She Was Just 17; The Gagosian Gallery Presents Picasso and Marie-Therese: L’amour fou
It was a chance encounter on a boulevard in Paris in 1927. She was 17 and on her way to buy a Peter Pan collar — a "col Claudine" — at the Galeries Lafayette. He was 45 and married to a very possessive former ballerina. "You have an interesting face," he said. "I would like to do your portrait. I have a feeling we will do great things together. I am Picasso."
She had never heard of him, the story goes, so he took her to a bookstore and produced a volume of his paintings to prove his point. They agreed to meet again, "Monday at eleven o’clock at the Saint-Lazare station," Picasso friend, biographer and co-curator John Richardson writes in an essay in the show’s soon-to-be-published catalogue.
Without question, they did great things together, as this exhibition of nearly 90 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints demonstrates. It is the third, themed Picasso show organized by the Gagosian over the last several years. There was Picasso: Mosqueteros in the New York gallery in 2009, followed by Picasso: The Mediterranean Years in London in 2010.
Marie-Thérèse Walter became Picasso’s secret lover and an enduring muse. The so-called Marie-Thérèse years from 1927 to 1940 are regarded as "a period of unprecedented creative explosion, giving rise to the artist’s liveliest and often most studied works," art historian and co-curator Diana Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter, writes in a separate essay for the catalogue. "Today, works of this period command the highest prices at auction." But Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou (crazy or obsessive love) is the first major exhibition devoted to the mysterious middle-class girl from a suburb of Paris who was seduced by one of the world’s most famous artists.
References to Marie-Thérèse, a full-figured, blonde beauty with a prominent "Greek" nose, were often camouflaged, or appeared in code, in Picasso’s art (e.g., Guitàre a la main blanche, 1927, with her initials and a chalk-white hand), and her identity was a closely hidden secret, as was the birth of their daughter Maya in 1935. (Maya was Diana Widmaier Picasso’s mother.) The artist bought mother and child a country house in Boiseloup, some 70 kilometers northwest of Paris, and commenced a secret life apart from his wife, Olga. As Richardson writes, "Picasso was more in love than he had ever been."
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