Picasso’s early works draw many

Press, 7 February 1985, Page 25

Picasso’s early works draw many

NZPA-Reuter Berne

A collection of Pablo Picasso’s early works — including rarely-seen erotic sketches — is drawing large crowds to the Berne Art Museum.

Since early December, 90,000 people have queued to see more than 200 works gathered from private and public collections as far away as the United States and the Soviet Union.

The exhibition, the most •popular in Switzerland since a Van Gogh display in 1972, has been extended two weeks to March 3, and Spain has shown interest in presenting it. Mr Juergen Glaesemer, a curator at the museum closely involved with setting up the exhibition, attributes its success only partly to the name of Picasso, a giant of twentieth century art. “People who are not involved in art can understand his early, more naturalistic, works more easily than the later cubist paintings,” he said. The exhibition allows the public to follow Picasso from southern Spain, where he was born in Malaga in 1881, to Paris, the European cultural capital of the time.

The works trace Picasso’s artistic growth and changing state of mind in the years leading up to 1904, the climax of the Blue Period during which he deviated from the styles of the day. The exhibition begins with bull-fighters from when Picasso was aged nine. Paintings from his teens show the ease with which he used colour or.adapted to the large canvas, as in “The First Communion” (1896), showing his sister, Lola, kneeling at an altar. The exhibition’s centrepiece is the symbolist Blue Period work “Life” depicting sexual and maternal love, the embryonic beginnings of life and a reference to death. Picasso’s friend,

Carlos Casagemas, was a model for one of the figures. Picasso’s grief at the suicide of Casagemas in a Parisian cafe in 1901 was one decisive factor behind his stylistic change from fin-de-siecle Parisian gaiety to the morbid Blue Period’ tones, Mr Glaesemer said. “Picasso also mistrusted the success of an early Paris exhibition at the Vollard Gallery where he had drawn on all the colourful styles of the day, from Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh and the vogue for art nouveau.”

Picasso found such painting “too easy-going” and saw the other side of Paris: the drunks and the women in St Lazare jail.

“At first Paris life was exciting and new. Then he realised what it really meant to be there and the paintings after the Vollard exhibition show the flip side of what he had drawn before,” Mr Glaesemer said. The exhibition cleverly shows the transition. Hanging on one side of a wall is “Woman In The Theatre Box” — a lively, colourful painting — while on the other hangs “The Absinthe Drinker,” a sad lonely woman with only a glass for company. Also on show is “I,” a self-portrait painted in the same year as Casagemas died, which is very different from the lighter Vollard pictures. Not all the paintings of the period are pessimistic. Fifteen erotic sketches from 1901 to 1903, never assembled before, show sometimes sexually explicit scenes and are free from the anxiety of other contemporary works.

The exhibition ends with the Blue Period, after which Picasso abandoned the sombre tones for pink.

He later embarked on Cubism, one of the dominant styles in European painting for decades to come. Picasso died in 1973.