Bonjour Picasso!

“For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography.”
—Pablo Picasso

Bonjour Picasso! opens wide the doors to La Californie, the artist’s villa near Cannes in the south of France, where he lived from 1955 to 1961. David Douglas Duncan’s photographs provide rare insights into Picasso’s life at home—dining with his wife Jacqueline, twirling a jump rope for his children Claude and Paloma, beginning work on a new painting. Artist friends Georges Braque and Jean Cocteau are present in photographs, drawings and prints.

Picasso’s former loves, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, are also here, in paintings and prints both delicate and shocking. A richly colored landscape captures the deep green palms and fresh blue sky of nearby Vallauris, site of the famous Madoura Pottery, where Picasso created the elegant figured vase on view here. His images of minotaurs and fauns make ancient myths new again.

Pablo Picasso was a deep and complex man, who revolutionized 20th-century art through his Cubist paintings, collages, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, stage sets and costumes. He never stopped inventing and was a legend in his own time. Today, he is one of the most important artists of all time.

Welcome to his private world!

This exhibition is supported by the Campbell-Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions.