LIVING HISTORY Picasso’s sculptures come face to face with their ancient ancestors in Rome
Picasso’s masterpieces join classical antiquities in Rome’s Galleria Borghese
You think of Picasso as someone so huge that sometimes you forget he was just a man,’ says Silvia Venturini Fendi, the eponymous fashion house’s creative director of accessories and menswear, when I meet her in the spectacular surroundings of the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Tonight, she is in the company of Diana Widmaier Picasso, an art historian who has co-curated an exhibition of her grandfather’s sculpture at the gallery. ‘It’s a privilege to see Picasso’s work with Diana because it has so much sentimental value for her, and that gives another dimension to our understanding of the artist.’
Part of an ongoing partnership between Fendi and the Galleria Borghese, the exhibition has a particular emotional resonance because of the close friendship between Diana and Silvia, both the granddaughters of creative visionaries. Diana, whose mother Maya was born from Picasso’s liaison with Marie-Thérèse Walter, acknowledges that part of her motivation to study her grandfather’s sculpture was familial (‘As with any great legacy, you have a responsibility,’ she says). The story she wants to tell, however, is less about birthright than about a wider ‘spiritual family’ of artists. Wandering through the gallery’s lavishly decorated rooms, with their frescoed ceilings and classical antiquities, we are retracing steps that Picasso himself almost certainly took when he made a cultural pilgrimage to Rome in 1917. By
juxtaposing his sculptures with those of his forebears, Diana hopes to create an ‘invisible dialogue that makes you realise when art is great, it doesn’t belong to time’.
The connections are thoughtfully made: the unusual stance of the figures in Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625) is echoed in Picasso’s Woman with Child (1961), a sheet-metal cut-out of a mother bearing her child aloft; Titian paintings celebrating the feminine form surround the curvaceous-looking bronze Vase-Woman (1948); and Caravaggio’s still-lifes are exhibited with collages of objects assembled from domestic life. The extraordinary stylistic variety among Picasso’s sculptures suggests that he was constantly finding new art-historical reference points, whether for Cubist-style bronze busts, wooden carvings such as his odalisque-like Seated Woman (1958) or monumental late works that recall the scale and grandeur of the Egyptian pyramids.
Why, given the breadth of his sculptural oeuvre, do we still know Picasso primarily as a painter? For Diana, it comes down to the very personal connection the artist had with his creations. ‘He considered them like living beings and he wanted to keep them to himself,’ she explains. She describes sculpture as the ‘nervous centre’ of his work – a ‘laboratory’ to which he would return time and again to test new creative ideas. His assemblages, for instance, gave him an opportunity to work with unusual materials such as nails, bones and pieces of wood. ‘People would give him amazing fabrics like silk, but he always preferred things he found in the street that had been disregarded by the world,’ says Diana. Aligning him with other pioneering contemporaries such as Marcel Duchamp and Jean Dubuffet, this innovative approach reminds us that while Picasso sought inspiration from his predecessors, he was always exploring ways to reinvent the rules of sculpture.
In this regard, the exhibition is the perfect fit for Fendi – a fashion house that recognises the importance of looking to both the past and the future. ‘Fendi is one of the actors of Roman life,’ says its CEO Serge Brunschwig. ‘Rome doesn’t lack roots – it has an immense reservoir of antiquities – but it’s important for curiosity to create something new as well.’ Blending tradition with modernity, the Galleria Borghese show is therefore more than just a tribute to Picasso – it is part of an unfolding story about creativity and renewal in the Eternal City.
‘Picasso: the Sculpture’, supported by Fendi, is at the Galleria Borghese (www.galleriaborghese.it) in Rome until 3 February 2019.