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Picasso 1932 — Love, Fame, Tragedy
Tate Modern
London SW1
Despite its rather misleading title, erotic love is the overarching subject of Tate Modern’s Picasso 1932, Love, Fame, Tragedy. Indeed, when first shown in Paris this extensive exhibition was more explicitly titled Picasso 1932 — Année erotique (erotic year).
This emphasis is clear from the selection of works, their captions and the wall texts, which are reproduced in the accompanying free booklet, and in some large statements by Picasso painted on the walls like “Essentially there is only love. Whatever that may be.”
Picasso’s muse was his young and illicit lover Marie-Therese Walter, whose long-limbed body and Grecian profile had arrested his gaze in a Paris boulevard in 1927. His cliched, but prophetic, chat-up line was “I feel we could do great things together.” And they did. She was not yet 18, he was 45.
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