A short train ride from the center of Paris, the town of Fontainebleau is a picturesque tourist destination, widely loved for the rich forest that surrounds it and its magnificent, opulent palace. The town’s cemetery holds the remains of the writer Katherine Mansfield, among others, and its palace was contributed to by French monarchs throughout the middle ages, including the Sun King, Louis XIV.
For a few months in the summer of 1921, Pablo Picasso, his first wife, Olga Koklova, and their infant son Paulo, took up residence in Fontainebleau. The family’s time there, the artistic ferment surrounding Picasso at the time and the strange duo of masterpieces that the Spaniard created in his cramped Fontainebleau apartment are the focus of MoMA’s new exhibit, Picasso in Fontainebleau.
As far as we know, the summer of 1921 was Picasso’s first and last visit to Fontainebleau. The experience provided the famous artist with a unique opportunity to step away from the blistering exchange of ideas in Paris and experience the stillness of a creative tabula rasa. The result of this space was two very different works: the relentlessly cubist Three Musicians and the equally neoclassical Three Women at the Spring. Superficially, the works could not be more different, Musicians a jubilant mishmash of polygons presenting a modern street scene, whereas Three Women is a somber, primitive look at three realistically depicted women in classical dress.
The show’s curator, Anne Umland, recalls arriving at the MoMA in the 1990s and being struck by the differences between the paintings. “As a young art historian I just thought, ‘Wow, what was he doing that summer!?’ The fact that he painted such different-looking pictures side by side in the same space within the course of three months undid every notion of art history I’d ever been taught.”
Shaped around these two paintings (which are actually four, as there are two versions of each), MoMA’s show gives audiences ample opportunity to draw their own conclusions, hanging them opposite each other in the show’s main gallery. “The bodies of these three protagonists in Three Women are as volumetric and sculptural as the Three Musicians are flat,” said Umland.
In a much smaller gallery that is roughly equal to the proportions of Picasso’s apartment in Fontainebleau, Umland places representations of all four paintings so that showgoers can get a sense of just how strange it was for the great cubist to be working on these enormous canvasses in such a compressed space. To add to the weirdness of the scene, Picasso himself measured 5ft 4in tall, so these 7ft canvasses towered over him. “In this space that measures 10x19 ft, Picasso is painting, side by side, these gigantic works,” said Umland. “We try to establish some sense of the incredibly compressed and pretty humdrum space he’s working in. It magnifies the ambition of the statements.”
We know from Picasso’s multiple studies for Three Women that he spent a great deal of time thinking about many different ideas for the painting. “We see him working through ‘How many different ways can I pose three women?’” said Umland. In contrast, there are no known studies for Three Musicians, in spite of the painting’s intricate mixture of disjointed shapes (including a fanciful dog that Picasso hides in the background). Another contrast is that Picasso’s women do not engage our gaze, whereas his musicians boldly look right out into us. The subjects in Three Musicians have been identified as associated with the commedia dell’arte – the Pierrot character, the Harlequin and a monk in benedictine garb – whereas Three Women’s inspiration may have come from a trip that Picasso made to Pompeii in 1917. In their way each is also retrospective – Three Women to the classical past, Three Musicians to the cubist era that dominated Picasso’s thought before the first world war.
The year 1921 was an interesting time for Picasso to be working on a big, neoclassical statement, as artistic standards were in flux after the great war. Originally trained as a classical painter, Picasso was deeply conversant with the conventions and methods of the most traditional painting. From that perspective, moving toward the abstraction of cubism was to step away from his classical roots as an artist, yet after the first world war, he and many other artists throughout Europe found themselves stepping back toward classicism. All across the continent there was an artistic retrenchment from the excesses of the prior decade – accordingly, Picasso is widely thought to have inaugurated his neoclassical phase around 1919, as a part of this current. “At this time, the meaning and value of classicism and cubism are being hotly debated,” said Umland.
Part of the value in bringing Three Women and Three Musicians together is that they make palpable the debates that were taking place in 1921 regarding the future of art. But as much as these canvasses come from distinct artistic frameworks and make individual statements, they do share a lot more than might seem apparent at a first glance. “He’s intent on demonstrating at this moment how in his art the avant garde, the academy, cubism, classicism, the present and the past, they’re all a part of the same creative enterprise,” said Umland.
Picasso in Fontainebleau provides a wealth of other artworks that recreate the milieu that Picasso found himself in throughout those months. “I feel like I’ve thrown this amazing party,” said Umland. “Our primary goal was to reunite as many works as we could that were created in Fontainebleau in the summer of 1921. They range from very large drawings on canvas to oil sketches to photographs to a series of pastel heads to teeny tiny photographs taken by Picasso and Olga.” In addition, the show offers both cubist and classicist paintings that were shown in Paris throughout 1921, giving a sense of the cultural conversations that Picasso was taking part in.
Thoughtful and ambitious, Picasso in Fontainebleau is a wonderful take on one of the best-known artists of the 20th century. It also offers a rare opportunity to enter the mind of the genius, one that probably will only be available once. “It gives me goosebumps that all of these pieces are here together,” said Umland, “and they probably won’t ever be again. I find it moving to reassemble works that were once in close proximity, and to see what they have to say to us. The lesson of this show for me is to always look at Picasso’s work relationally – everything relates to one another.”
Picasso in Fontainebleau is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until 17 February
