"Avignon girls" are waiting for Muscovites and guests - the Pushkin Museum will show how the masterpiece of Pablo Picasso was created

"Avignon girls" (1907) Pablo Picasso - one of the icons of the avant-garde, a painting that initiated the Cubism. On friends of the artist, who saw her in the studio, she made a strong impression, and a new aesthetics soon manifested itself in the works of Georges Braque and other artists. But only in 1937 a picture depicting a scene in a brothel ("Philosophical brothel" - its first name) appeared at the exhibition, but no one was shocked. There she was bought by Lilly Bliss for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

The exhibition in the Pushkin Museum will show how the masterpiece was born. The center of the exposition will be a notebook with sketches for the "Avignon girls" from the Picasso house-museum in Malaga. The house where the artist spent the first ten years of his life became a museum 20 years ago. There is stored a christening shirt and genius toys, an art collection for her collects a special fund. A notebook with sketches and sketches was purchased in 2006 from the heirs of Picasso. 63 small sheets with drawings of ink show how the idea of ​​the future picture was born and developed.

In addition to the sketches, the exhibition will include about 20 works from the collection of the Pushkin Museum that somehow influenced the birth of Cubism: "Bathing" (1890-1894) Paul Cezanne, antique, ancient Egyptian artifacts and African sculpture, which Picasso admired so much, this is not the art of the past, and that "in our day it can be more vital than ever." There will also be Picasso gouaches, alternating because of their fragility during the exhibition (a good excuse to come to her more than once).

The Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin
Anatomy of Cubism
30 August - 28 October 2018