After a messy relationship and breakup with Pablo Picasso, his muse Dora Maar said, “All his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.” The quote has an element of truth in that all portraits are subjective. Usually, Picasso began with a faithful likeness of his subject, and as he grew to know them better, he would change it, making it more abstract.
“When he meets a woman, she’s a pretty face. After he spends a few years with her, she becomes a real person, she becomes more complex, so her portrait becomes more complex,” Gagosian curator Michael Cary tells Observer, speaking about “Picasso: Tête-à-tête”, his thirteenth show of works by the artist at the gallery, which was co-presented by Paloma Picasso. “Marie-Thérèse is an exception because when he meets her, he’s trying to conceal her identity. So, she starts off abstract and becomes more recognizable.”
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Attend the show and you will see her in a way you never have before. Of the three portraits of Marie-Thérèse painted in 1937, two have never been publicly shown, and one was shown only in the 1953 show at Palazzo Reale in Milan and the 1981 retrospective in Tokyo. Of the more than fifty paintings (mostly portraits), sculptures and drawings spanning 1896 to 1972, there are twelve works on exhibit that have never been publicly shown, and another fifteen haven’t been seen since 1981.
The idea for “Picasso: Tête-à-tête” comes from the 1932 Paris retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit, curated by the artist himself. In it, he made the unusual decision to pick works from throughout his career and put them in conversation with each other, something no curator at the time was doing.
“Someone asked me how I was going to organize this exhibition. I replied, ‘Badly,’” Picasso told French newspaper L’Intransigeant at the time. “For an exhibition, like a painting, well or badly ‘organized,’ it all comes down to the same thing. What counts is a certain consistency in the ideas. And when this consistency exists, as with even the most incompatible couples, things always work out.”
The new show’s four portraits of Marie-Thérèse, painted within two years of each other, are vastly different. Two still lifes, Fruit Dish and Guitar, 1932, and Still Life with Skull, Leeks, and Pitcher, 1945, resonate with one another and enter a dialogue with the bronze sculpture, Skull (death’s head), 1943.
“By changing medium, that enabled him to not get stuck in a corner. By tackling new kinds of problems, it took him on a different path. And once he understood that, he could bring it back into what he was doing before,” Paloma Picasso told artist Peter Doig in a conversation at the gallery earlier this month. “So, there was a dialogue inside his creativity. There’s a lot of chatter going on between these works. It’s like we’re eavesdropping at a party—and it gives us enormous flexibility and a sense of fun in how we present them.”
When Gagosian and Cary took a list of paintings to Paloma, her curiosity was sparked by the thematic connections they were making. So she turned to her own collection and pulled out a few works that had long been out of the public eye.
While most of Picasso’s heirs have loaned their father’s works for exhibitions, Paloma has mainly refrained, with the exception of the Tokyo 1981 show. “The bulk of her collection hasn’t gone out into the world. She wasn’t a big lender. And because institutions weren’t sure of what she had, they didn’t ask for loans,” notes Cary.
“When my father passed away, there were so many Picassos around the world already in so many different museums that people thought there’s nothing left in the house,” noted Paloma. “But he needed to have them in his house. Even if he was not looking at them, knowing that they were there meant that he could go back to something.”
After Picasso split with Paloma’s mother, painter Françoise Gilot, she and her brother Claude spent holidays and summers with their famous father. Because she was quiet and didn’t cause a ruckus, Paloma often sat in his studio, drawing with pencils and crayons alongside him. When she asked him his opinion of her work, he told her, “That’s for you to decide, whether it’s good or not,” recalled Paloma. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. You have to figure it out by yourself.”
“There are so many sycophants who wrote about this work—he’s the maestro, the genius, the monster—but to Paloma, he was dad. That’s a very unique perspective,” offers Cary. “She doesn’t talk about him like he’s a genius or a monster, but as a person. Talking about him like he’s a genius is shorthand to a dead end. It does him a disservice. He worked alone in the studio every day for eighty years. He almost didn’t do anything else. The reason we pay attention to his work is because he worked really hard at it, not because he had some supernatural powers.”
Picasso stole from everyone on his way to finding his voice. Some of the early works in Barcelona’s Picasso Museum show influences ranging from Toulouse-Lautrec to Vincent van Gogh. His Las Meninas series is directly inspired by Velázquez’s iconic 1656 work of the same name. Diego Rivera, who knew him briefly while in Paris, accused him of co-opting his technique for painting flora. And sculptor Alberto Giacometti would pull the blinds on his studio when Picasso walked by lest he borrow ideas.
“Picasso said you should try to paint like other painters because you try that and you fail at it. And failing to paint like someone else, you become yourself,” says Cary. “That’s a worldview, an ethos, a method of working that is kind of new. He invented that way of thinking about how you use the past.”
“Picasso: Tête-à-tête” is at Gagosian (980 Madison Avenue, New York) through July 3, 2025.
