Picassos in the City

Picasso galore! I was extremely excited when I learned about the two art exhibitions in the city which feature paintings by one of my favorite artists - Pablo Picasso. One was SF MoMA's The Steins Collect: MATISSE, PICASSO, AND THE PARISIAN AVANT-GARDE which closed on September 6.  The other one is De Young Museum's Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris and is ending on October 10.  Mijo and I were fortunate to see and enjoy both events.  Secretly, I was even happier because we either got discounted tickets or free general admission to the events.


I just want to share with you these photographs of souvenir postcards of two of my favorite paintings which show Picasso's  variety of styles.

Portrait of Dora Maar 1937. 
Oil on Canvas. 92 x 65 cm. 
Musée National Picasso, Paris. MPI58
Photo (c) RMN

This is my favorite at the De Young Museum. It was hard to snap a photo inside the museum because the security was tight so I thought it was not worth the risk of getting kicked out of the exhibition.
The light was low too so the pictures would probably come out blurry or too dark. So I just took this picture using the  souvenir postcard set from the exhibition. Voila!  One thing I liked about this exhibition is that it is all about Picasso.  The art works shown were from different era starting from his early life in 1901 through his late works in 1973.  The exhibition was also effective in showing the viewers the progression of Picasso's artworks from expressionism to cubism and from neoclassicism to surrealism. He's not only brilliant but truly cutting-edge during his time! The museum gets really crowded on weekends so plan to see the exhibition during the week if you don't like a full house.  The exhibition closes on October 10.

Gertrude Stein, 1905-06

Oil on Canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York , bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946

2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS)

The exhibition at the SFMoMA featured avant-garde paintings collected by the Stein family so it was not particularly just about Picasso. It also featured paintings from the others like Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir, etc. The Stein family was originally from the San Francisco Bay Area but they lived in Paris in the early 1900s. The exhibition showed how the siblings - Leo, Gertrude, Sarah and Michael, were great patrons of modern art during its early stage. This postcard photo of a painting of Gertrude Stein shows another facet of Picasso's talent that I don't always see - something lifelike and not abstract art. It is just unfortunate that Sarah had to sell the paintings to support his grandson's horse racing habit. How I wish the Stein family hadn't gone broke so most of their collections would have remained local. Sigh.


If I get a chance this weekend, I'll post more pictures of the postcard sets I got from the two museums.

 ~rl


P.S.
The other pictures are in More Picassos in the City.