Picasso Portraits

Fantastic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery focusing on Picasso’s portrait works.

Although his was a large exhibition and busy, the pictures were well spaced out and it took you clearly through themes and periods in Picasso’s life. I would have liked to know a bit more about some of the people pictured but I also liked the fact the show assumed you knew a certain amount and focused on the style of the portraits not Picasso’s life or the relationships.

I liked the early, more realist work, such as the picture of Bibi-La-Puree portrait full of character with a Van Gogh like use of colour.  There were also some lovely sketches of friends at a bar in Paris and a section on portraits of writers done as frontispieces for books. There was a great  drawing of Poulenc with wonderful simply drawn tweed.

I loved the room dedicated to Picasso’s first wife Olga with a lovely mix of styles. It included the beautiful brown, naturalistic portrait of her which I was amazed to see was from a private collection. There was also a good portrait of her in a flowered armchair. It was nice touch to show family movies in a smaller room.

The main gallery space was well used with a lovely line of sculptured heads down the middle of the room. There was a good sequence of pictures of three women in different styles with good descriptions of his approach to each picture. I loved the various pictures of Nusch Eluard in this room and the way you could always recognise her by her full black hair however else her features might have been configured.

My favourite picture was one of his children drawing in black and grey with their mother forming a protective dome around them. It was a really tender picture, an aspect of Picasso you don’t see very often.

Closes on 5 February 2016

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