Picasso at the Fondation Beyeler : The young Titan

As in the post-war decades, abstraction dominated the field of art, gathered the advocate of a representational view behind the large, unassailable name Picasso. With Picasso, the mold breaker, the stalwart rebel and Innovator, was to be on the safe side, protected from the accusation of traditionalism. Particularly fond of citing the images of the early so-called "Blue" and "Pink period", and in countless households reproductions of "boy with the pipe" or the "family of Saltimbanques" hung need to have, which, if equal to a half-century earlier, with a wonderfully standard everyday existentialism fit.

The passed. However, renewable art had liked prospective buyers are hardly ever the opportunity to decide on the basis of the original images for which the power in them is stuck. The paintings were simply too valuable, they were not given in exhibitions, and also, as you have now in the Fondation Beyeler, to the Surprise of the find, were and are equally deprived of several key works in private possession, and thus to the Public.

It is noteworthy, first, that it is the Beyeler Foundation in Riehen, near Basel, and your art is close to the market Director Sam Keller in Association with the relevant curator Raphael Bouvier managed to elicit a number of Picasso's private owners. How hard that must have been, to the total sum insured of the exhibition "The young Picasso. The blue and Pink period", which is amazingly communicated indiscreet with "four billion Swiss francs". This is difficult to beat.

Who is Picasso's models were?

70 works of the years from 1901 to 1906 are to be seen in the beautiful, age-less construction of a Museum designed by Renzo Piano. These are the years in which the from the Pablo Ruiz short-hand is Picasso, as he self-portrait signed, this light for the first time in 1901, to be expressive in color. Picasso was one of the many Parisian Künstlerbohémiens, of course, the theatrical public in a Café, completed suicide of a close Catalan friend Carles Casagemas. The shot at the beginning of 1901, out of love, grief, and Picasso was shaken by it for years, so that he painted everything in a melancholic dark blue. So it came to the question period.

Picasso took the shadow sides of the Bohème true – the absent-minded absinthe-Drinkers, the verhärmten opportunity to prostitutes, the bearded mistletoe seller with his grandson. Earlier he had grieved artistically to the dead friend, first of all, in a highly expressive Portrait on his death bed, months later, the same scene in a pale blue green.

Two little-known burial images have been added. To see Beyeler, adds a Dimension to the image of the artist as a genius, Picasso, as the Spaniard looks to his compatriot El Greco. Even his choice of the Weary and burdened as the image subjects has not come about, especially in the popular illustrated magazines, such representations were often. would be to ask, what is perceived to Picasso at the time, to role models,

But for such comparisons, the exhibition has no place. She revels almost in it, the show almost never shown pictures in a chronological gap in the lack of. The blue period culminated in the large format picture "The life," of 1903, an allegorical representation of the artist's life between Muse and mother-to-child, for the last time in the character of head of the friend Casagemas set. With the right to be famous, brutally direct picture of the one-eyed brothel boss "Celestina", painted with a return to Barcelona in 1904, approaching the row of blue images.

Picasso's first – and at first in images captured – beloved Madeleine, a spindle skinny girl, in pink tones against a dark Background, and from now on, everything is mixed pink-and-blue. Also for the lock of the Fondation Beyeler unattainable, large-format main work of the "family of Saltimbanques" from Washington calls, a more complex allegory for the artist's existence, must be added in thought to understand the following, and incredibly dense set of artist pictures. Picasso loved the circus, but he has, and how decades later, Fellini in the Film, the circus people as the epitome of the existential Geworfenheit seen. Naked younglings, populate of course thin and delicate, more pictures, and also Picasso sculptor. Of all the Creator suggests.

The visitors will be amazed and astonished

the exhibition here to the end of your title would be. However, the organizers also work in Picasso's 1906 and the big break: namely, that the artist painted with a archaisierende portraits – especially of himself – like masks. In fact, Picasso had seen the archaic sculptures of the Iberians, soon then African masks in Paris in the Trocadéro Museum, a Remnant of the universal exhibition of 1878, and after 1900, probably quite dusty and mysterious.

sometimes a little too catchy symbolism of the blue and pink images as the new images, culminating in 1907 in the "Desmoiselles d'avignon", the justification of the image of the Modern, only today has understood, that it was without the experience of African sculpture are also conceivable. swept away by the hard primitivism

The exhibition shows a lot of preliminary studies and paintings from the perimeter of the "Desmoiselles"-large format, this is still unausleihbarer than this, unfortunately, missing the Portrait of the patron and collector Gertrude Stein from 1906, with the commonly the prelude to cubism is specified. But this final room of the exhibition is impressive enough. He shows an artist that has nothing to do with the previous rooms: the re-invent, the protean Picasso.

His self-portrait of 1906 strikes the bow, "I, Picasso" of 1901, and already this short period of time would have been enough to fill two normal artist life. Here, Picasso is still at the beginning. And the visitor is astonished and amazed and know that he can such see a second Time.

exhibition at the London Tate Modern Picasso in 1932 - the most productive year in the life of the century, artist

Riehen, near Basel, Fondation Beyeler, to 26. May. Catalogue (Large Format, 300 S.) 60 Francs. – See more at: www.fondationbeyeler.ch