A deep dive into the ‘Blue Period’
New Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition tells a ‘fresh’ story about Picasso’s artistic genesis
Nearly 50 years after Pablo Picasso’s death, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario is purporting to shed new light on one of modern art’s most infamous icons.
In “Picasso: Painting the Blue Period,” which opens this week to the general public, curators from the AGO and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., offer an essayistic recasting of Picasso’s early works — an era defined by the artist’s obsessive use of cobalt, and stark reflections of the impoverished and marginalized.
By utilizing scientific method and critical analysis, “Painting the Blue Period” frames a trio of works in the AGO and Phillips collections as seminal transi- tional examples of the artist’s develop- ment, presenting Picasso, then in his early 20s, as pliable and empathetic; a synthesis of his influences as he traversed from Spain to France and back again.
“It’s the story of Picasso’s artistic formation but without (explicit) biography,” explained Kenneth Brummel, the AGO’s associate curator of modern art, during a recent tour of the exhibition. “The challenge was how to recast this artist who has been vetted from every possible direction into something fresh, interesting and new without repeating someone else’s argument. For us, the answer was conservation science.”
Seven years in the making, “Painting the Blue Period” is anchored by revelations discovered beneath works in the galleries’ collections. In using image spectrometry to dig beneath the paint’s façade, conservators were able to uncover new insights into Picasso’s mythology: a ruminant bon vivant beneath the Phillips’ “The Blue Room” (1901), showing the artist literally painting over a Degas homage; a contorted hand in the AGO’s “Crouching Beggarwoman” (1902), exposing an aborted attempt at subverting religious iconography, while an expanded cast of characters in homage to the French realist Honoré Daumier and the murals of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes surround the figurative duo in 1903’s “The Soup,” imbuing the work
“The challenge was how to recast this artist who has been vetted from every possible direction into something fresh, interesting and new without repeating someone else’s argument.”
KENNETH BRUMMEL
AGO ASSOCIATE CURATOR OF MODERN ART
with a deeper political element.
Using these insights as a starting point, throughout the exhibition Brummel and his co-curator, the Phillips’ Susan Behrends Frank, contextualize Picasso’s method in his influences, assembling more than 100 pieces of supporting evidence, including more than 70 other Picasso works, as well as pieces by Spanish renaissance artist El Greco, Auguste Rodin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas.
Recalling the herculean experience of putting “Painting the Blue Period” together, Brummel explained he had always held ambitions to put on an early period Picasso exhibition at the AGO, but it was only when Behrends Frank approached the gallery for a loan after scanning “The Blue Room” that he found the spark to move ahead with
such an ambitious project.
“She wanted to borrow two of our Picassos and my response was simply: we should be equal participants,” he recalled.
Working alongside AGO senior paintings conservator Sandra Webster-Cook, Brummel managed to convince John Delaney, the senior imaging scientist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Francesca Casadio from the Art Institute of Chicago to take a look at the works in the gallery’s collection.
When they were finally able to see the results, “what became instantly clear was that our three paintings were critical to understanding the Blue Period,” Brummel said. “The underlying layers enabled us to explain Picasso’s formation in a unique and novel manner. To create a story of this young artist’s emergence as an adult into the Parisian avant-garde.”
To highlight the importance of the pieces in telling that narrative, the curators chose to include works from slightly before and after the Blue Period, offering visitors a chance to view Picasso’s early forays into impressionist mimicry as well as his proto-Cubist Rose Period.
“Normally an exhibition with this type of focus would be two galleries,” Brummel said with a smirk.
“Well, we made it into 10.”
In offering an expanded scope across such a vast piece of real estate, Brummel said he hopes “Painting the Blue Period” will not only shine a light on the AGO’s own connection to Picasso but bring attention to the value of works already in the gallery’s vast collection.
“The gallery hosted the first Canadian retrospective of Picasso’s work in 1964, which means even when Picasso was alive and working, we were part of the formation of his career. I really felt that it was incumbent upon me to try to honour that tradition,” he said.
“The reality is, when we participate in other (museum) projects, our paintings often get lost. Whereas in this case we’re able to explain to the people of Ontario that works in our collection are foundational and they are of critical importance — our paintings are, in fact, the fulcrum, the focus, the culmination of the arguments that we are creating in the gallery!
“I hope that people will understand that we own major works of art at the Art Gallery of Ontario,” he added. “And they deserve to be celebrated.”