Tate was as always busy - Tourists, families and would be intelligentsia (my group) - they refitting the boiler room and it was noisy as contractors worked 'safely' to bring the old work down and prepare for the next exhibition.
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| Now dismantling - last time (about 4 months ago) we played on the swings |
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| 1932 - A view of mortality |
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| April 23 beckons |
The plan was to meet at Tate Modern and find out what a busy boy Pablo Picasso was in his 50th year (1932).
So first thing to mention is that I (like many others I think) have a visualisation of Picasso as a bald guy with a striped Breton -esque- T shirt - in 1932 in many pictures he looked a bit like a bourgeois bank manager (and like Antonio Banderas in the Nat Geo film about him) .
The second thing is that (like many of us) Picasso felt old at 50 but the woman (Marie-Thérèse Walter in her early 20's) who came into his life dispelled this feeling and he was reinvigorated by her presence - producing loads of paintings, curating a retrospective and sculpture too.
Towards the end of the year Picasso's work reflects on the dearth of his sister seemingly sparked by the illness Marie Therese contracted from swimming in a dirty part of the river Marne.
While the work is somewhat variable the fact that it takes 10 rooms to contain gives an idea of just how busy Picasso was - the end of his marriage in this year also (perhaps) leads to the artistic rebirth which last for nearly 40 further years.
The exhibition is worth visiting - we had a break half way through as there's a lot to see (and big crowds too) - I had to keep reminding myself this was (partly as a result I think of a Curatorial exercise) - more a less one year.
It was also useful for us to remind on another how shocking some of this work would have been 85 years ago.
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