By Rudy Chiappini
The exhibition is first and foremost a tribute to Jacqueline Roque, the artist's second wife and muse of the last twenty years of his activity, who accompanied him until his death in 1973 in Provence. Man of a thousand faces and many contradictions Picasso is the artist who best knew how to embody the tumultuous spirit of the twentieth century. A volcanic creativity, unfolded for the entire course of an extraordinary existence, an irrepressible sensuality, which impregnated both his work and his private life, and the courage to take sides in front of the dramatic events of his time he is a timeless myth of modern art.
In its path it is all a succession of epochal turning points, linguistic and emotional overturns. The women he loved were the source of surprising stylistic metamorphoses. For much of the criticism, the relationship between the creative dimension and the sphere of eros represents the hallmark of his poetics, the secret of his unstoppable expressive vitality.
During his very intense life Picasso has created a reputation as a lover of love and a lover of women, indeed, according to the evil ones, a reputation as a man full of lovers. Certainly his talent was difficult to contain, and he needed to have one or more muses to devote himself to. From Fernande Olivier to Marcelle Humbert, from Olga Koklova to Marie-Thérèse Walter, from Dora Maar to Françoise Gillot, the painter has portrayed every woman in his life countless times, creating the spectacular works that we admire today.
The Martigny exhibition intends to testify to what extent the extreme creativity of the Spanish master was marked by the presence of Jacqueline. When they met in 1952, she was 26 and he was 70. With her the painter continued to work a lot: model and reference point until his death was probably the woman the artist portrayed most of all.
Jacqueline's presence and her youth accelerate Picasso's creative pace. Jacqueline aux fleurs (1954) stands out among the most significant works exhibited at the Fondation Gianadda. The woman is depicted with her hieratic profile, standing on an interminable neck. In the canvas the artist experiences the intertwining of stylistic, graphic and pictorial motifs. The young woman's physiognomy is rendered with a very stylized stroke, which accentuates the rigidity and elegance of her bearing.
In other paintings such as Jacqueline aux jambes repliées (1954), the companion even becomes the emblem of classical beauty. His figure permeates Picasso's work with all of itself. The portraits that the artist dedicates to her go beyond the very notion of similarity to tend towards a sort of metaphorical poetics of her personality.
For the artist, the meeting with Jacqueline represents the beginning of a new life and an unprecedented pictorial impulse that develops in different places. First in the villa La Californie in Cannes, where he will create some of his latest masterpieces and where his gaze seems ready at any moment to set out towards new pictorial discoveries in the most remote corners of the imagination.
In the elegant mansion on the Côte d'Azur Picasso, the painter of modernity par excellence, revisits the masters of the past with curiosity. He reflects on Delacroix's Les Femmes d'Alger, interprets Vélasquez's Las Meninas in his own way, picks up David's L'enlèvement des Sabines, confronts Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. The artist once again feels the need to return to themes and modules of the past, to establish his dominion over tradition. The deconstruction of the compositional system takes place in a radical way: Picasso moves and inverts the characters as he likes, adds new figures and eliminates some fundamental details: the goal is to affirm his superior ability and above all the relevance of his painting.
Later the artist at the end of the fifties bought the castle of Vauvernargues, at the foot of the Sainte-Victoire mountain so dear to Cézanne, near Aix-en-Provence and finally moved to the buen retiro of Mougin where he regained possession of the theme of the painter and the model: it focuses on the archetypal figures of the woman, the couple and the man-painter who faces the last season of life. He creates paintings, engravings, ceramics of great expressive power characterized by the continuous research and questioning of the results achieved, by a constant and growing success, by an inexhaustible creative force. Picasso's production in recent years has the character of an extraordinary synthesis in the awareness of the absolute value achieved, it does not reduce the work of a whole life to an easily identifiable common denominator, it is not a testament. Rather, it represents a continually rediscovered struggle with himself in pursuit of new expressive boundaries. «The freedom to paint - said Picasso - is the freedom to free something of oneself. It is necessary to hurry, as this does not last ».
