The Picasso Show at the De Young Museum

We went early to the De Young to see the Paris Musee Picasso show. There was only one blue-period painting (the woman with a cataract) and one rose-period one (a naked boy carrying his younger brother on his shoulders). There were many bronze sculptures and renderings of Dora Maar (usually with a very aquiline nose, but sometimes without a nose). We liked an etching (if I remember the medium correctly) of an owl, though it looked like an owl/hawk hybrid. My favorite was a large painting of the studio at la Californie, painted in 1956 in memoriam of Matisse. Picasso considered Matisse the great colorist and also included what look like cutouts.

The show did not go back as far as the Barcelona Picasso Museum does, but had a lot from the middle and the 1960s and 70s (I remember the Barcelona collection having ceramics and a lot of 50s paintings). Having seen two big Picasso shows at NY MOMA, some smaller specialized ones, the Barcelona museum, and many paintings in museums, I did not feel any revelations from the show. Perhaps I had not previously noticed how bulky and butch many of the women he painted are (rivaling Michelangelo's sibyls). Marrying often is not, IMO, an indication of liking women. Perhaps mutilating their images was a defense against the fear of Woman? Here must be a whole feminist literature on this with which I am unfamiliar --

What I liked best were what looked most like Matisses (a 1905 painting that looked like a set of African masks, one of palm trees in the last room and the studio at la Californie nearby, plus the very first work in the show, a profile of a horizontal dead man and a large candle'"I guess this looked more like a Van Gogh than a Matisse).

As an overview of the styles of representations of figures (human and animal) or an introduction, I could recommend the show. The crowds (at least on a weekday morning arriving to help open the museum -- ) are less than at the two Muse d'Orsay shows last year, but sufficient to get in my way.

I enjoyed the archival photographs (some by, mostly of Picasso) from the Muse Picasso that are hung outside the exhibit (between the exhibit area gift shop and the bookstore and restrooms on the same level).

Links:

De Young Museum www.associatedcontent.com/article/353394/visit_san_franciscos_de_young_museum.html?cat=16

Picasso show

http://deyoung.famsf.org/deyoung/exhibitions/picasso-masterpieces-mus-e-national-picasso-paris

Studio at la Californie

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso153.html