Pablo Picasso

 

On March 14 1932, Picasso signed Girl before a mirror. The painting was part of a series of artworks inspired by his then secret lover Marie Therese Walter. Later that year he told in an interview that “the body of work one creates is a form of diary” and that he preferred this painting to any of the others he had completed that spring. His comment is therefore coded declaring that the girl in the painting is his favorite.

Marie Therese signing without her full name (she was born in 1909), also writes a secret message : the purple circle refers to her, since Picasso often painted her with round lavender shapes, and the red diamond represents Picasso as he painted himself as an Harlequin.

 

The painting will be exhibited during his retrospective at Georges Petit gallery in Paris, opening on June 15, a year day by day after Matisse’s retrospective at the same gallery. If the critics had been tepid about Matisse’s show, they were harsh about Picasso’s. One of them Louis Mouillleseaux wrote “it is a sort of very bad sub matisse, very bad, false… monumental vulgarity”.

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Jean Michel Basquiat​

 

La Colomba was painted by Jean Michel Basquiat in the spring of 1983. This painting shows two different views of a head meeting at the center and it is believed that Basquiat wanted to express the duality in human beings.

Since Basquiat admired Picasso’s work, this artwork resonates with Girl Before a Mirror (1932) and the title La Colomba (meaning Dove in Italian) can be seen as a direct referral to Picasso.

In this POST, dated on April 6, on the 10th anniversary of Picasso’s death, Basquiat’s comment is based on his quote “influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.”

The comment of Andy Warhol is based on an interview in 1980, of him and Paloma Picasso. He said “Somebody called me up and asked me what I thought of Picasso and I said I never think about Picasso, I just think about Paloma”. They were very good friends hence the #BFF and the dove emoji since Paloma means Dove in Spanish.

Roy Lichtenstein declared that “Everyone is influenced by (Matisse) to a certain extent. It’s an influence that everybody also tries to get rid of. I think the same is true of Picasso”.

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Sources: Matisse Picasso, Jack Flam

Picasso Girl before a Mirror, Anne Umland

Sources: Basquiat, Marc Mayer, 2005   I  Basquiat-isms by Jean-Michel Basquiat, edited by Larry Warsh, 2019  I   Interview Magazine, 1980 

Conversation on Matisse, Art in America July August 1975