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The Picasso Style 1937-1943
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In "Guernica" Picasso had arrived at the formal idiom with which we
automatically associate his name. It was to inform a diverse range of
works without ever again breaching his system from within. Thus his
work from 1937 till his death can be seen as expressing that one style
- though of course shifts in emphasis indicate changes in the artist's
major interests.
The first phase saw the years in which Picasso tested the
possibilities of his new style. Initially individual in character,
this process of evolution ran its course at a time that could hardly
have been more turbulent, dangerous or uncertain, a time of great
political crisis in Europe followed by the Second World War. Picasso's
art did reflect the existential menace of the age, but only
indirectly. Considered dispassionately, his work seems to reverse its
profile. "Guernica" had been a commissioned work, with a brief to
articulate history. Under the powerful pressure of events, form had
become a counter-world, art a counter-attack. This in itself was an
eminently political stance. And the full dimensions of that stance
become apparent if we assess the hallmarks of the Picasso style.
Since the great experiment of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", the
subsequent further development of Cubism, and the years of so-called
classicism, two mutually contradictory principles of depiction had
coexisted in Picasso's art. They may be labelled dissociation and
figuration. Figuration is mimetic, representational art, handed down
by tradition; dissociation is autonomous art, non-representationally
departing from its subjects in the given world. In Picasso's work they
alternate and exert a mutual influence. Figuration informed his work
from the outset, even in work influenced by Surrealism. He used
techniques of dissociation even in the years from 1916 to 1924 to
offset his classical approaches; they were decisive in his engagement
with Surrealism. The path to a synthesis was always implicit in his
dual system.
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Within the overall system of depiction, figuration and dissociation
represent polar opposites. The former reproduces the subjective
viewpoint, shows the subject as the beholder sees it. The laws of
perspective apply: a subject viewed from the front cannot reveal its
rear. That aspect of its appearance is left to the imagination,
figuration relying upon the associative cooperation of the beholder.
Dissociation, by contrast, includes the whole subject, shows the rear
as well as the frontal view if it so wishes. In this respect it is
more objective. But the gain in terms of dissociative images is
countered by a loss: the various elements can no longer be
accommodated within a defined area, and the principle of a containing
outline has to be abandoned. That principle belongs to figurative art:
it includes everything in unified outlines, ensures that every subject
is distinct from every other. The basic task for any depictive art
seeking a synthesis of the two approaches is obvious. It has to
introduce the gains of dissociative art into the realm of figuration,
and vice versa. Picasso's new style did just that, using contoured,
linear, figurative outlines without feeling compelled to represent the
exact specifics of the given subject.
He had been working on this since the mid-Thirties. Children's art
influenced him importantly; it did not depict objects in the
conventional manner of the single subjective viewpoint, but it did use
clearly defined outlines. Children try to depict features of an object
that seem important. Their representations bear little resemblance to
the originals as we in fact see them in everyday experience. Form in
children's art is a kind of sign language, a system of figurative
symbols. Children are not out to produce art; they are engaging with
the reality before them. This, of course, is the fundamental
difference between children's art and Picasso's style.
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Two portraits of seated women done in 1937 before his work on "Guernica"
afford clear illustrations of this. Both of them show lovers:
Marie-Therese Walter and Dora Maar. The former is dated 6 January
1937, and that of photographer Dora Maar was doubtless painted not
long after. The most striking visual trick at first inspection, in
both paintings, is the treatment of the faces. The outlines are
profiles, but the features are seen frontally too, which is impossible
in real circumstances. This dual angle of vision had been familiar in
Picasso's art since the 1920s. It occurred in figure portrayals that
combined the dissociative and the figurative principles. Parts of the
body were dismembered, so to speak; and in the portraits of these two
women Picasso transformed their clothing into autonomous visual
imagery. In this he was following principles unknown to children's
art: perspective and balanced proportion. Both principles are
fundamental to figurative art. Picasso had already developed ways of
deploying both principles freely, as he chose, in the dissociative
formal idiom of Cubism. Now, with the input of ideas gleaned from
children's drawings, his options had been extended to include the
figurative symbolism characteristic of children's art.
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Portrait of Marie-Therese Walter
1937
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Portrait of Dora Maar Seated
1937
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Portrait of Dora Maar
1937
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Portrait of Dora Maar
1937
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Maya with a Boat
1938
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The portrait of his daughter Maya, done on 16 January
1938, clearly reveals how capriciously Picasso handled this new
system. The little girl is sitting on the floor, a doll in her
arm. Her legs and skirt are rendered as geometrical blocks,
unnaturally crossed; the legacy of Cubist dissociation is
unmistakable. Her face shows the familiar combination of profile
and frontal angles, the two angles not additively juxtaposed in
Cubist manner but simultaneously present, as in a superimposed
photograph.
By contrast, in Dora Maar's face we see the two angles in
juxtaposition; the nose is both in its normal position and in
profile. In the portrait of Marie-Therese Walter the profile view
was the point of departure. It was merely extended by adding a
second eye and a heightened, whiter area to suggest a cheek. In
the picture of his daughter, as in the women's portraits, Picasso
more or less retained the natural proportions. There is just one
striking exception: the girl's right arm was painted as a child
might have painted it, a short stump ending in sketchy shapes that
stand for five spread fingers. For Picasso, what was interesting
in children's drawings was only the principle of formal
construction. For this reason, comparison of his own work with
children's drawings, though it may seem an obvious one to draw,
does not make a great deal of sense. The resemblance is only
superficial and only ever relates to individual features.
Denunciation of Picasso's work as infantile is a cliche of
contemporary art opinion. In 1937, indeed, the official German
guide to the Paris World Fair declared that "Guernica" "looks as
if it had been drawn by a four-year-old". The Fascists used this
defamatory response as freely as comparisons with the work of the
mentally retarded if they wanted to disparage art.
Cubist dissociation, figuration and childlike symbolism are the
three foundations on which the formal idiom of the "Picasso style"
was built. They made possible a vast potential of variation. Every
one of these formal systems consists of a number of characteristic
features which only define a system once they appear together. But
these features can be used separately, or combined with others.
This fact is illustrated by the three portraits we have been
examining too. In each one the artist has established an imaginary
space. In none of them is it genuinely illusionist; rather,
Picasso is playing with the notion of three-dimensionality, and
its imitation. In the "Portrait of Marie-Therese Walter" zones of
different colour are juxtaposed in such a way as to suggest depth.
Lighter and darker shades indicate the floor, ceiling and walls.
The way that they interact is suggestive of central perspective,
so that there is an element of caprice in the spatial sense of the
picture. In the portrait of Dora Maar, Picasso juxtaposes areas of
parallel lines which, taken together, convey spatiality, since the
lines run in such a way as to suggest depth. Though nothing here
is indicative of exact perspective either, the illusion strikes us
as more persuasive, since the basic grid of perspective
foreshortenings is there. In the portrait of little Maya, two
horizontal bands of white and brown suggest space. They are
colours only, without any perspective construction; but the
child's pose prompts us to interpret the colours as part of a
room. In part, the composition depends on our powers of
association, which is a traditional method in establishing
backgrounds.
What is true of the construction of spatial values is also true of
the presentation of figures - for instance, in another picture of
Maya also painted in January 1938. The child herself and the toy
boat in her hands are established with blocks of bright juxtaposed
colour, but details such as the hair style and clothes are
reproduced figuratively. The face is a schematic design of purely
linear, crudely drawn eyes, nose and mouth, using triangular areas
of white, green, red, blue and yellow colour. These areas have no
intrinsic figural meaning whatsoever; indeed, they are at odds
with figural representation. But once they are there, as parts of
the face, we respond to them as we would to the modelled
three-dimensionality of differently-lit parts of a face.
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Portrait of Maya with Her Doll
1938
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The Yellow Sweater (Dora Maar)
1939
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A diametrically opposed method is at work in a study of a seated
woman done on 27 April 1938 in India ink, gouache and crayon
(Seated Woman). It is a study in both the autonomy and the
functionality of the line. The woman's head is done in the familiar
combination of frontal and profile; and, in the process, the line as
an instrument for conveying form has taken on an independent life of
its own. Admittedly an identifiable image of a body has been produced,
and thus a certain representational value; but the picture is a fabric
of webs and meshes. This use of lines totally alters the character of
the image. The line is no longer subordinated to representation of the
sitter; rather, the seated figure is an excuse to play with lines.
Naturally enough, most of the forms are angular. In the December 1938
"Seated Woman in a Garden" Picasso went on to combine
autonomy of block with autonomy of line. Since "Guernica", Picasso had
essentially been ringing the same changes on the fundamentals of
visual presentation as he had been doing in the Cubist phase.
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Seated Woman
1938
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Seated Woman in a Garden
1938
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What did make a considerable difference was the fact that his free
variation was now always contained within a defined outline, a figural
shape. This is particularly apparent if we look at "Women at Their
Toilette", done in spring 1938. This cartoon for a tapestry
combined the papiers colles technique with conventional oil on canvas,
thus, true to Picasso's new synthesis, combining dissociative Cubism's
technical achievements with the painting method of traditional
figurative art. He found he could use this variation of formal
principles to communicate statements. In the "Portrait of Maya with
Her Doll" Cubist, figurative and childlike approaches to form
complement each other in a way that seems wholly apt to the subject -
a child. The interchange of defining characteristics is apt in a
similar way. The doll, for instance, has a more human face than the
child: its big eyes, tiny nose and full, slightly pouting lips add up
to a schematic, stylized baby-face. Using sophisticated juxtapositions
of this kind, Picasso contrived to load simple compositions with
details of defining quality.
We see this vividly if we compare the portraits of Marie-Therese
Walter and Dora Maar. Marie-Therese's hat and dress consist of lined
patterns that give a mood of yielding softness. The rounded contours
of her body give the same impression. The sitter is manifestly being
portrayed as a calm, gentle, unaggressive personality. Dora Maar
strikes us quite differently, though. Using the pattern of her dress
as a pretext, Picasso emphasizes angularity, and the note of
aggressiveness this strikes is reinforced by the signal red and dark
violet shades. Maar's long fingers are like daggers; and her face,
done in loud, bright yellows, greens and reds in a crescendo of
intensity, only underlines the shrill impact.
The colours and poses in both portraits are similar, yet the
overall image is entirely different. One is all calm and joie de
vivre; the other is nervousness and tension. In both portraits the
artist has succeeded in conveying that most intangible of things, a
human personality. And he has done it without stressing facial
expressions or poses, which customarily establish the character of a
sitter.
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Women at Their Toilette
1938
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Another important work that used the new method of depiction grew
out of the work on "Guernica". After he had completed that enormous
canvas, Picasso did a number of studies on the time-honoured subject
of grief, showing a woman weeping into a handkerchief. Using his
combined dissociative and figurative method, he dissected the faces
into lines and experimented with various colour bases applied in
different ways. When he had tried out combinations to his
satisfaction, he produced an oil of moderate size which he completed
on 26 October 1937. Again the composition combines a frontal and
profile view of the face. Furthermore, the face has also been
splintered into shards contoured with thick lines, and these shards,
painted in shades of varying degrees of aggressiveness, serve to
heighten an overall impression of shattered nervousness (as in the
portrait of Dora Maar). The handkerchief, hand and face interconnect
(and in this respect extend the method used in "Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon"); the treatment defies the natural definition of the
individual motifs. This is the most fractured portion of the picture,
and the rest of the head, and the background, are juxtaposed in
relative tranquillity and clarity of definition. The composition
perfectly conveys the act of crying; it catches the expression of
profound emotional crisis exactly. Picasso can well afford to dispense
with conventional attention to detail. Only the one or two rounded
shapes suggest tears; the anecdotal flavour of big round sobbed tears
has been carefully avoided. Here, it is the shattered form that
conveys the shattered feelings.
Given the associative relation of Picasso's forms to the emotional
content, he succeeds in presenting things which are fundamentally open
to analogy - the aim of figurative painting. But the Picasso style is
actually far richer in technical scope, and in a position to
reformulate the traditional aims of visual presentation - without by
any means dropping historical work, genre scenes or other conventional
types of painting.
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Weeping Woman
1937
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Woman Crying
1937
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A signal example of this is "Night Fishing at Antibes", a
large composition painted in 1939. Real experience lay behind it;
Picasso spent the last summer of peace with Dora Maar at Antibes on
the Cote d'Azur, and in the evenings he would watch the fishermen
going out to fish by acetylene lamp. The painting that resulted is
anecdotal at heart. Dora Maar is to be seen to the right of the
harbour, with her bike, eating an ice cream. Beside her is Breton's
wife Jacqueline Lamba, and at the very back we can make out the Palais
Grimaldi. The centre of the picture is occupied by the fishermen,
spearing childishly-scrawled fish from the deep green waters. The
contrast of darkness and colour establishes a nighttime scene both
cheerful and yet enigmatic.
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Night Fishing at Antibes
1939
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Picasso was thus able to deploy his formal means to achieve very
different results. His work from 1937 to 1945 saw him continually
testing those differences. One of the most important pictures of the
period was the "Nude Dressing Her Hair", painted in May
and June 1940 in his studio at Royan. In the bottom quarter of the
canvas Picasso has placed a violet trapezoid, with two dark green
vertical trapezoids at the sides, a thin, almost black triangle at the
top, and a large, not quite regular rectangular area of olive green
between the two dark green sides. This suggests a space or room: the
illusion is almost of a view through a peephole, framing the subject,
a seated woman with her arms behind her head. She occupies almost the
entire canvas, so that she not only has a monumental quality but also
makes the space seem cramped. The use of this tight compositional grid
introduced a note of disquiet: the figure's attitude calls for elbow
room, but space is precisely what this painting, in a direct appeal to
our emotions, denies her. Picasso has emphasized this disquiet. The
figure's bodily proportions are unnatural. The feet still follow
nature, albeit in crudely simplified form; but thighs, knees and
calves are harshly juxtaposed, angular areas of light beige and dark
brown. The figure is rendered with extreme foreshortening, a
capricious use of perspective, and a playful rethinking of the
elements of visual presentation. Whole parts of the body (such as the
left thigh) are simply left out. The face is no longer an overlapping
yoking of frontal and profile views as in the portraits of Dora Maar
or Marie-Therese; rather, the silhouette and full-face are crudely
juxtaposed at different heights. There is a curious duality in the way
the figure has been done. It might be described as mechanization of
the organic, and stylizing of the mechanical, both principles so
interwoven that it is difficult to make out what is happening in the
picture.
Though Picasso was plainly performing a variation on stylistic
approaches he had already tested, "Nude Dressing Her Hair" was not
spontaneously done. In fact a large number of sketches and studies
preceded it. In various sketch-books there are a total of well over
200. One of these books, started at Royan on 10 January 1940 and
finished there on 26 May the same year, sheds particularly instructive
light on Picasso's work methods. It not only contains studies for
"Nude Dressing Her Hair".
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Nude Dressing Her Hair
1940
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The first drawings are hasty sketches after Delacroix's famous
painting "The Women of Algiers" (1834), which Picasso knew well from
visits to the Louvre. In these sketches, Picasso was internalizing the
compositional options made available by Delacroix's painting; in the
process he redistributed the components in geometrically rounded or
conical form. If Picasso had not expressly noted the original he was
following, we should scarcely be able to identify any connection. In
other sketches, Picasso schematically rendered details of the
original. Then at length a study of Delacroix's two seated women
prompted him to a figural idea of his own. What is most striking in
this sketch is the use of profile and frontal views of the face at
split levels - the very device he was to use in the finished "Nude
Dressing Her Hair" and which he had already employed in "Seated Woman
in a Garden". In the next sketch Picasso further dissected the forms.
There is a twofold rationale to such a method: it connotes both
distance (and thus independence of the given subject) and the presence
of a specific original. Because the forms being conjoined are discrete
and distinctly abstract, the leeway for further metamorphosis is
considerable. This left Picasso the option of projecting physical
forms into the largely neutral shapes of his first sketches, and then
rendering his further studies specific in the same way, by
establishing legs, arms, and a chest and abdomen.
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Study for "Women of Algiers"
1940
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Study for "Nude Dressing Her Hair"
1940
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Plainly - and this is what makes the process so utterly fascinating
- the associations were not altogether free. It is even possible to
follow them and recreate a thought process. As he reshaped the figure,
Picasso was toying with a motif he had long been using, that of the
female nude with arms raised and crooked behind her head, a classic
nude pose which he had already used in a key position in "Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon". Picasso worked on "Nude Dressing Her Hair" for
a full six months. It was typical of his work methods that in the
process he was continually taking his bearings from a particular point
of departure, in this case Delacroix's painting.
At heart, all Picasso's paintings to the end of the Second World
War were interrelated. When the "Nude Dressing Her Hair" was finished,
he adapted the pose and compositional grid to "Boy with Lobster". It was not an isolated case of adaptation. Indeed, the range of
subjects he covered was palpably limited if we compare with earlier
periods, and he introduced few new motifs. This is an indication of
Picasso's interest in experiment at the time, of course: he used and
re-used the same motifs, but placed his emphases differently. Thus he
did a large number of portraits of seated women, and an immense number
of busts and portraits. The sheer quantity ought not to blind us to
the fact that even among the limited range of motifs there were
interrelations. The sitting position in the portraits of Dora Maar,
Marie-Therese, and his daughter Maya, and the preliminaries for the
"Nude Dressing Her Hair", was a single position, somewhat varied. The
location of a style was merely one aspect (a formal one) of this
output; Picasso's serial work also had an unmistakable, strongly
self-referential component. His fruitful interest in the work of
contemporaries had waned. This, however, was less the fault of the
artist than of the age:
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Boy with Lobster
1941
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it was, after all, a time of pre-war crises, the Second World War,
and the occupation of France by the Germans.
The political situation forced Picasso into isolation. First, he
was cut off from his homeland by the Spanish Civil War and the victory
of Franco's Falangists. And then, after the German invasion of France,
the Paris art scene changed in a way that peculiarly affected Picasso,
the great practitioner of Modernism. As in the First World War, when
everything was in a state of flux and upheaval, but even more so now
because of the alien occupational rule, the arts in France were
dominated by the summons to traditional French values. Independence in
the arts was now viewed with deep suspicion. What the journalists and
arts officers wanted instead was applied art. Maurice de Vlaminck,
once a leading member of the Fauves, was foremost in this new line,
branding Picasso (in a malicious article written for "Comoedia"
magazine in 1942) as the pre-eminent modern artist who must bear the
responsibility for the decline of the arts. The old, defamatory
cliches revealingly made their appearance in the piece, particularly
the claim that Picasso was a pernicious foreigner whose un-French
spirit was having a destructive influence on the culture of the great
French nation.
A group that had previously been marginalized, a group whose
anti-modern position had rendered it unimportant for the evolution of
the arts, was now dominant in the official scene in France. As in
Fascist countries, so too in France, political change had brought with it the triumph of reactionaries in the arts. Not that
the Modernists did not defend their position vigorously. Andre Lhote
and Jean Bazaine immediately protested in print against Vlaminck's
article. The major Modernist artists remained visible in gallery
exhibitions (if they were French). Two fronts were defined. On the one
side were the reactionary, nationalist advocates of traditional art,
and those artists who collaborated with the Nazis. They all agreed to
go on a study tour of Germany in 1941, and in 1942 constituted an
honorary
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committee for a large-scale show of work by Nazi sculptor Arno
Breker at the Orangerie des Tuileries. As well as Vlaminck, this group
included Derain, Dunoyer de Segon-zac and Othon Friesz, to name only
the more familiar artists. On the other side were young French
artists, such as Charles Lapicque and Bazaine, who exhibited in a 1941
show of Modernist painting. Like other radical Modernists, such as
Alfred Manessier, Nicolas de Stael and Jean Dubuffet, their endeavours
all tended to the continuation of pure abstraction.
For Picasso there was no room - as a contemporary artist, that is,
rather than a mere cult figure of the Modernist movement. Thus he was
doubly isolated during the war. Furthermore, he personally felt very
deeply affected by the consequences of the occupation. In autumn 1940
he moved entirely to the Rue des Grands-Augustins studio, which was to
be his sole space through the dark years till 1944. After his years of
travels to the Cote d'Azur, or lengthy sojourns at Royan on the
Atlantic coast, he was now compelled to lead an unsatisfying life in
occupied Paris, cut off from an arts scene with any life to it, and
confronted every day with the troubles of wartime, such as the
impossibility of heating in winter. Throughout that difficult time,
Picasso adhered to a policy of non-intervention. He took no sides: he
refrained from direct involvement in the Resistance (in contrast to
his friend Paul Fluard), but also kept a polite
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distance from the Germans. True, his studio was open to German
visitors; but when they came he would give them postcard reproductions
of "Guernica", and on one famous occasion, when a German officer asked
Picasso, "Did you do that?" the artist replied, "No, you did."
Moreover, when he ran out of fuel, he declined to accept special
favours as a non-French national, and observed: "A Spaniard is never
cold."
His work recorded the wartime situation indirectly. The version of
"Still Life with Steer's Skull" (1942) now in Diisseldorf
records the German commandant's order to black out Paris at night. The
gloomy, claustrophobic "L'Aubade" conveys the oppressive mood
of the war years too. The subtly allusive mode of these paintings
reflects a practice common among contemporaries. The younger French
abstract artists, for instance, preferred the French national colours of red and blue for their
non-representational paintings, for expressly political reasons.
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Still Life with Steer's Skull
1942
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L'Aubade
1942
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Though his personal situation was a melancholy one, Picasso's fame
abroad was then growing apace. "Guernica" was of key significance in
the process. In 1938 the painting embarked on its travels, being
exhibited first in London and then in the USA. In America in
particular, Picasso came to be recognised as the foremost modern
artist in those years. In 1937, the newly-founded Museum of Modern Art
in New York bought "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", and in 1940, together
with the Art Institute of Chicago, mounted the major retrospective
"Picasso. 40 Years of his Art", which was seen in no fewer than ten
major American cities. In the eyes of the Americans, the tour
established Picasso as the most important living artist of the
century.
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Portrait of Lee Miller
1937
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