Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Women Of Avignon)

On exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art is one of Pablo Picasso's well-known painting, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," ("The Women of Avignon"; Paris, June-July 1907. Oil on canvas, 8' x 7' 8"). Photo was taken on October 29, 2010.

MoMA gallery caption:

The result of months of preparation and revision, this painting revolutionized the art world when first seen in Picasso's studio. Its monumental size underscored the shocking incoherence resulting from the outright sabotage of conventional representation. Picasso drew on sources as diverse as Iberian sculpture, African tribal masks, and El Greco's painting to make this startling composition. In the preparatory studies, the figure at left was a sailor entering a brothel. Picasso, wanting no anecdotal detail to interfere with the sheer impact of the work, decided to eliminate it in the final painting. The only remaining allusion to the brothel lies in the title: Avignon was a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel.

Art Auction's World Record-Breaking PICASSO Painting - "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust"

This is a copy of Pablo Picasso's painting displayed in the window outside Christie's New York at Rockefeller Center. The work is called Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, a sensuous and stunning masterpiece from Picasso’s celebrated 1932 series of paintings depicting his muse and mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. Last week, the painting, from the Collection of Mrs. Sidney F. Brody, sold for a record $106,482,500, breaking the previous world record for any work of art sold at auction. The May 4 Evening Sale portion of the Brody Collection also achieved the highest total for a single-owner sale offered at Christie’s New York.

PICASSO in The Met and on the sidewalk on Madison Avenue

Sidewalk artist HANI SHIHADA's chalk-an-pastel image of Picasso's "The Dream" on the sidewalk on Madison Avenue outside the Carlyle Hotel

An exhibition of 300 works of art by PABLO PICASSO (Spanish, 1881-1973) opened recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This landmark exhibition is the first to focus exclusively on works by Picasso in the Museum's collection. It features the Museum's complete holdings of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and ceramics by Picasso—never before seen in their entirety—as well as a selection of the artist's prints. The exhibition covers the full breadth of the artist's multi–sided genius over the course of his long, prolific and influential career. The exhibit runs through August 1.
While photography is not allowed at the Met's exhibition hall, there is a masterpiece of Picasso's "The Dream" worth photographing - the chalk-and-pastel copy by HANI SHIHADA. The artwork is on the sidewalk on Madison Avenue outside the Carlyle Hotel. Mr. Shihada is a Jerusalem-born Palestinian artist who has been using the sidewalk as a canvas for more than 30 years. He has done a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on a sidewalk, Caravaggios and Raphaels.

"Girl Before a Mirror" by Picasso

This is Pablo Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror" (1932; oil on canvas, 162.3 x 130.2 cm) on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The painting shows Picasso's young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of his favorite subjects in the early 1930s. Her white-haloed profile, rendered in a smooth lavender pink, appears serene. But it merges with a more roughly painted, frontal view of her face—a crescent, like the moon, yet intensely yellow, like the sun, and "made up" with a gilding of rouge, lipstick, and green eye-shadow. Perhaps the painting suggests both Walter's day-self and her night-self, both her tranquillity and her vitality, but also the transition from an innocent girl to a worldly woman aware of her own sexuality. It is also a complex variant on the traditional Vanity—the image of a woman confronting her mortality in a mirror, which reflects her as a death's head. On the right, the mirror reflection suggests a supernatural x-ray of the girl's soul, her future, her fate. Her face is darkened, her eyes are round and hollow, and her intensely feminine body is twisted and contorted. She seems older and more anxious. The girl reaches out to the reflection, as if trying to unite her different "selves." The diamond-patterned wallpaper recalls the costume of the Harlequin, the comic character from the commedia dell'arte with whom Picasso often identified himself—here a silent witness to the girl's psychic and physical transformations (information from the MOMA website).

Picasso’s "The Daughter of the Artist at Two-and-a-half Years with a Boat" Headlines Sotheby’s Auction

This is a photo of the cover of SOTHEBY'S Catalog for the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale. Pablo Picasso's 1938 portrait of his daughter Maya as a toddler is expected to bring up to $33.8 million Cdn at Sotheby's New York auction next week.

From CBC.ca:

La Fille de l'artiste a deux ans et demi avec un bâteau (The Daughter of the Artist at Two-and-a-half Years with a Boat) will be auctioned at Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale on May 5-6.

It depicts Maya Widmaier-Picasso, the second of Picasso's four children by three women, as a golden-haired toddler holding a toy boat. She was born to the Spanish artist's mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, in 1935, while he was still married to the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova.

As a child, Widmaier-Picasso was the subject of a series of colourful portraits with her favourite toys. This work was created just a few months after the harrowing Guernica, Picasso's protest against the bombing of a small village during the Spanish Civil War.

"It reflects the great joy that Maya brought into the artist's life, even on the eve of the Second World War," Sotheby's vice-chairman of impressionist and modern art Emmanuel Di Donna told the Telegraph.

Like many of Picasso's portraits of his family members, the work remained in his personal collection for 35 years until his death in 1973. It has been in a private collection since the 1980s.

The painting has never been auctioned before.

Maya married Pierre Widmaier and had three children, Olivier, Richard and Diana, an art historian and author whom major art houses seek out to authenticate her father's works.

EXHIBITION AT SOTHEBY'S (located at 1334 York Avenue)

Fri, 1 May 09, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Sat, 2 May 09, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Sun, 3 May 09, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Mon, 4 May 09, 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Tue, 5 May 09, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

PICASSO's The French Manager

This is PABLO PICASSO'S "The French Manager," Costume for the ballet, PARADE (1917). Paint on wood, canvas, fabric, carboard, metal, leather, wool, string and wooden chair. For the 1917 Ballet Russes production premiere in Paris. This reconstruction is based on Picasso's original. This piece is on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

PABLO PICASSO SCULPTURE at MOMA

Head of a Woman

Head of a Warrior

Pregnant Woman

Goat Skull and a Bottle

She-Goat

On view at the MOMA's Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Lobby Gallery, fourth floor is a collection of PABLO PICASSO's sculptures. The artwork will be on display until November 3. Above are images that I made of some of the pieces.

From the MOMA website:

Pablo Picasso is perhaps best known for his paintings, but his sculptures are among the most radical, thought-changing artworks of the modern period. While the artist's two-dimensional work was frequently exhibited during his lifetime, the first comprehensive exhibition of Picasso's sculpture was mounted in 1966, when the artist was eighty-five years old. This installation provides a broad overview of the artist's career as a creator of three-dimensional objects through selections from The Museum of Modern Art's collection. The strength of the Museum's collection in this area is due, in part, to the support it received from the artist himself, who donated his sheet-metal construction Guitar (1914), on view here, to the Museum in 1971. 

Picasso turned to sculpture with particular rigor at several key moments in his career, using the medium as a testing ground for ideas that would catalyze crucial shifts in his practice at large. The sculpture Woman's Head (Fernande) (1909), also on view, helped Picasso conceptualize the break of solid volume into shifting masses suggestive of varying perspectives, and served as a foundation for the development of Cubism. In much of his subsequent sculptural work, Picasso abandoned the traditional art of modeling in favor of assemblage and construction. Picasso introduced non-art materials into his artwork, radically incorporating everyday objects into his sculpture much as he used found print materials in his famous collage works. The transformation from banal item to sculptural element is never complete, and much of the great visual wit of the objects seen here comes from the play between these two roles.