Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario will showcase works by Pablo Picasso dating back to early years of 20th century from 6th October to 16th January 2000. The show, titled Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, will be “super intellectual,” says the museum’s director and CEO, Stephan Jost.
The exhibition was originally scheduled to open last summer but was delayed due to Covid-19 restrictions. It will feature paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Picasso as well those by artists who inspired him, including El Greco and Daumier, with more than 100 in all on view.
The show is curated by the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Modern art curator Kenneth Brummel, who has been work on the exhibition for the past seven years, with help from Susan Behrends Frank of The Phillips Collection. This marks the first major collaboration between the AGO and the Washington, DC, museum, where it travels to after its Toronto run.
The show focuses on a trio of paintings by Picasso—Crouching Beggarwoman, The Soup and The Blue Room. The first two came from the personal collection of AGO and the third one as a loan from The Phillips. Both the AGO’s pieces were done in Barcelona, while The Blue Room was painted in Paris and was also one of the first works by the artist to be acquired by an American museum.
Cutting-edge technology, and art historical research, revealed lost works underneath the three pieces, even an underlying landscape in the Beggarwoman. Picasso was ever adaptable (although it would be decades before he turned a bicycle seat and handlebars into a bull) and there are even hints of the earlier work in the final painting. It was not unusual for struggling artists to re-use canvasses and, as Brummel pointedly puts it: “Picasso was short of supplies and funds.”