Courtauld Gallery

AVAILABLE FEBRUARY 2013

Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901

160 pages, paperback, 260 x 216 mm, 120 colour illustrations
PRICE: £30.00
ISBN: 978 1 907372 45 2

Barnaby Wright et al.

1901 was a momentous and turbulent year for the nineteen-year-old Picasso. He spent the first part of it in Madrid but his sights were firmly set upon becoming a great painter in Paris, the capital of the arts. His first visit to Paris, at the end of 1900, had fuelled his ambitions and led to the prospect of an exhibition with one of the city's most important modern art dealers, Ambroise Vollard.

This fully illustrated catalogue, with essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field of Picasso studies, tells the remarkable story of Pablo Picasso's breakthrough year – 1901 – as an artist. It brings together an extraordinary group of paintings to explore his rapid artistic development during this single year which launched his career and reputation in Paris. These major paintings will be reunited from public and private collections internationally, making the catalogue a unique opportunity to experience Picasso's very first masterpieces.

Picasso left for Paris in May with around twenty paintings and little over a month to produce enough wotk to fill his Vollard exhibition. Once there, he painted unstintingly, sometimes finishing three canvases in a single day. The canvases express Picasso's desire to take on and reinvent the styles and motifs of his artist heroes, such as Van Gogh, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. The Vollard show was a success and launched Picasso's career in Paris. But despite this he immediately took his art in new directions.

The suicide of his closest friend, Carlos Casagemas, that same year inspired Picasso to produce a new group of subjects. They constitute one of his greatest early achievements and with them he found his own artistic voice. Typically muted in tone with strong outlines, anticipating his famous 'blue period', the paintings often depict isolated figures in sparse surroundings, such as Child with a Dove, and include an extraordinary series of drinkers at café tables, such as Harlequin (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Absinthe Drinker (The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersberg).

Accompanying the exhibition, Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901, at The Courtauld Gallery, London, 14 February – 26 May 2013.

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