Visual Arts

Last week I had the privilege of spending an afternoon digging through the Walker's archives and managed to uncover several inches of files on the 1980 exhibition, Picasso: From the Future Picasso Museum, Paris. As someone who wasn't even alive when the Walker put on this exhibition, what I found out about its history was just fascinating...

In a settlement following his death in 1973, the French government selected a group of key works from Picasso's personal collection of some 45,000 objects, in lieu of inheritance taxes from his heirs. It was decided that these 700 works would form the basis of what we know today as the Museé Picasso in Paris. Little did I know that outside of France, the Walker was the very first museum to ever exhibit from that legacy collection, the second being the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After that, the works returned to the new Picasso museum and it was said that the chance of their ever traveling again was doubtful. Yet those who were among the Walker's record-breaking crowds in 1980 will recognize a few of those pieces back in the galleries for Picasso and American Art, including "The Shadow" (1953). And as it did in 1980, the Walker will provide extended hours for Picasso's final weekend, as follows:

Thursday-Saturday, September 6-8, 10am - 10pm
Sunday, September 9, 10am - 6pm

“The Shadow,” 1953

Did you also know that...

• In preparation for the 1980 exhibition, the Walker sold advance tickets for the first time ever. They also increased staffing for a number of departments, including maintenance crews whose job was partly to work overnight repainting walls that got dirty during the day.
• Marketing for the exhibition included daily, alternating menus in Gallery 8 that featured French and Spanish cuisine and a Metro Transit bus that was painted into what was called the "Picassomobile."
• An art graduate student was hired to decorate cake reproductions of works in the exhibition for the members' preview events. The cakes took one week to complete and were 4 x 5 feet and 48 inches in diameter. The frosting alone required 70 pounds of powdered sugar, 14 pounds of margarine, one quart of vanilla, one package of salt and two and a half gallons of whole milk.

Before Thursday night’s opening of the exhibition Triangle of Need, photographer Cameron Wittig captured artist Catherine Sulllivan and curator Doryun Chong putting the final touches on the multi-screen installation.

When artist Catherine Sullivan approached choreographer Dylan Skybrook about collaborating on a film project, details were deliberately scant. "Catherine was almost comically stingy with information," he told exhibition curator Doryun Chong. "She told me: Neanderthals, Vizcaya [Museum and Gardens in Miami, Florida], Nigerian email scams, and that's it. No context. She said the dancers are the Neanderthal layer and set me free." Skybrook set out, assisted by local dancers Justin Jones and Kristin van Loon, to create movements inspired by the now-extinct cohabitants of humans' ancient ancestors. The result of their exploration is on view in Triangle of Need, a multichannel film installation now making its world premiere at the Walker August 23.

This most recent and ambitious project by the Chicago-based artist topically addresses class and evolution, among other things, and draws inspirations from a variety of images and ideas. Chong recently discussed the process of collaborating with Sullivan in a wide-ranging interview with Skybrook. (more…)

The exhibition that’s now on view in the Walker galleries, Picasso and American Art, argues that Pop artists of the 1960s responded to Pablo Picasso's art. But was Picasso himself a sort-of Pop artist? When Robert Rosenblum came to the Walker to give a lecture "Cubism as Pop Art" in conjunction with the Picasso show at the Walker in 1980, he argued that Picasso was indeed thinking Pop. I listened to a cassette tape of his lecture when I was searching in the archives for sound bites to put in our Picasso audio guide. We didn't end up using any of the stuff I dug up, but this talk by Rosenblum was just too good to put back in the basement. So I decided to post audio of his lecture. (And despite the fact that we didn't officially use any of the archival sound clips I found, Robin, our New Media guru, did have my voice appear on Art on Call reading some of the artist's names, which was a pretty cool consolation prize.)

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