HAMBURG.- The window motif can be found throughout Picasso’s entire body of work. For Picasso, a window was much more than an everyday object. The exhibition Picasso. Window to the World demonstrates for the first time that Picasso considered the window to symbolize painting itself. It symbolizes artistic self-reflection by addressing the issue of seeing and communication between the internal and the external – an element in Picasso’s work that runs through all his creative phases and one which has never before been identified. This exhibition, curated by Ortrud Westheider, illuminates the window subject as a painted theory of images. From February 6 to May 16, 2016 the Bucerius Kunst Forum is bringing together around 40 loans from international collections such as Museu Picasso, Barcelona; Museo Picasso, Malaga; Musée Picasso, Paris; the Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the MoMA, New York.

During periods of artistic reorientation, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) repeatedly returned to the window motif to examine fundamental artistic ideas. This occurred during transitions to a new phase in his work and was provoked by a change of place or a new phase in his life. It could also be stimulated by a new studio where the artist began a new creative period.

At 18 Picasso painted his first series of window images in his studio in Barcelona. Whereas windows had appeared since the Renaissance as a place to project realistic constructs, in the paintings Picasso created around 1900 they marked the division between inside and outside: The studio window was established as an interface between the artist and the world around him.

Into the 1920s Picasso created images of windows which negotiated the conflict between flat surfaces and space, and between line and volume. He began to integrate the window motif into paintings with objects dissected in a Cubist manner resting on a console table in front of a window, and he incorporated a view of the horizon for the first time. The flat, horizontal depiction creates the impression that the painting is identical to the window. The exterior light is at the same time the paint on the canvas.

Picasso’s fresh start following Cubism returned him once again to the window motif in 1925. He began sculpting and incorporated his experiences in sculpture back into painting at his studio at Château Boisgeloup. For the first time a head complete with silhouette appeared and was inserted by Picasso into numerous works in connection with sculptures in front of windows. Black planes are given ambivalent significance. Their fixed form in window frames and handles merge into the busts and figures depicted.

In the 1930s Picasso created a group of paintings in which one or two women were shown in front of a window. These images depict the models in his studio drawing, reading, resting or keeping watch. In this series the window signals closed, protected spaces of idle contemplation.

Picasso returned again to the window theme in occupied Paris during the Second World War. Still-lifes with skulls, a recurrent motif in Picasso’s work at this time, allowed powerful compositions to be created in combination with windows. The existential threat seen in the death motif of the cross formed by square window panes is coupled with this reference to the skulls traditionally found in Old Master vanitas paintings.

In the summer of 1955 Picasso moved into a 19th century villa in Cannes where a large ornamentally divided window solemnly framed the palm trees in the estate’s garden. In the same year he created eleven upright format paintings that focused on one of the large Art Nouveau windows in his ground floor studio. Picasso called them “Interior Landscapes”.

Picasso. Window to the World brings together around 40 paintings, drawings and printed works from all the artist’s creative periods. Loans come from international collections such as Museu Picasso, Barcelona; Museo Picasso, Malaga; Musée Picasso, Paris; the Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the MoMA, New York. Around 50 images by photographers such as Robert Doisneau, Edward Quinn and David Douglas Duncan show the window as a defining element in Picasso’s living and work spaces and how he positioned himself in front of them.

The exhibition catalog with essays by Emilie Bouvard, Fabrice Flahutez, Esther Horn, Brigitte Leal, Androula Michaёl and Ortrud Westheider is published by Hirmer Verlag (Munich, approx. 204 pages with color illustrations of all works on display, € 29 at the exhibition).