ART: Picasso – Between Wine and Ballerinas

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jorge Pina

ROME, Apr 14 1998 (IPS) - Pablo Picasso, acknowledged as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, first came to Italy in 1917, when he visited Rome, Naples, Pompeii and Florence, and was impressed by the country’s women, good food and, curiously, carnival masks.

These passions of Picasso are recalled in a new exhibition in the Grassi Palace of Venice, where a giant painting of 17 by 11 meters, the most outstanding product of the Spanish painter’s first visit to Italy, welcomes visitors. The painting was prepared for the ballet “Parade,” created by Russian Sergei Diaguilev, which was presented in Rome at that time.

Diaguilev contracted Picasso to prepare the set design and to design the dressing rooms of the Russian company’s 60 ballerinas. Among them was Olga Koklova, the 25 year old daughter of a colonel of the Russian Imperial Army – whom Picasso married one year later.

One of the paintings in the Venice exhibit is the “Portrait of Olga” who, according to the critics of the era, was a mediocre ballerina whose beauty, intelligence and ambition were also mediocre. But for Picasso, who had known all kinds of women, Koklova must have seemed very “exotic,” according to one of the his biographers, Arianna Huffington.

The ballerina had, in effect, an aura of mystery surrounding her: the mystery of her country, distant and unknown to Picasso who had always loved Russia. With the triumph of the revolution in 1917, the painter’s fascination with Russia grew.

Picasso, born in Malaga in southern Spain on October 25 1881, came from Italian ancestry. His mother, Maria Picasso, was from Sori, a small town near Genoa. He was was 35 when he first visited Italy, which is commemorated in the current exhibition at the Grassi Palace “Picasso 1917-1924, The Visit to Italy” – which is on display until June 28.

The exhibit includes more than 300 works, including paintings, drawings, photographs and documents that express what Italy meant to Picasso on that first visit which bergan in Paris, while World War I was still underway.

On February 17, 1917, he took the train at La Gare du Lyon to Rome. He traveled with poet Jean Cocteau, who convinced him to make the trip.

It was not easy for Cocteau to overcome Picasso’s natural tendency not to travel much, said Jean Clair, director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, who organized the Venetian exhibit.

Picasso, who spoke only Spanish, was easily understood by the Italians. He visited the Vatican museums, where was impressed less by the “tormented lines” of Michelangelo than by those of Rafael, which he says “bring me serenity because they are so pure and assured.”

Another of the works of Picasso’s Italian period is the “Harlequin with Guitar,” a mask of ancient Italian theater.

The encounter with Italy’s traditional carnival masks was highly inspirational for the Spanish genius. Another of his works, “Project for a suit for Polichinela,” used as its model a burlesque character of Neapolitan theater. Picasso loved Naples, and appreciated the joy of its people and beauty of its bay.

Numerous studies indicate that the Harlequin as well as the Polichinela hide Picasso himself, as it they were self-portraits. “Two Women Running on the Beach,” painted in 1922, in another of his works being exhibited in Venice.

The painter visited the ruins of Pompeii, the city which in the year 79 was buried by the lava of the Vesuvius volcano. He was attracted by the erotic figures there, Cocteau said in a letter to his mother.

Picasso finished his first visit to Italy in April 1917. He returned in 1949 for political reasons, to assist a congress of the Partisans of Peace in Rome.

The Venice exhibit covers the period 1917-1924, the happiest of Picasso’s works, linked to music, dance and the light of the Mediterranean, filled with the classic lightness and grandiosity, with sources in the ancient frescos and in Rafael.

He said then that he loved Italian food and wine, according to one of the exhibit’s document.

Picasso, in the opinion of Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi “the most famous artist of all time”, died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France, at the age of 91.