is an obvious insult which struck me as harsh as the man had moved on and had a child with someone else by now. 
It is a decievingly simple painting.  You can see the surface colours have been painted over some kind of dark ground.  Effective use of geometric shapes. It is particularly interesting when contrasted with an earlied much more classical painting of the same woman. 

Of all the women displayed in this exhibition the one whose pictures I kept on being drawn to was a wife of a friend of his, a whippet thin woman with the incredible name of Niasch Eluard.  All the pictures of her have a likeable hard spikey quality to them.  She was, apparently, active in the French resistance during the war, as was her husband (who it would seem Picasso didn't find time to paint, at least not in this exhibition). 

Being an unecessarily talented fellow Picasso also found time to knock out the odd sculpture. The one below left being of another paramour of his Dora Mare.  The various crossing lovers of Picasso can make the timeline rather confusing but I wasn't particularly interested in the history I have to say but rather the product.  In this sculpture I like the bulbous nature of the work itself but also the melting waxy quality he has given the base,  as though the piece perhaps at one time looked different but has wilted under the sun. 

My favourite piece in the whole show and one I kept on coming back to time and time again was the one below right which is called Portrait of Jaqueline in a black shawl.  Like many of Picasso's painting it gives the impression of being painted in an enormous hurry which in this case give the thing a dark energy.  He has also carried over something that, if you go,  you will see in some of the earlier rooms in painting of his male friends,  that of this devilsh palid skin.  What, for me makes this piece most effective is the strong contrast between the two halves of the face (set off by the alternating contrast in the background) and also the strange reddis tinge to the right side of the face.  This it seems to me is a woman of great mistery and power.  

Another piece that calls out to you, is in the final gallery and when you get to the end and look back you see a picture called Old Man seated which shouts out with its vivid orange,  contrasting with green and blue. 

There are more subtle works, like an interestingly abstract but touchingly sentimental piece done in white, greys, blue and black showing one of his wives flowing in angelic form over two of his children, one of them drawing.  

Some works are quite meh.  Particularly what are called the comic works.  One of these that I originally dismissed came from Picasso's obsession with La Maninas done in his own version (right).  However I have this habbit of once having gone round an exhibition I go back round the other way.  Almost always different things strike me and I appreciate works in a different way.  This happened with this piece where coming from the other angles the geomotries of red and white seemed much more appeal.  

This show then lacks a little bit of the wow factor that other Picasso shows I have seen.  There are some forgettable things here but there are also some gems and, like all good shows,  some gems you probably won't have seen before.