Picasso’s grandson releases hundreds of previously unpublished photos

PanARMENIAN.Net - Hundreds of previously unpublished photographs and some home movies of family and friends are to give a new insight into the life and loves of Pablo Picasso, the Guardian reports.

The extraordinary personal archive has been released for the first time by Picasso’s grandson, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, to Sir John Richardson, the British art historian and one of the world’s foremost experts on the artist and his work.

Richardson, 90, who was a friend of the artist, told the Observer: “It is a mass of hundreds and hundreds of photographs which have never been seen. They’re a revelation. They are of all periods – fascinating when you compare them to certain paintings or events in his life. It opens up his life. It makes it 3D. Absolutely astonishing.”

The archive includes a personal photograph album and images from which the artist derived ideas. Through photography, he was recording aspects of sculptures in development, trying out ideas and documenting their creation.

Apart from images such as Picasso playing with his dogs, there are countless portraits of the women in his life, including his first wife, Olga, and his celebrated mistress, Dora Maar. “He constantly took photos of them,” Richardson said. “Sometimes there’s a direct resemblance. Sometimes you can see that he’s looking around for the way he wants to paint her.”

The home movies include footage of Olga plucking a daisy’s petals, mouthing the words, “he loves me, he loves me not …”

“That’s absolutely unseen,” Richardson said. “That belongs to the family. I was rather determined to get that. You can feel from the portraits most of all whether he was passionately in love or whether he was completely turned off by them.”

There are numerous stories of Olga, whose life story Richardson describes as “sad”. “Picasso fell madly in love with her when she was a Diaghilev dancer. She turned out to be rather neurotic. It ended badly. She didn’t exactly go crazy, but she became a very wounded woman.”

Some of the most romantic images include pictures of Picasso’s courtship of Olga in Spain and Italy – “he was very proud of her, she was very beautiful”, Richardson said. They contrast dramatically with later photographs. In one she appears in the foreground dressed impeccably. In the background, not by chance, the studio door is open, revealing a bust of Picasso’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. “Poor Olga is looking tired but elegant,” said Richardson.

Richardson is the author of an acclaimed three-volume biography, A Life of Picasso, and is now working on the fourth. Appointed Slade professor of art at Oxford in 1995 and knighted in 2012, he was awarded France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011.

He describes the photographs as “a revelation”. They show the relationship “between the subject and the artist, between the model and the image on the canvas,” he said.

Richardson has selected some of the photographs – alongside paintings, drawings and sculptures from public and private collections – for a major exhibition, Picasso and the Camera, showing at the Gagosian Gallery in New York until Jan 3. The exhibition explores how Picasso used photography not only as a source of inspiration, but as an integral part of his studio practice.

Asked why the photographs have not been released until almost 40 years after Picasso’s death, Richardson said: “I am very close to Bernard, the one legitimate grandson. Bernard’s passionate about photography. It was really as a result of conversations with him. He told me he had literally hundreds of unpublished photographs and that he would make them available.”