By Amber Mything
If you happen to be walking downtown and notice some graffiti, look closely. It could be an advertisement for the new exhibit at the National Gallery.
Picasso: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art opened at the gallery last Friday. The show includes 114 paintings, drawings, sculptures and collages, and spans 67 years of the flamboyant Pablo Picasso’s life.
The show is expected to attract more than 200,000 visitors during its three-month visit.
In fact, by last Sunday about 33,000 advance tickets had already been sold. Karen Oxorn, a communications officer at the gallery, estimated they were selling about 250 an hour.
“It’s much better than I predicted. We are encouraging people to book at an advance time to ensure that they get a ticket.”
The exhibit started its tour at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia where it set new attendance records, attracting almost 250,000 visitors over three months.
Leslie Miller, president of the Ottawa Tourism and Convention Authority is hoping the exhibit will experience similar success while in Ottawa.
“We’ve been marketing it for over a year now. It’s a big part of our spring-summer campaign, since it’s such a big event. It’s a great hook for the city.”
But even big, long-anticipated events have their share of problems. The Picasso exhibit almost didn’t happen.
The gallery’s union had been in a strike or lockout position since the end of January and workers were set to walk off the job on Feb. 19.
But gallery management and union leaders managed to reach a deal at the last minute and the strike was averted.
Union members wanted the gallery to stop contracting out jobs and to accept third-party arbitration for job classification and performance evaluation disputes. A strike likely would have seriously disrupted pre-show preparations for the exhibit.
But the earlier uncertainty had no effect on the exhibit during its opening weekend. In fact, the exhibit seemed better organized than a previous big-name exhibit.
When the gallery presented Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age last year, the show was hampered by crowd control problems.
This is not the case with Picasso. Only a certain number of tickets are available for any given time and gallery goers have to wait their turn.
Patrons have ample room to wander through the cleverly arranged exhibit and peruse the various works.
Except for the sculptures, which have a room of their own, the pieces are arranged in chronological order.
As patrons walk through the exhibit they can follow Picasso’s progression through the various periods of his life.
The exhibit begins with his Blue period, featuring melancholic, depressing pieces such as Meditation. This piece portrays the artist watching over the sleeping form of his current mistress.
It then moves on to his Rose period, which is much more cheerful. Boy Leading a Horse, one of the more famous pieces from this period, is very dignified and not as sentimental as the previous period.
The next series of works progresses from the brightly colored and disorganized cubist phases to Picasso’s larger and more widely known abstract pieces.
It is then that patrons get to see the bright yellows, oranges and pinks of such famous works as Girl Before a Mirror or Three Musicians.
Reproduction of such works of art doesn’t do them justice; they are things that must be seen in person.
In particular, Picasso’s She-Goat, made from leftovers he found in the town dump, is something that should be viewed up close.
Marie-Anne Lapraino and Marie-Laure Pilon, second-year art students from the University of Montreal who took in the exhibit during opening weekend, agreed.
“It was very good. It was nice to see (the works) in real life and not just on the slides,” says Lapraino.
But the two women were also slightly disappointed. Lapraino explains, “We thought we would see more (examples) of the cubism and the collages.”
Not all of Picasso’s work is at the gallery. Many of his more famous pieces are on display elsewhere.
For example, Les Desmoiselles D’Avignon, which is said to have launched modern art, is still on display in the New York Museum of Modern Art, where this exhibit originated.
The National Gallery’s presentation is still quite spectacular. Picasso’s vivid use of shape, bright colors and textures is breathtaking. Particularly his cubist work is something that should not be missed.
The exhibit will be in Ottawa until July 12, when it moves on to Los Angeles.