Picasso On Paper

As the world commemorates fifty years since Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) death and remembers his unique contributions to art, Forum Gallery presents a special exhibition of prints and drawings curated for quality, originality, provenance, condition, and excellent value. Picasso on Paper opens on Thursday, September 28th, continuing through Saturday, November 11th, 2023.

Spanning eight decades of Picasso’s creative expression, the exhibition will present more than thirty works spotlighting Picasso’s extraordinary early gift, his classical training, his enduring and vigorous artistic production, and his voracious appetite for experimentation in visual vocabulary and art-making techniques. Picasso treated drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture as equal conduits to his vision, revolutionizing traditional approaches to each in ways that would change forever the way we see and make art.

In Picasso on Paper, we present some of the most memorable images created by Picasso including impressions of Le Repas frugal, 1904, an iconic image of Picasso’s Blue Period; Minotauromachie, 1935, in which we see Picasso’s alter ego emerge as the central figure in a disturbing, prophetic vision of the Spanish Civil War; and the enduring 1937 image of a crying Dora Maar in La Femme qui Pleure I, created immediately upon completion of his monumental war protest painting, Guernica, our impression gifted to Picasso’s friend, the Spanish writer, Juan Larrea, author of Guernica published in 1947.

Picasso’s personal relationships heavily influenced the evolution of his work. The earliest work in the exhibition, Portrait de Femme, c. 1897, is a sensitive colored pencil drawing of a woman in the Picasso household created when the artist was just sixteen and still living in Spain; the intimate Visage de Marie-Thérèse, 1928, captures Picasso’s famous “golden muse” in the early days of their relationship; an evocative ink drawing, Tête de femme (Dora Maar), c. 1942, brilliantly captures Dora Maar with remarkable economy and is dedicated to Albert Skira, publisher of the journal Minotaure and fine art books; Françoise Gilot is depicted in Femme au Fauteuil No. 4, 1949 in graphic magnificence wearing a sheep’s wool coat that Picasso gave her in 1949; while in five exceptional impressions created between 1955 and 1962, Picasso explores the image of his last great muse, Jacqueline Roque, who dominated Picasso’s linocuts and lithographs of the last twenty years of his life. Picasso developed friendships with prominent personalities of the twentieth century, including Norman Granz, the pre-eminent jazz impresario who started the pivotal concert series, Jazz at The Philharmonic; the unique impression of Peintre et modèle au fauteuil, 1963, included in the exhibition is dedicated to Granz by Picasso.