Hello. I'm Tom Campbell,
Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
and I'm here with Gary Tinterow, curator of the exhibition
Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum.
Gary, this is a landmark show of about 300 works by Picasso
drawn from our own collections.
You've chosen to hang them chronologically
to provide a full survey of his life and his work.
And we start off with the year he arrives in Paris, 1901.
And we have paintings that, in fact, if one didn't know,
one might almost attribute them to Toulouse-Lautrec.
TINTEROW: Yeah.
CAMPBELL: This was the milieu into which he came.
Absolutely.
Picasso said, "Great artists don't borrow; they steal."
And Picasso was like a magpie and wherever he went,
he had incredible instinct for knowing
what was hot at that moment and what style in which to work.
And when he arrived in Paris at the height of the Art Nouveau
poster-making period with Jules Cheret and Toulouse-Lautrec,
the visual landscape of Paris were all those great posters
and the nightlife of Montmartre
was this compelling subject matter.
CAMPBELL: And so here, the signature image
of the first gallery, the harlequin,
do we see early Picasso emerging from this cutting and pasting?
Absolutely. I mean, cutting and pasting
is an interesting analogy
because that's just what he was doing.
And what's so fascinating about this,
because of our work on other exhibitions and projects,
we're able to know quite precisely what Picasso saw
before he made this picture.
So when you look at the floral background,
it might remind you of our "La Berceuse" by Van Gogh
in the Annenberg Collection hanging here at The Met.
CAMPBELL: That's right. Yup.
TINTEROW: And, indeed, we were able to determine
that that painting was in Vollard's gallery in June 1901,
when Picasso had his own exhibition
in Vollard's gallery in June 1901.
The blue and green color harmony reminds one
of Gauguin's late work, his Tahitian paintings,
that Vollard had recently exhibited in Paris
and certainly had some in his storeroom.
So, he knew how to make a compelling image,
I mean, what we might call an iconic image
because of its frontality, its placement.
That's something that he learned early on
and repeats constantly through his career.
He's only 19 years old when he paints this
and it's such an extraordinary masterpiece.
CAMPBELL: Now, there's a gaiety,
there's a vibrancy of coloration in the paintings in this gallery
which we see falling away as we go through into the next gallery
where the coloration becomes predominantly blue.
TINTEROW: Yeah, his mood shifts dramatically at the end of 1901.
He's in Paris and the death of his friend, Carlos Casagemas,
by suicide begins to weigh heavily on him.
He began to paint outcasts, the marginalized.
He himself seemed to develop a morbid fear of blindness,
which was the typical result of promiscuity in those days,
syphilis.
He frequented an asylum for women near Montmartre
called Saint-Lazare, which was a public hospital for women
with venereal disease.
And there he found a number of his subjects
for his Blue Period pictures.
Including this blind man?
TINTEROW: Yeah. This is more sacred than profane
'cause as you can recognize, it's the Eucharist:
bread and wine, and this poor man, but he's blind.
To me, it's a fantastic painting because of its secular scene,
which is a marginal man, an outcast--
what we would call a homeless person today--
infused with the spectral light of El Greco,
giving us a timeless scene about Christian symbolism.
CAMPBELL: Now, I know you've done a lot of research
with infrared and X-rays.
Do we know in the painting process,
was this an image that Picasso arrived at early
or was this kind of a labored image that, you know,
there was much experimentation? - Yeah.
Dramatic discovery here was an entire painting underneath,
which is a crouching nude from the Blue Period,
which is visible in a famous painting by Picasso
called "La Vie" in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
And it shows a couple, sort of Adam and Eve-like,
in Picasso's studio with two canvases visible,
one on an easel, one leaning against the easel.
The one leaning against his easel is the crouching nude,
which is a painting that scholars have been looking for
for years and now we know where it is.
CAMPBELL: Now we know where it is.
- It's underneath this picture. - Under this one. (chuckles)
TINTEROW: Precisely.
And because he was so poor, and canvas was a luxury,
it was more convenient for him to paint over something
that wasn't going to be sold anyway.
CAMPBELL: Now, how long does this blue,
this melancholy period last for?
TINTEROW: I would say it began in Paris at the end of 1901
and it continued straight through to his return to Paris
from Barcelona in spring 1904.
It was spring, it was Paris, things lightened up.
He found a new subject, which was the itinerant acrobats
whom he paints in the Rose Period
and which we have a very fine collection of.
CAMPBELL: In changing his palette in this Rose Period,
is he reflecting contemporary thought
about the symbolism of colors
or is it just a more instinctive aesthetic decision?
TINTEROW: I think it's all those things.
But it was a conscious aesthetic choice as well.
I mean, the two were operating together.
But in coming into the Pink Period
and choosing this harmony of pink and blue,
let's say with "The Actor,"
he's developing his own color scheme
that is unlike those of anyone else.
CAMPBELL: And we're getting an ever more marked distortion
with the figures, a freedom to mix figures, shapes
to an emotional and evocative purpose.
Yeah. I think, you know, the key thing
if we're looking for stylistic influences
is that he leaves El Greco, although in the attenuation here
we could say there's still a hint of El Greco left
in this figure and we think of pictures by El Greco
where the hands are so nervous and electric.
So he has that here.
But he essentially leaves El Greco behind for Ingres
when he goes from the Blue Period to the Rose Period.
And all three of these pictures
are informed by the example of Ingres.
So you know, of course, the great "Oedipus and the Sphinx"
at the Louvre.
And so that's where the gesture,
the final gesture that he arrives at
is taken straight from that picture.
There, you'll recognize
Bronzino's "Portrait of a Young Man,"
with a hand on hip, which was then reworked by Ingres,
in "the Comte de Pastoret,"
the portrait now at the Art Institute of Chicago,
which he then quotes more fully here,
and he thought it was a swagger pose, as it is,
and he used it in these two depictions of circus performers.
So we can find resonances within our own collections here
that speak to the development of Picasso's oeuvre.
TINTEROW: Absolutely.
CAMPBELL: Now, to our right,
we've got the famous portrait of Gertrude Stein.
Would you call that a Rose Period painting?
TINTEROW: Well, it comes right at the end of the Rose Period,
and that's what's so interesting.
But he's looking for non-Classical sources.
He's also looking at sculpture.
CAMPBELL: The hands could be straight out of Ingres.
- Precisely. - The upper torso is going
an entirely new direction. - Yeah, and that's
what we see in the next room. - Yeah.
What's going on here?
How did he get here?
TINTEROW: There are a number of things.
He is introduced to African art by Henri Matisse,
who brought a Congolese statue
over to Gertrude Stein's apartment,
and they were marveling at the carving.
He then went to the ethnographic museum, looked at Oceanic art,
and he made an amalgam of all these--
what used to be called "primitive"--
traditions of art making,
and conceived a very sculptural approach.
There's something very strong and animalistic about them.
This is what he's gaining from primitive art.
CAMPBELL: We've got two very identical images here.
- What's happening here? - That's just spectacular,
because, you know, no curator
would be allowed to buy two works
that are so close, you would just have to choose:
"Do you want this one or do you want that one?"
But because so many of the works were given to the museum,
we have the great luxury of seeing these two works,
which are probably done on the same day, if not the day after.
This one, I think done first, in pencil, with the blue washes,
and here with much stronger application of washes...
- More heavily accented. - Precisely.
And where he begins, you know,
he looks at the figure here,
he makes these wonderful arc-like shapes,
and then he begins to shade and pencil
where he wants to create the relief.
And here, knowing just where that's going to happen,
it comes out with greater sureness.
CAMPBELL: There's a drawing over here in the corner
you especially cherish.
TINTEROW: "Standing Female Nude," 1910,
I think it's the greatest Cubist drawing there is.
What I love about the drawing is this marvelous scaffold
that is organic and intuitive.
It's not a scaffold that an architect
or an engineer would make,
but we can sense the human body very strongly.
Everything has been broken up into these formal elements:
cubes, planes, figures.
It's an exaggeration and extension
of all sorts of things, but predominantly,
it's Cezanne right now.
He's looking at late paintings by Cezanne.
The way the brush strokes are applied,
and the way they act like mosaics to, at a distance,
assemble a picture.
It also is in very good condition.
CAMPBELL: Mm-hmm. How long does this go on?
TINTEROW: Picasso ends his first big flush of Cubism
with the close of the war,
when he's invited by Jean Cocteau and Sergei Diaghilev
to work on the Ballets Russes.
He goes to Rome, he works on a ballet,
he meets a dancer, a Russian dancer named Olga Khokhlova,
he marries, and his life changes dramatically at that point.
And I would say his art does, too,
and that's what we can see in the next room.
CAMPBELL: Changes in what respect?
TINTEROW: He becomes neoclassical again.
Having been to Italy, having gone
to Herculaneum and to Pompeii,
seeing those great frescoes
completely changes his perception.
He makes marvelous heads like this
that are a direct reflection of his Italian experience.
But these women are all in one way or another his wife Olga.
These two pastels both come from Scofield Thayer,
who was a remarkable American collector,
very important in literary history,
the first to publish T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in America.
He had a magazine called "The Dial,"
which was tremendously influential.
And he wanted to buy works of art that he could reproduce
in his magazine.
CAMPBELL: Now, in this gallery, we're predominantly looking
at paintings and drawings,
but I know in the next gallery, you have many linoleum cuts.
It was clearly a medium he loved working in.
He was really inventive. - He did.
And he invented new processes.
So when you look, for example, at this suite here,
of transformation of the satyrs and the bulls,
with the starry sky, this is a reductive line or cut--
which is to say he's using the same block,
and he continues to scoop away more-- precisely--
in order to make the different color patches,
because for a work like here, "The Woman after Cranach,"
he was very unhappy with the problems of registration,
and you can see even the red block for her dress
doesn't line up where it should.
And he found that very disturbing.
And so, with his printer,
he developed this reductive technique,
and we see an explosion in his art.
And was he making linoleum cuts at the same time
that he was painting oils?
Or does he kind of have periods
working in the different medium?
Certainly, there are moments when he favors one or the other,
but I think he loved the transformation.
When he was working on a painting,
he would often revise the pictures,
and that's what we've seen through infrared and X-ray.
But he would lose the previous states.
And what he loved with printmaking
is that he could hold onto the previous states,
he could pull a print, and then go back to the plate
or to the block and continue to revise it.
And he loved seeing the progressive stages
of metamorphosis, because for Picasso, it was all about
transformation, metamorphosis, creativity.
CAMPBELL: Many of our paintings are on display most of the time.
But this is the part of the show that is really unusual.
He's painting as well, and drawing never stops,
making sculpture,
but I think his printmaking, more than any other medium,
show his creativity and expression best.
The exhibition is on through August the 1st,
but of course, even after it closes,
many of our Picasso paintings
will be on display in our permanent galleries.
I hope you have the opportunity to visit.
Thank you.