Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy

Tate Modern
8 March – 9 September 2018

In March 2018 Tate Modern will stage its first ever solo exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work, one of the most significant shows the gallery has ever staged. The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy will take visitors on a month-by-month journey through 1932, a time so pivotal in Picasso’s life and work that it has been called his ‘year of wonders’. More than 100 outstanding paintings, sculptures and works on paper will demonstrate his prolific and restlessly inventive character. They will strip away common myths to reveal the man and the artist in his full complexity and richness.

1932 was an extraordinary year for Picasso, even by his own standards. His paintings reached a new level of sensuality and he cemented his celebrity status as the most influential artist of the early 20th century. Over the course of this year he created some of his best loved works, including

Pablo Picasso
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1299 x 972 mm
Tate. Purchased 1953
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, an anchor point of Tate’s collection, confident colour-saturated portraits and Surrealist experiments, including thirteen seminal ink drawings of the Crucifixion. His virtuoso paintings also riffed on the voluptuous sculptures he had produced some months before at his new country estate.

In his personal life, throughout 1932, Picasso kept a delicate balance between tending to his wife Olga Khokhlova and their 11-year-old son Paulo, and his passionate love affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, 28 years his junior. The exhibition will bring these complex artistic and personal dynamics to life with an unprecedented range of loans from collections around the world, including many record-breaking works held in private hands.

Highlights will include  

Pablo Picasso
Girl before a Mirror (Jeune fille devant un miroir)
1932
Oil paint on canvas
1623 x 1302 mm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim 1937
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

Girl before a Mirror, a signature painting that rarely leaves The Museum of Modern Art,

Pablo Picasso The Dream (Le Rêve) 1932. Private collection © Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2017

and the legendary The Dream, a virtuoso masterpiece depicting the artist’s muse in dreamy abandon, which has never been exhibited in the UK before.

1932 was a time of invention and reflection. Having recently turned 50, in collaboration with Christian Zervos, Picasso embarked on the first volume of what remains the most ambitious catalogue of an artist’s work ever made, listing more than 16,000 paintings and drawings. Meanwhile, a group of Paris dealers beat international competition to stage the first ever retrospective of his work, a major show that featured new paintings alongside earlier works in a range of different styles.

Realist portraits of Olga and Paulo revealed Picasso’s feelings of pride and tenderness for his family, while his sexually charged new paintings unveiled for the first time the presence of the secret woman in his life. This included the iconic trio of Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, Nude in a Black Armchair and The Mirror, widely regarded as a pinacle of Picasso’s artistic achievement of the inter-war period. This dazzling series will be reunited at Tate Modern for the first time in 85 years.

Picasso’s journeys between his homes in Boisgeloup and Paris capture the contradictions of his existence at this pivotal moment: a life divided between countryside retreat and urban bustle, established wife and recent lover, painting and sculpture, sensuality and darkness. The year ended traumatically when Marie-Thérèse fell seriously ill after swimming in the river Marne, losing most of her iconic blonde hair. In his final works of the year, Picasso transformed the event into scenes of rescue and rape, a dramatic finale to a year of love, fame and tragedy that pushed Picasso to the height of his creative powers.

Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern and co-curator of the exhibition said: ‘Picasso famously described painting as “just another form of keeping a diary”. This exhibition will invite you to get close to the artist, to his ways of thinking and working, and to the tribulations of his personal life at a pivotal moment in his career. By showing stellar loans from public and private collections in the order in which they were made, this exhibition will allow a new generation to discover Picasso’s explosive energy, while surprising those who think they already know the artist.’

The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy will be open from 8 March to 9 September 2018 at Tate Modern in the Eyal Ofer Galleries. It will be curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern and Nancy Ireson, Curator, International Art, with Juliette Rizzi and Laura Bruni, Assistant Curators. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Musée National-Picasso, Paris, where it will be curated by Laurence Madeline from 10 October 2017 to 11 February 2018.