UK Edition
Picasso exhibition: Tate Modern planning 'blockbuster' in 2018
It is a painting with a colourful history - a portrait of Pablo Picasso’s mistress, sold for a record £102 million, but only after a Las Vegas hotel mogul accidentally put his elbow through it.
Next year fans will be able to view Le Rêve (The Dream) up close as it will go on display in Britain for the first time as part of a blockbuster Picasso exhibition at Tate Modern in London.
Set to draw in thousands of people a day, it will display work from a time when Picasso, who is widely acknowledged to be the most important artist of the 20th Century, was at the height of his powers.
The show, which Tate describes as one of the most significant in its history, will focus on the work produced in a single year: 1932. It will feature more than 100 “outstanding” paintings, sculptures and drawings.
The subject of Le Rêve was Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s young mistress. In 1932, the artist was involved in what Tate describes as a “delicate balance” between tending to his wife, Olga, and their 11-year-old son, Paulo, and conducting a passionate affair with a woman 28 years his junior.
It was previously owned by Steve Wynn, the billionaire hotel owner. In 2006, he put his elbow through the canvas while showing it off to friends. It was repaired - the damage is said to be invisible to the naked eye - and bought by Steve A Cohen, a hedge fund manager, for an artist’s record of $155 million (then £102 mlilion) in 2006.
Other highlights of the show include Jeune fille devant un miroir (Girl before a Mirror), a painting on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 - Love, Fame, Tragedy will open in March 2018.
It will take visitors month-by-month through 1932, the year Picasso turned 50. Tate said: “It was an extraordinary year for Picasso, even by his own standards. His paintings reached a new level of sensuality and he cemented his celebrity status as the most influential artist of the early 20th century.
“Over the course of this year he created some of his best loved works, from confident colour-saturated portraits to surrealist drawings.”
Before the year had ended, Marie-Thérèse fell ill after swimming in the River Marne, losing most of her hair. Picasso turned her ordeal into a series of dramatic works.
Archim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions, Tate Modern and co-curator of the exhibition said: “Picasso famously described painting as ‘just another form of keeping a diary’. This exhibition will invite you to get close to the artist, to his ways of thinking and working, and to the tribulations of his personal life at a pivotal moment in his career.
“By showing stellar loans from public and private collections in the order in which they were made, this exhibition will allow a new generation to discover Picasso’s explosive energy, while surprising those who think they already know the artist.’
Tickets for the Exhibition, titled Picasso 1932 - Love, Fame, Tragedy, are not expected to become available until early 2018. It will run from March 8 to September 9, 2018 at Tate Modern in the Eyal Ofer Galleries.