How the back of an iconic painting reveals the life it lived

I always try to follow The Strokes pretend on painting I'm following picassos FR drugs my name is Alexander Morrison and I'm the curatorial assistant for Picasso in Fon blow Annie avam and I started working together on this project November 2021 Annie had started the process of cleaning the work we got to see the three musicians slowly come back to the surface you like nobody else become very intimate with a surface you're working on with the painting you're working on I just did it because it's going to be reframed the way The Strokes are you can tell that there are smaller brushes the way he paints always is a purpose of how you going to have the lb come forward go backwards we spent lots of time in front of the painting but we also spent lots of time behind the painting in a couple of those conversations Annie and I started to really look closely at what was there on the stretcher three musicians tells us so much about its life so this is a story with many chapters begins in the summer of 1921 July 1st Picasso and his wife Olga Picasso and their 5-month old son Paul arrive in F blow and immediately it seems Picasso sets to work so the studio itself was in a garage next to this house we knew that it was a fairly long narrow space we imagined Picasso was probably working during the day we think that Picasso must have ordered a huge number of art supplies and had them delivered to the house among those art supplies would have been a role of canvas from from which he cut three pieces two were about 6 ft wide the third was a little bit wider about 7 fet that piece became M's three musicians why is important to look at the back of a painting and what is telling us it's basically a portrait of the painting's life after it leaves the artist studio and I think kind of the first place to start looking is this little in description here which we found together when we were really doing a lot of um deep dives into how the painting was made how it was stretched we didn't know for sure how old the stretcher was it's clearly very old has lots of stickers and labels on it but this really confirms that this is the original stretcher and it reads 361 shap qu and then an address for and that was where they operated so we know that shapi was a important reliner conser reliner that worked for many artists early 1922 shapri had probably already put this canvas onto the stretcher and then shortly after that the painting is sold to Picasso's dealer Paul Rosenberg and a lot of the inscriptions we see here on the back relate to its life while it was with Paul Rosenberg for me some of the most interesting ones are these inventory numbers here you see pH 1087 the pH refers to its photo number he photographed anything that passed through his hands and that number basically allowed him years later to reconstruct his inventory from this period because he had lost a number of documents and archives when he left France during the second world war Paul Rosenberg was ch Jewish and he had already seen what happened to all of the German dealers in the wake of the first world war and how their stocks had been seized and probably realized that anything he owned his own personal collection the stock of his Gallery could potentially be seized he went to Great Lengths to protect anything that he had it seems Rosenberg strategically sent out Picasso's three musicians out on this kind of world tour with the idea that if it were constantly moving it would be protected it seems the first time the work was exhibited to the public was in June 1926 Paul Rosenberg organized an exhibition at his Gallery 1932 Picasso had a retrospective in Paris at the Galer PTI which he himself curated and there for the first time both versions of three musicians were M it's in October of the same year that the show travels and opens at the conow cich alred bar was the first director of the museum so was a very important figure in the art field bar was also very interested in this painting and its relationship to Philadelphia's version of three musicians he wrote to Picasso and asked him outright which one did you paint first to which Picasso responded I painted them simultaneously Paul Rosenberg who still had the painting in his possession in 1939 lent it to Alfred Bar's hugely important exhibition Picasso 40 Years of his art so even though now it's a work in Mom's collection we have a little trace of its life when it came in as a loan this is a very particular case in which you not only have all the labels and the history of exhibitions but you have a stretcher that you know was the the only one it's over 100 years old so that is is very significant in a large painting like this the back of the painting really acts in a way like it's passport you know where the painting has been it's been to New York it's been to Buenos Ares it's traveled to Amsterdam it's traveled to Brussels and even to Connecticut it also reminds us that an artwork moves through time and crisscrosses the globe thanks to a network of actors I think in the history of modern art there's this enduring idea of a lone Genius of an artist unfettered unbothered by anybody creating paintings that go on to be masterpieces that idea of the lone genius has been undone increasingly and a work like this really shows you even if it's a single artist who produces the work there's so many other people who are involved in that painting's [Music] life

Channel: The Museum of Modern Art

Views: 210,668

Keywords: moma, museum of modern art, new york, art, artist, museum, contemporary

Id: VMy90xfyrnc

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2024