Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change @ The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia & Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change
The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
February 21 - May 9, 2016
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
June - ..., 2016

The Barnes Foundation, in partnership with the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, premieres Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change. On view February 21 through May 9, 2016 at the Barnes, the exhibition will then travel to the Columbus Museum of Art in June. Curated by Simonetta Fraquelli, an independent curator and specialist in early twentieth-century European art, the exhibition explores Pablo Picasso’s work between 1912 and 1924, highlighting the tumultuous years of the First World War, when the artist began to alternate between cubist and classical modes in his art.

Inspired by the Columbus Museum of Art’s Picasso Still Life with Compote and Glass, 1914-15 and the Barnes’s extensive Picasso holdings, Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change features some 50 works by Picasso drawn from major American and European museums and private collections. The show includes oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and four costumes the artist designed for the avant-garde ballet, Parade, in 1917. Some 15 other important canvases by Picasso’s contemporaries—including Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, and Diego Rivera—will also be presented.

“A radical shift occurred in Picasso’s work in 1914,” notes curator Simonetta Fraquelli. “Following seven years of refining the visual language of cubism, he began to introduce elements of naturalism to his work.” This change in his production can be viewed against the backdrop of an unsteady cultural climate in Paris during the First World War. Many people identified the fragmented forms of cubism with the German enemy and therefore perceived it as unpatriotic. This negative impression reverberated throughout Paris during the First World War and may have been a factor in Picasso’s shift in styles. However, Fraquelli states, “What becomes evident when looking at Picasso’s work between 1914 and 1924, is that his two artistic styles—Cubism and Neoclassicism—are not antithetical; on the contrary, each informs the other, to the degree that the metamorphosis from one style to the other is so natural for the artist that occasionally they occur in the same works of art.”

Included in the exhibition will be major works from the Picasso museums in Barcelona, Málaga, and Paris, including, respectively: Woman with a Mantilla (Fatma), oil and charcoal on canvas, 1917; Olga Kholklova with a Mantilla, oil on canvas, 1917; and Femme Assise, oil on canvas, 1920. 

The exhibition also features four costumes that Picasso designed for the avant-garde ballet, Parade, which premiered in Paris in 1917. These are: Costume for Chinese Conjurer (original), and reproductions of The American Manager, The French Manager, and The Horse. Performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with music by Erik Satie, story by Jean Cocteau and the choreography of Léonide Massine, Parade was the first cross-disciplinary collaboration of its kind. The ballet, which tells the story of an itinerant theater group performing a sideshow, or a parade, was viewed as a revolutionary approach to theater. Picasso was the first avant-garde artist involved in such a production – not only designing the costumes, but also the theater curtain and set. Included in the exhibition will be a watercolor and graphite sketch of the curtain design, and a pencil sketch of the Costume for Chinese Conjurer. Picasso drew inspiration for his designs from the modern world – everything from circuses and carousels, to music halls and the cinema. With Picasso’s inventive, geometric costumes and naturalistic curtain design, Parade can be seen as the ultimate fusion of cubist and classical forms.

Picasso’s juxtaposition of figurative and cubist techniques can be seen as an expression of artistic freedom during a time of great conflict, and his shifts in style became a means of not repeating, in his words, “the same vision, the same technique, the same formula.” The works by Picasso’s contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera’s Still Life with Bread Knife from 1915 and Henri Matisse’s Lorette in a Red Jacket from 1917, offer further insight into the shifting cultural climate in France during this transformative period.

Managing Curator for Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change at the Barnes Foundation is Martha Lucy. Managing Curator at the Columbus Museum of Art is Chief Curator, David Stark.

THE BARNES FOUNDATION
www.barnesfoundation.org

Early Modern Japanese Prints, Toledo Museum of Art - Fresh Impressions

Fresh Impressions: Early Modern Japanese Prints
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
Through January 1, 2014

Fresh Impressions: Early Modern Japanese Prints

Toledo Museum of Art

In 1930 the Toledo Museum of Art played a critical role in popularizing modern Japanese woodblock prints in North America by organizing the largest exhibition ever devoted to the movement and producing an authoritative catalog to accompany it on its nationwide tour of 10 museums. Installed in four special exhibition galleries with works that spanned a decade, the landmark 1930 show presented 343 prints by 10 leading artists of the shin hanga (“new prints”) movement. 

Fresh Impressions: Early Modern Japanese Prints reassembles and revisits that historic exhibition. The Museum has also produced a major catalog in conjunction with the show that for the first time reproduces all 343 prints together in full color. The exhibition is organized by the Museum’s chief curator and curator of Asian art, Carolyn Putney. 

Hashiguchi Goyo (Japanese, 1880–1921)

Woman Combing Her Hair (Kami sukeru onna), March 1920. 

Color woodblock print. 

Toledo Museum of Art. Museum Purchase, 1930.109 

“The Toledo Museum of Art’s momentous 1930 exhibition is considered a touchstone of the early-twentieth-century Japanese shin hanga movement, which revived the traditional woodblock print for the modern era,” said Museum Director Brian Kennedy. “I am delighted that a new generation of Museum visitors can experience this rare opportunity to view these incredibly vibrant and compelling images for themselves.” 

Natori Shunsen (Japanese, 1886–1960) 

Actor Jitsukawa Yenjaku as Danshichi, 1926. 

Color woodblock print. 

Toledo Museum of Art. Gift of Hubert D. Bennett, 1939.225

The shin hanga movement began in Japan around 1915 and is noted for combining traditional Japanese woodblock technique with an interest in Western aesthetics and a vivid, modern color sensibility. The new exhibition underlines the importance of the early 20th-century resurgence of Japanese woodblock printmaking, which has been described as “a period of Renaissance” in the field. The prints encompass a variety of subject matter, including traditional landscapes, seascapes, rivers and lakes, beautiful women (bijinga), actors (yakusha-e), the natural world and wildlife, cities and towns and temples, as well as Western-inspired still life and genre scenes. 

Kawase Hasui (Japanese, 1883–1957) 

Zojoji in Snow (Shiba Zojoji), 1925. 

Color woodblock print. 

Toledo Museum of Art. Gift of Hubert D. Bennett, 1939.165

The 10 artists in the exhibition are Hashiguchi Goyō (1880–1921), Itō Shinsui (1898–1972), Kawase Hasui (1883–1957), Miki Suizan (1887–1957), Natori Shunsen (1886–1960), Oda Kazuma (1882–1956), Ohara Shōson, also known as Ohara Kōson (1877–1945), Yamamura Toyonari, also known as Yamamura Kōka (1885–1942), Hiroshi Yoshida (1876–1950) and Yoshikawa Kanpō (1894–1979). 

All but five of the 343 prints are now in the Museum’s collection. Most of these were purchased around the time of the original show and donated to the Museum in 1939 by local businessman and print collector Hubert D. Bennett. (The Museum is borrowing the additional five prints.) The Toledo Museum of Art’s collection of shin hanga is considered to be one of the finest in any museum in the country. The prints have only rarely been out of storage since the 1930s and as a result are in pristine condition. 

In addition to the 343 woodblock prints, the exhibition will present companion objects depicted in the prints—such as kimonos, netsuke and samurai swords and armor—not included in the original 1930 show. A companion exhibition, Ebb and Flow: Cross-Cultural Prints, in the Works on Paper Gallery, covers the period from the 1930s to the present and explores the global influence of these modern Japanese printmakers. 

Hiroshi Yoshida (Japanese, 1876-1950), 

Sailing Boats, Afternoon (Hansen, Gogo), from the Inland Sea Series (Seto-Naikai Shu), 1926. 

Color woodblock print. 

Toledo Museum of Art. Gift of Hubert D. Bennett, 1939.335

Shin hanga was introduced to the American public in the 1920s through several smaller exhibitions organized to benefit artists affected by the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. But it was not until the Toledo Museum of Art’s 1930 show, A Special Exhibition of Modern Japanese Prints—co-organized by Toledo curators J. Arthur MacLean (1879–1964) and Dorothy L. Blair (1890–1989), in collaboration with shin hanga artist Hiroshi Yoshida—that the movement’s scope was fully grasped and examined. The original catalog, which was fully illustrated in black-and-white and featured artist biographies, signatures and seals, became an invaluable resource on the work of modern Japanese printmakers for scholars and enthusiasts; it was reprinted and sold out twice.

Ohara Shoson (Japanese, 1878–1945) 

Camelia and Rice Birds (Tsubaki ni Shiro Buncho), 1929. 

Color woodblock print.

Toledo Museum of Art. Gift of Hubert D. Bennett, 1939.271

Blair, the subject of Putney’s essay in the new catalog, was a pioneering authority on Asian art and culture in a field dominated by men. In 1927 she spent a year studying in Japan at Kyoto Imperial University—the first woman and first foreigner accorded that privileged status. She became assistant curator at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1928, after stints at several other noted museums, including the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

The 352-page catalog accompanying Fresh Impressions, with essays by Putney, scholars Kendall H. Brown and Koyama Shukō and artist Paul Binnie, was published with the assistance of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. 

TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART 

2445 Monroe Street at Scottwood Avenue, Toledo, Ohio 43620
www.toledomuseum.org