By Daniel
Solecki
Solecki While strolling along a Parisian boulevard on a spring day in 1927, Pablo Picasso fell in love. She was seventeen years old, almost thirty years his junior; a half-Swedish blonde from Maison Alfort. Her name was Marie-Therese Walter. To say the 20th century’s most famous painter was completely enamored would be but an understatement.
“I am Picasso,” the artist declared to his new love, “and I believe we can do wonderful things together.” Marie-Therese Walter looked back in confusion. Love-drunk, Picasso whisked her off the street to a nearby bookshop to show her prints of his work. Flattered, she agreed to his request to meet in Gare Montparnasse the following day.
Their Baudelairean encounter on the streets of Paris began the affair that Picasso admitted, “saved my life.” During their time as secret erotic partners from 1927 until 1937, Marie-Therese became Picasso’s muse. The incorporation of her physically striking and womanly form into his art marked his abandonment of Cubism and his adoption of new innovative styles.
However, the show of Picasso’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures of Marie-Therese Walter currently on view at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street isn’t as much about Picasso’s versatility or chameleonic 
stylistic changes and innovations that seem to define his legacy, it's a show about the how love looks through the eyes of an artist. The gallery does the reverse work of a "grand theory" style of art analysis; it examines art history not just as the response to historical changes like the advent of modernity or archaeological discoveries, but as the response to the seemingly frivolous, picayune, and highly-personal events of an artist's life. Art history was shaped, the show suggests, by nothing more than a chance meeting on the streets of Paris and the ups-and-downs of the tumultuous affair that followed. The Gagosian tells the story of how love, one of the most illogical, chaotic, and mutable aspects of human experience, is represented in art.
stylistic changes and innovations that seem to define his legacy, it's a show about the how love looks through the eyes of an artist. The gallery does the reverse work of a "grand theory" style of art analysis; it examines art history not just as the response to historical changes like the advent of modernity or archaeological discoveries, but as the response to the seemingly frivolous, picayune, and highly-personal events of an artist's life. Art history was shaped, the show suggests, by nothing more than a chance meeting on the streets of Paris and the ups-and-downs of the tumultuous affair that followed. The Gagosian tells the story of how love, one of the most illogical, chaotic, and mutable aspects of human experience, is represented in art. This huge show covers the entire period of Picasso and Walter's liaison and includes photographs, life-drawings, a slew of paintings, some well known, others from private collections, several sculptures, and a short film made of photo-booth pictures of Marie-Therese. It is especially remarkable the variety of ways that Picasso’s subject appears. Marie-Therese Walter here appears by the sea as an unapproachable abstraction of Santorini-colored stone, as sitting for a portrait in dainty clo
thes with Picasso’s distinctive distorted eyes and facial features, and as a sort of modernist Willendorf. In some of the works, every line seems to be painted with utmost tenderness; the curves of Marie-Therese’s body are distorted and sexualized into harmonious, rounded abstraction. In others, the rendering is chaotic, with stucco-textured blotches of paint or bronze and harsh warping of facial features.
thes with Picasso’s distinctive distorted eyes and facial features, and as a sort of modernist Willendorf. In some of the works, every line seems to be painted with utmost tenderness; the curves of Marie-Therese’s body are distorted and sexualized into harmonious, rounded abstraction. In others, the rendering is chaotic, with stucco-textured blotches of paint or bronze and harsh warping of facial features. The show links up Picasso’s ever-evolving style with the natural ups-and-downs of any relationship. While the curators do make it obvious that Picasso did love Marie-Therese Walter—one indeed can’t argue with the highly sensual images and the quotes from several drippy romantic poems that adorn 
the Gagosian’s walls—the artworks are so varied, with such different approaches to the subject matter that one can actually feel the changes in Picasso’s mind toward his subject. Here is a visual record of Picasso’s relationship—of the times when the love of his life and the muse of his art appeared to him as an ancient Venus and the times when the same person felt distant and distended. We, the contemporary viewers, are left amazed at how perfectly truthful to the experience of love it all feels.
the Gagosian’s walls—the artworks are so varied, with such different approaches to the subject matter that one can actually feel the changes in Picasso’s mind toward his subject. Here is a visual record of Picasso’s relationship—of the times when the love of his life and the muse of his art appeared to him as an ancient Venus and the times when the same person felt distant and distended. We, the contemporary viewers, are left amazed at how perfectly truthful to the experience of love it all feels. 
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