TIL Summer 2018

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Pablo Picasso: Le Reve (The Dream) 1932.
Private Collection.
© Succession Picasso/DACS London, 2018
THE EY EXHIBITION: PICASSO 1932
– LOVE, FAME, TRAGEDY
The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 –
Love, Fame, Tragedy at Tate Modern takes
visitors on a month-by-month journey
through 1932, a time so pivotal in
Picasso’s life and work that it has been
called his ‘year of wonders’. More than
100 outstanding paintings, sculptures and
works on paper demonstrate his prolific
and restlessly inventive character. They
strip away common myths to reveal the
man and the artist in his full complexity
and richness.
1932 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, including Nude Woman in
a Red Armchair, an anchor point of Tate’s
collection, confident colour-saturated
portraits and Surrealist experiments,
including thirteen seminal ink drawings
of the Crucifixion. His virtuoso paintings
also riffed on the voluptuous sculptures
he had produced some months before at
his new country estate.
In his personal life, throughout 1932,
Picasso kept a delicate balance between
tending to his wife Olga Khokhlova and
their 11-year-old son Paulo, and his
passionate love affair with Marie-
Thérèse Walter, 28 years his junior. The
exhibition brings these complex artistic
and personal dynamics to life with an
unprecedented range of loans from
collections around the world, including
many record-breaking works held in
private hands. Highlights include Girl
before a Mirror, a signature painting that
rarely leaves The Museum of Modern
Art, and the legendary The Dream, a
virtuoso masterpiece depicting the
artist’s muse in dreamy abandon, which
has never been exhibited in the UK
before.
Picasso’s journeys between his
homes in Boisgeloup and Paris capture
the contradictions of his existence at this
pivotal moment: a life divided between
countryside retreat and urban bustle,
established wife and recent lover,
painting and sculpture, sensuality and
darkness. The year ended traumatically
when Marie-Thérèse fell seriously ill
after swimming in the river Marne,
losing most of her iconic blonde hair. In
his final works of the year, Picasso
transformed the event into scenes of
rescue and rape, a dramatic finale to a
year of love, fame and tragedy that
pushed Picasso to the height of his
creative powers.
The EY Exhibition: Picasso 1932 –
Love, Fame, Tragedy will be open until
9 September at Tate Modern in the Eyal
Ofer Galleries.
Cecil Beaton: Pablo Picasso, rue La Boetie, Paris
© The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s.
FLOWER FAIRIES: BOTANICAL
MAGIC AT THE GARDEN MUSEUM
Since they first crept out from behind
leaves and flowers in 1918 for the Elves
and Fairies postcards, Cicely Mary
Barker’s Flower Fairies have been
enchanting and delighting children and
adults alike. A selection of these charming
characters will be on display at the Garden
Museum this summer in an exhibition
which celebrates the centenary of the
earliest publication of Cicely Mary
Barker’s first fairy illustrations.
Continuing to be inspired by fairies
Cicely Mary Barker published the first of
her Flower Fairies books in 1923. Visitors
will see original illustrations for more than
40 of her Flower Fairies designs, drawing
extensively from the Warne Archive,
Penguin Random House UK.
The exhibition demonstrates Cicely’s
precision and skill as an artist; the
fairies themselves were developed from
careful observation of children in her
sister’s nursery. The depictions of plants
are always botanically accurate, which
has contributed to the lasting appeal of
the designs. Fairies were experiencing
great popularity at the time Cicely first
published her works. Most notably, the
mystery surrounding the Cottingley fairy
photographs which Arthur Conan Doyle
published in a sell-out article for The
Strand, whilst JM Barrie captured the
imagination of a generation in his
enduring tale Peter Pan.
t h i s i s l o n d o n m a g a z i n e • t h i s i s l o n d o n o n l i n e