Picasso Black and White

Picasso Black and White
Guggenheim Museum
October 5, 2012–January 23, 2013

Surveying the Spanish master’s oeuvre from 1904 to 1971, Picasso Black and White examines the artist’s lifelong exploration of a black-and-white palette through some 110 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Picasso’s deceptively simple use of isolated black, white, and gray hues belies the extraordinary complexity and power of these expressive works, which purge color in order to highlight their formal structure. The exhibition traces the artist’s unique vision thematically throughout his whole body of work, including early monochromatic blue and rose paintings, gray-toned Cubist canvases, elegant and austere neoclassical portraits and nudes, Surrealist-inspired figures, forceful and somber scenes depicting the atrocities of war, allegorical still lives, vivid interpretations of art-historical masterpieces, and the electric, highly sexualized canvases of Picasso’s last years.