cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744
DURHAM -- This weekend marks the last time for visitors to view "Picasso and the Allure of Language," an exhibit that explores Pablo Picasso's relationship with Gertrude Stein, Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and other writers whose work influenced his visual art.
To accommodate visitors, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University will have extended hours beginning today. The museum will be open today until 9 p.m., and New Year's Day until 5 p.m. The museum will be open until midnight Saturday and Sunday.
The exhibit first went on view this year at the Yale University Art Gallery, before it opened at the Nasher Museum in August. After Monday, the exhibit comes down.
The exhibit has had "tremendous response," said Wendy Hower Livingston, director of marketing for the museum. "The show requires visitors to come in and really look closely," she said. "People are willing to look close and really absorb his work."
While ticket sales have been brisk, visitors should feel confident buying a ticket at the door this weekend, Hower Livingston said. The museum was able to accommodate the crowds for "El Greco to Velasquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III" in 2008.
When the exhibit opened in August, Kimerly Rorschach, director of the Nasher, said it "breaks new scholarly ground in exploring Picasso's relationship with writers." Susan Greenberg Fisher, a curator at the Yale gallery and curator of the exhibit, said the germ for the exhibit came when she was looking through the Yale archives of Gertrude Stein papers, and realized that no one had produced an exhibit that focused on Picasso's relationship with writers. Fisher said she wanted viewers to understand "how language reshaped his imagination."
The exhibit has 60 works Picasso did between 1900 and 1969, focusing on Picasso's life after he left his native Spain and moved to the Montmartre section of Paris in 1904.
The Stein-Picasso relationship is an important one. Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were Picasso's principal patrons from 1905 until 1914. This exhibit contains Picasso's "Dice, Packet of Cigarettes, and Visiting-Card" (1914), which expresses the lifelong and sometimes stormy friendship between Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Stein and companion Alice B. Toklas once went to visit Picasso, who was not at his home. They left a calling card, which Picasso then used in the work, which includes a cigarette wrapper and other items that were part of the life Stein and Toklas led.
This exhibit also has a display of other Stein-related items, and an audio loop of Stein reading a 1923 poem she wrote for Picasso, titled "If I Told Him."
Among the other writers with whom Picasso collaborated was poet Pierre Reverdy, who in 1948 published a book of poems titled "Le chant des morts (The song of the dead)," a response to the horrors of World War II. Picasso painted a series of lithographs for the book. At this exhibit, the entire book, unbound, is in a display case. Some of the pages were pulled for display, and six panels are mounted on the wall. Visitors also may scroll through a digital slide show reproduction of every page of this poem.
Picasso himself wrote poems and plays, and this exhibit has numerous examples on view. Among them are a 1968 translation of his poem "Hunk of Skin," and a copy of a 1935 Paris journal titled "Cahiers d'art," containing some of his earliest poems.
