THE PICASSO CENTURY 2

DR MICHAEL ADCOCK

22 OCTOBER 2022

In this second lecture on the Melbourne NGV Winter Masterpieces exhibition, The Picasso Century, Dr Michael Adcock offered insights into Picasso’s middle and late works, encompassing the narrative of Picasso’s art and influence from the 1920s. He illustrated Picasso’s development through the Exhibition’s contents and explained how they came about.

The aftermath of the World War upheaval wrought major changes in social and artistic worlds. The surrealist and modernist movements influenced Picasso’s depiction of the human figure. This presentation also covered some lesser-known modernist painters represented in the NGV exhibition: André Masson, Suzanne Valadon (best known to many as the pretty young girl in Renoir‘s The Dancers), the American Dorothea Tanning, and the Russian Natalia Goncharova (who also created costume designs and stage sets for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes).

This second lecture continued its celebration of the important women in Picasso‘s life: Marie-Thérèse Walter, who introduced a new note of dreamy sensuality to Picasso’s nude studies; Dora Maar, a painter and modernist photographer who also documented the evolution of Picasso’s Guernica, a political painting that expressed his volcanic eruption of rage at the slaughter of the people of the town of Guernica in 1937 by General Franco; and Françoise Gilot, another modernist painter who, at age 100, is still alive and still painting.

Picasso continued to experiment and create extensively in all media until his death in 1973. A colourful life, and an epic career, indeed!

U3A Port Phillip has been a fortunate beneficiary of Dr Adcock’s generosity with regular contributions to our Saturday Seminars. His scholarly approach to the arts, both its history and critically, continues to be appreciated by our member audiences.

See a VIDEO of Dr Adcock’s presentation.

From Mark Denniston of Saturday Seminars.