Word: picassos
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Take the paintings of one popular artist (preferably, but not necessarily, Pablo Picasso). Juxtapose them with the works of another genius. Compare, contrast and voilà: You have a blockbuster exhibition guaranteed to bring in the crowds. The phenomenal success of the three-city "Matisse Picasso" show in 2002-03 helped inspire the thoughtful "Picasso Ingres" exhibit in Paris last year. Now there's the traveling "Turner, Whistler, Monet" exhibit currently at London's Tate Britain. This is the golden age of spot-the-influence shows. Some museumgoers see them as a two- or three-for-one bonus, others...
...There is a single, irrefutable reason the pairing works: Francis Bacon spent his entire career aspiring to Picassohood. In fact, Bacon maintained that his first encounter with the Spaniard's work, the 1927 show "A Hundred Drawings by Picasso" at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in Paris, made him want to be an artist. "Why don't I try it?" the Ireland-born, England-raised drifter asked himself; within months...
...first-ever systematic analysis of Picasso's influence on Bacon, the show gathers some 100 works of the two 20th century legends. The Musée Picasso even attempts to re-create the show at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, with plates of 40 of the drawings Bacon said "shocked" him into his career. Given that both artists specialized in distorted images, anthropomorphic monsters and screaming faces, the Rosenberg drawings are surprisingly mild. In fact, they are lyrical studies for Picasso's neoclassical works that were criticized at the time as a betrayal of the revolutionary spirit behind his Cubist masterpiece...
...Perhaps Bacon, who never met his idol, was drawn to images that seemed tolerant of homosexuality, like the near-naked androgynous youths (one playing the flute, the other transported by the music) in the sketches for Picasso's monumental Pipes of Pan. When Bacon arrived in Paris at age 18 - after his father caught him in his mother's underwear and threw him out - he was certain of his homosexuality, but less certain of his artistic talent. He flirted with interior design when he returned to London in 1929 and, once he started painting, destroyed most of his early efforts...
...Indeed, crucifixions are one of the major themes of the show, even though neither Picasso nor Bacon was at all religious. In a 1992 interview, Bacon called Picasso's crucifixion scenes "still my favorite of his works." Picasso's oil-on-wood Crucifixion (1930) is a vibrant, surreal retelling of the Calvary story, with cross, nails, lance, weeping women and garments being divided by dice-throwers. Bacon's interpretation, Second Version of Triptych 1944: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, ignores all this action - even the cross - and concentrates instead on three anguished black-and-white...