Pranced off to the DeYoung today, to follow the lines in the sand to the Picasso Exhibit. It opened last Saturday, to enormous hype, including some companion exhibits featuring G. Stein et famille, their art collections and personal foibles. I always like a good foible exhibit, me.
Well, it is a lovely and wondrous exhibit and especially nice if you spring for the audio tour, even though the volunteer who connected us must moonlight as a dominatrix ("You Must have this audio if you're going to the exhibit!!!!")The Man insisted that he didn't need it and wouldn't have it. I caved, and was glad I had, being an afficionada of odd factoids, of which there are a multiplicity.
A long, long, long time ago, when I still raising small children, I read a book by Francoise Gilot called something like My Life With Picasso, which made me yearn for small, white-washed, tile-roofed mud houses, close to a beach and brooding, sunken-eyed men in espadrilles, painting on everything, painting breasts and guitars and roosters and eyes with starry lashes. A life lived with wine and bread. A life different from the one I was experiencing in New England, in drafty old summer houses, ripe with mildew and fade. Gilot was all but missing from the exhibit today but there was a picture of Picasso wife # 1 or maybe 2: Olga, a beauty, painted from a photograph (interesting factoid) and looking remarkably like a Matisse.
There were none of the sexy paintings, really. No satyrs, no nymphs. Only one minotaur, not engaged in randy malfeasance. Fairly tame and dimly lit, this exhibit, but I didn't get to see any of it in Paris, two years ago, because the museum closed two days before we got there and won't reopen until it's renovated. Art without a home. Anyway, a gracious and welcome traveler/guest. See it if you can.
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