champs elysées | The Worley Gig

Photo By Gail

Located near the Champs–Élysées, the city’s fame tree-lined avenue, Jardin de Paris (1901) was the summer location of the historic dance hall Le Moulin Rouge. A young Pablo Picasso pursued commercial work to sustain a living and produced this design as a speculative bid. The venue’s Catalan manager, Josep Oller, however, did not purchase it. Both the imagery and the style recall that of the iconic Montmartre artist of the 1890s, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose work Picasso emulated. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Pablo Picasso, Jardin de Paris →

Photo By Gail

By 1935, when Marguerite Caetani, Princess Bassiano, commissioned this portrait of her daughter Lelia, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) had grown tired and resentful of the painting commissions that were his only source of income. Depicted in the elegant Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées in Paris, Lelia is unfashionably dressed and appears considerately older than her twenty-two years. Her limbs are elongated and she dwarfs her surroundings, awkwardly towering over the trees and lamp posts, just as Lew Carroll’s Alice would do from time to time. Balthus later called his stylized, unflattering, and even bizarre portraits his “monsters.”

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

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Modern Art Monday Presents: Pablo Picasso, Jardin de Paris

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Modern Art Monday Presents: Balthus’ Lelia Caetani

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