The Pace Gallery in New York is presenting Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style, featuring nearly 140 works by Pablo Picasso created in the last two decades of his life while living with his muse, and later, wife, Jacqueline Roque. With many works from the Picasso family and Jacqueline Roque’s estate on view to the public for the first time, plus loans from private collections and major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this exhibition is the first to examine Picasso’s late transformation in style, as seen exclusively through the portraits of Jacqueline, his last and perhaps greatest love. Picasso & Jacqueline features painting, sculpture, works on paper, and ceramics, all depicting Jacqueline in a myriad of ways—from odalisque to bride—that would immortalize her arresting beauty.
Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style is presented at two Pace locations, the gallery in Midtown (32 E. 57th Street) and in Chelsea (534 West 25th Street) and will be on view only until January 10, 2015. The exhibition begins in 1954 when the 73-year old Picasso started living with the 27-year old Jacqueline. That year also marked the death of Matisse, an early rival and later friend of Picasso, who had been the only living artist that Picasso considered his equal. In an unprecedented burst of creativity, Picasso put forth scores of paintings and drawings that showed odalisques as Matisse often did in his own art. This would begin a tremendously prolific period in which Picasso created a wide range of works spanning multiple mediums in an homage to Matisse following his death. It was also during this period he began to cast Jacqueline in his reworkings of French and Spanish masters like Velázquez, Delacroix, and Manet.
Pablo Picasso (b. 1881, Spain) was perhaps the most influential artist of the 20th century. Though Spanish, Picasso worked mainly in France, and his first mature phase in Paris was his Blue Period, followed by the Rose period. With “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,” he pioneered the style cubism without which modern and contemporary art would be radically different. Another of his most enduring images, the iconic “Guernica,” immortalizes the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. With analytic cubism, synthetic cubism, surrealism, and the incorporation of “primitive” imagery, Picasso and his contemporaries Braque and Duchamp challenged the trajectory of the arts and rebuilt the context in which future generations of artists practiced.
Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries. Founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960 and led by Marc Glimcher, Pace has been a constant, vital force in the art world and has introduced many renowned artists’ work to the public for the first time. Over the past five decades, the gallery has mounted more than 700 exhibitions, including scholarly shows that have subsequently traveled to museums, and has published nearly 400 exhibition catalogues. Today, Pace has ten locations worldwide: four galleries in New York, two in London, a 25,000 square-foot gallery in Beijing, and recently opened exhibition spaces in Hong Kong and in Menlo Park, California.