Walking around a gallery full of Picasso’s work on Jacqueline made me realize how dedicated and incredible the artist was throughout his life. What particularly stuck out to me, however, was his linoleum cuts. In the process of this particular art-making, Picasso gouged out the image in a piece of linoleum against a block of wood. Traditionally, artists make separate linoleum cuts for each color used in the art. Picasso was innovative, in printing one color from his linocut, then going back to the same piece of linoleum and carving deeper for the next color. There was no room for error, which again proved to me how sensational Picasso was.
Since the image is cut out into linoleum, there’s potential to play with different color schemes. One of my favorite linoleum cuts from Picasso is called “Life Under the Lamp.” This painting may seem fairly simple on the surface, but looking at what went into each and every color is astonishing to me. I first saw the image upstairs in the Pace Gallery, up the spiral staircase in a room set off to the side. “Life Under the Lamp” was one of the only images in the gallery not of Jacqueline, so it was also refreshing to see an image that was not an abstract representation of Picasso’s love.
To see the full process of making “Life Under the Lamp,” the British Museum outlines it here.
A full gallery of Picasso’s work showed me (someone who doubted that he was an incredibly special artist apart from his name) that art definitely is a lifestyle. For example, Picasso created his linocut “Life Under the Lamp” when he was 80 years old. His name is known everywhere you go, and this gallery allowed me to have a greater respect for an image I grew up seeing in my home, shown below
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I am finally able to say, I have experienced a Picasso!
It was indeed a powerful experience to observe his paintings and drawings in the PACE gallery today on 57th street.
Picasso was born in the year 1881 in Spain, though he had spent most of his career as an artist in France. He is known for the development of analytic and synthetic cubism as well as surrealism- types of art that have ever since remained highly influential and appreciated all around the world.
In this particular exhibition, Picasso features his second wife Jacqueline as a beautiful, almost immortal figure. Jacqueline had accompanied Picasso for longer than any other woman had, and she’d been his artistic muse during the critical time before his death.
As I was looking at the various paintings in the gallery, I realized that many of them looked so simplistic yet so complex once you got a better, closer look. Picasso used many different variations of Jacqueline, painting her in different positions and colors, using cubism elements, or simply painting her portraits. Yet in spite of all these variations, it was possible to feel that she was greatly admired and loved by him through his art.
On one of the walls in the galleries I noticed a quote by Helene Parmelin that perfectly describes Jacqueline’s impact on this exhibition: “Jacqueline has, to an unimaginable degree, the gift of becoming painting… She unfolds to infinity. She invades everything, becomes everybody.” Undoubtedly, this is exactly what Picasso had intended to do: make Jacqueline become everything and everybody.
A particular set of paintings that I thought was interesting is called “Jacqueline With Multicolored Straw Hat”. This set consisted of 6 paintings of Jacqueline, each labeled by Picasso as an individual stage. Though all six are practically the same, the only difference among them is the color. This made me curious to know how was Picasso able to replicate the paintings 6 times, making them all look so similar to each other, almost as if he took a photograph of it and simply reprinted it in different colors. I found it astonishing that the details of each panting were so much alike. Perhaps, the variation of the colors (which were going from light to dark) was meant to represent the stages of life, the first being the lightest and last being the darkest, almost as if it was meant to represent life, death, and the stages in between.
Below is one of the paintings of Jacqueline With Multicolored Straw Hat:
“Jacqueline With Multicolored Straw Hat” (Picasso; January 17, 1962)
I certainly enjoyed visiting the PACE gallery today, and I feel proud to be able to say that I have finally really seen a Picasso.
“Reclining Woman on a Blue Divan” (Picasso; April 20th, 1966; Oil on Canvas)
“Reclining Nude & Man with Mask” (Picasso; September 5 1964; graphite on paper)
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