Tag Archives: pablo picasso

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Pablo Picasso, Jardin de Paris

Leave a comment

pablo picasso jardin de paris photo by gail worley
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 →

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Jasper Johns, Montez Singing

Leave a comment

jasper johns montez singing photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

In Montez Singing (1989), the cartoonish eyes and meandering nose from Picasso’s Straw Hat with Blue Leaves (1936), along with a pair of  stylized lips, attach themselves to the edges of the painting, so that it becomes a face peering in on itself.  At the right of the canvas, mitered corners suggest a frame that dissolves on the left, while wispy strokes at the sides might read as hair and the circles below as breasts.

Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Jasper Johns, Montez Singing →

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Celia in Hollywood, May 1984 By David Hockney

Leave a comment

celia in hollywood hockney photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

The British textile and fashion designer Celia Birtwell has been a close friend and confidant of David Hockney‘s since the 1960s. Sharing northern roots and a similar sense of humor, the two found that they had much in common from their first meeting, and together they were at the heart of Bohemian London. Hockney has always been fascinated by the changing nature of Celia’s face and she remains, to this day, one of his favorite models.

Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Celia in Hollywood, May 1984 By David Hockney →

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Woman Dressing Her Hair Pablo Picasso

Leave a comment

Woman Dressing Her Hair Pablo Picasso By Gail Worley
Photo By Gail

Pablo Picasso created this work, Woman Dressing Her Hair (1940) in the months prior to the German occupation of Royan, France, where he fled from Paris as the Nazis advanced across Europe. He depicted a woman inside a boxlike room barley bigger than her body; her massive figure is awkwardly compressed and her contorted body juts this way and that. Transforming a familiar and typically serene subject in art history — a woman grooming herself — into a powerful grotesque, Picasso lent expression to the anxiety and confinement that attended this dark period.

Photographed at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Stuart Davis, Super Table

Leave a comment

Stuart Davis Super Table
Photo By Gail

Although Stuart Davis did not travel to Paris until 1928, he was well versed in avant-garde European art, including the innovative still lifes of of Pablo Picasso. Super Table (1925) experiments with the nature of the genre, toying with issues of illusion and perspective. Davis was also influenced by popular advertisement imagery, and his graphic style evokes the mechanical, cartoon like forms of commercial printing that were the hallmark of American culture

Photographed in The Art Institute Chicago.