A photographic expression of the experience

Here he is, in front of his 1938 creation, “Women at their toilette”, a Surrealist work using collage and gouache mediums. This month marked the end of an exhibition on “Picasso and Paper” at the Cleveland Museum of art. The exhibit was a chronological overview of Picasso’s career and experimentation with paper over about eighty years.

Cleveland Museum of Art, Picasso and Paper Exhibition

There were nearly 300 works. One could view all of them, but there were too many to examine closely. So, we chose a few to spend time with. I took photographs, not to duplicate what we saw, but to try to capture the stimulation we experienced at the exhibition. So, here is “Women at their toilette”

I created a shimmering ivory tone for the above image to convey the “electricity” of this image that is now over eighty-five years old.

The following image, “La Vie” was painted more than 120 years ago and is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art permanent collection. It is flanked by Picasso’s study drawing for this work. He considered different groups of people and different poses before paining La Vie

Here is Picasso’s “The Painter and his Model”. But again, I have modified the image, superimposing two views of the work to underscore the point that the image is anything but static.

In the following composite, I overlaid a self-portrait that Picasso sketched of himself sketching a model onto a larger drawing of “The Painter and His Model”

And, one more variation on a theme: The superimposition of nine framed drawing by Picasso onto his larger “The Painter and his Model”.

Finally, here is an image that isn’t very different from how it appeared in the exhibition. Yes, the photograph has been cropped to create a sense of standing close to the image and entering into the beauty of it.

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the exhibition contained nearly 300 works. In this post, we have viewed only four of them through several different lenses.