WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.- Due to the popularity of the Masterpiece of the Month series, especially Pablo Picasso’s Tête de femme (Head of a Woman), 1952, which was on view in August, the Norton has created Picasso’s Muses, on view Nov. 6, 2014 – Feb. 15, 2015. The artist drew inspiration from many sources during his long life and career, including French café society, the struggling poor, live models, and especially girlfriends and mistresses – which Picasso’s Muses illustrates. “Picasso returns again and again to his female companions as a source of pictorial and sculptural inspiration,” explains Jerry Dobrick, Curatorial Associate for European Art. The centerpiece of this boutique exhibition is Woman with Wrist Watch, from 1932, a monumental work inspired by Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom Picasso was then in a relationship. Also in the exhibition is another work from the Tête de femme series  as well as works from the Museum Collection.

Picasso’s Muses
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) found inspiration from many sources during his long life and career. Taught by his father, a professional art instructor, he acquired an excellent academic background at a very young age. Drawing from plaster casts and live models, his early work is extremely realistic and representational. Picasso’s academic training is reflected in works like Au Café, a pastel on paper, which dates from 1901, the year he moved to Paris, where he would have a home for the rest of his life. In this work, he is inspired by Parisian café society with all its emphasis on style and joie de vivre. But, at almost the same moment, he explored the life of the less fortunate in The Fugal Repast, an etching from his Blue period (1901-1904) which reflects his mood and circumstances as a young, struggling, foreign artist in Paris, before meeting American art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein, who would become life-long patrons.

Perhaps the most enduring muses for Picasso were his models, mistresses, and wives. Beginning with Fernande Oliver, his first model, who is the inspiration for Head of a Woman (Fernande), in which he explores the Cubist idiom. Picasso returns again and again to his female companions as a source of pictorial and sculptural inspiration. Such is the case with Woman with Watch, a monumental work whose physiognomy recalls Marie-Thérèse Walter, with whom Picasso was then in a relationship. A later work, Tête de femme, also finds its inspiration in one of his female companions, Françoise Gilot, the mother of his daughter, Paloma Picasso. This important work is the second in a series of six portraits he painted of his companion over the course of 12 days in May 1952.

Other sources from which Picasso found artistic encouragement were classical mythology and the Old Masters. From the 1920s onward, but most memorably in the iconic Guernica, in 1937, he portrayed mythological creatures in his works. His Bust of a Faun, is a celebration of the ancient roots of Mediterranean culture and creativity. Since his early study of the Old Masters in Madrid’s Prado Museum, Picasso returned to them repeatedly for creative stimuli. His acknowledgement of this source is nowhere more charming than in his painting Venus and Cupid, based directly on Venus and Cupid, The Honey Thief by Lucas Cranach I (1472 – 1553). For Picasso’s fertile mind, everything he came into contact with, both organic and man-made, offered creative inspiration.