Picasso’s Final Muse exhibitions

It must be the law of repetition. There are currently three shows in the city featuring Picasso, arguably the 20th century’s most influential artist: “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” at the Met, “Picasso & the Camera” at the Gagosian Gallery (closing Jan. 3), and “Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style” at the Pace Gallery’s Midtown and Chelsea locations, now through Jan. 10.

The latter is a sprawling, blockbuster of an exhibit devoted to the artist’s work in the last two decades of his life when he was in a relationship with Jacqueline Roque, who became his second wife in 1961. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was 70 when he met the 25-year-old saleswoman in 1952 at a ceramics studio in Vallauris, on the French Riviera. They were married in a secret civil ceremony at the town hall, with his lawyer and a cleaning woman as witnesses, critic Barbara Rose writes in the show’s lavishly illustrated catalog.

Picasso gave the bride a hilltop mansion near Cannes as a wedding gift and famously painted her to commemorate the occasion. “Jacqueline Dressed as a Bride Full Face, I” (1961), a delicate aquatint, is on loan to the Pace Gallery in Midtown from the Metropolitan Museum and is one of the show’s signature works. The exhibition as a whole is comprised of some 140 paintings, sculptures, ceramics and works on paper, many on display for the first time, with Jacqueline the recurring motif. Call it “All Jacqueline, All the Time.”

She was Picasso’s model and his “most consistent” muse, per the show’s introduction, the inspiration for some 400 portraits and a key player in numerous other works in his final years. But she rarely posed for Picasso. An exception: his portraits of her in Turkish costume. Picasso hated portrait sittings and typically worked from memory. He would imagine Jacqueline and then commit his vision to the canvas.

Two years after Picasso met Jacqueline and embarked on a new artistic journey, his life was turned upside down by another signal event: the death of his idol, Henri Matisse, on November 3, 1954. As Picasso would later say of his rival-turned-friend, “he left his odalisques to me as a legacy.”

He thereafter embarked on a reinterpretation of classic works by the Old Masters, notably Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,” a Turkish harem painting that Picasso re-invented in honor of Matisse, infusing it with the colors, decorative patterns, abstraction and odalisques so characteristic of his late hero. Jacqueline plays a prominent role in the series, standing in for a dark-haired figure on the right side of Delacroix’s famous canvas. Sixteen items from the “Women of Algiers” series are on display in the Chelsea gallery.

Picasso was completely consumed in his later years with copying and riffing the European masters—Delacroix, but also El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Lucas Cranach and, in a bow to the modernists, Cézanne, Manet and Van Gogh. He would cover his walls with projected images of Rembrandt paintings. As Rose writes, he was “the first appropriation artist,” portraying Jacqueline “in the guise of beautiful women from art history.” Cases in point, both on view here: “Jacqueline with a Black Scarf” (October 11, 1954), an homage to El Greco’s “Lady in a Fur Wrap” (1577-79), and “Jacqueline” (October 6, 1955), a hat-tip in colored pencil to Manet’s flamenco dancer, “Lola of Valence”(1862).

Equally fascinating are the dozens of photographs taken by Picasso confidante David Douglas Duncan that line the entrance to the Chelsea gallery. Here we see a bare-footed, shirtless Picasso teaching Jacqueline a Catalan folk dance, Picasso communing with Jacqueline in a lace mantilla, and Picasso taking a bath. In the catalog, Rose discusses the special affection Picasso had for his last partner, noting that, in his art, “she is never disfigured or destroyed like his earlier lovers.”

On the contrary, be prepared for an unabashed love fest—an apotheosis, in fact. We see Jacqueline every which way at Pace: in exotic attire, in prim attire, in wedding attire, eroticized. We see her in profile, in full face, and in both profile and full face in bifurcated portraits.

Sadly, the woman immortalized in countless ways in countless paintings, prints and sculptures by the world-famous artist could not endure life after Picasso. Following years of alcoholism and depression, Jacqueline shot herself with a revolver 13 years after her husband’s death in 1973. She was only 59 and was buried alongside him on the grounds of his beloved Chateau de Vauvenargues near Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Her beauty and their time together live on in this exquisite show.