When Pablo Picasso was 27 he spent the summer in a village in his native Spain, drawing and painting odd angles and curves that looked only a bit like his beautiful French mistress.
They ended up helping inspire the cubism that defined his career.
”When we invented cubism we had no intention whatever of inventing cubism,” he said many years later of the movement that moved far beyond the tradition of art that tried to reflect the world as it appeared to the human eye.
The National Gallery of Art has assembled 60 related sketches, drawings, paintings and sculptures for a show that opens on Wednesday: Picasso: the Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier. It will be on view until January 18.
Jeffrey Weiss, curator of the show, noted that cubism was not Picasso’s own name for the style — that name was popularised by a critic.
”Picasso didn’t name things,” Weiss said.
Trying to create an entirely new kind of painting, Picasso had been experimenting with geometric shapes. The pictures that resulted had less and less resemblance to realistic art though their subject was usually identifiable as a person or object.
That’s not the case with some later abstract artists, who often put nothing at all recognisable into their works.
As an introduction to the show, wall notes explain that mistress Fernande became ”less a subject than a motif” and that Picasso sought more an ”allegorical representation” than a likeness.
Weiss doesn’t see the pictures as an attempt to portray a particular woman, as artists had been doing for centuries. Though a professional model, the ”languorous, auburn-haired” Fernande — as Picasso biographer John Richardson describes her — apparently did not sit for them. In her many letters to Gertrude Stein, the American writer who was Picasso’s patron, she complained that a kidney ailment was so painful that she could hardly sit at all.
She spent much of the time at the village of Horta de Ebro stretched out and reading novels by Charles Dickens. They were sent from Paris by Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s long-time secretary-companion.
Picasso usually put one or more of Fernande’s characteristics into the pictures, such as the deep cleft between her nose and upper lip, or the bun that was her favored hairdo.
Her illness and the cooling of her long romance with Picasso, may be reasons for the figure’s bent head — an old symbol for melancholy — in many of the pictures.
The victim of an abusive husband she was afraid to divorce, Fernande had been living with Picasso since shortly after he settled in Paris. His family in Barcelona, whom they visited before going to the remote village, had thought they would marry and turned against her when they didn’t.
Villagers in the northeastern province of Catalonia were shocked by their unmarried state — this was 1909. One night demonstrators stoned their room at the inn, and Picasso scared them off with revolver shots.
Stein and Toklas promised to visit. Picasso got the pianola fixed in the local bar so they would have something to dance to, but they never came -possibly because of the bloody uprising in Catalonia that summer. Stein later bought two landscapes Picasso also painted in the village.
Three years after that Fernande and Picasso broke up, both having taken new lovers. Another of his mistresses later said that he had two successive ways of dealing with a woman: the first was to put her on a pedestal and the second was to use her as a doormat.
More than 40 years later Fernande was in her 70s and almost penniless. Picasso’s biographer says the wealthy artist gave her a million ”old francs” — then about $2 400 — with the understanding that she not publish a second volume of her memoirs, at least while he was alive.
Picasso died at 91, in 1973. – Sapa-AP