National Gallery in Prague - Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art Collection of Prints and Drawings

Permanent Exhibition of French 19th and 20th Century Art Veletržní Palace - 3rd floor

March 11 - July 7, 2009

The exhibition is held under the auspices of His Excellency Arturo Laclaustra Beltrán, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Spain in the Czech Republic.

Curator: Olga Uhrová

Main partner of the NG: UniCredit Bank
Patron of the NG: SYNOT TIP
Main media partner: Hospodářské noviny
Partners: ZENOVA, FIDES, Neternity
Media partners: Classic FM, AnoPress, ČRo 3 - Vltava

Picasso's extensive oeuvre of graphic prints was created throughout the artist's life, reflecting all of his various shifts in style and amounting to more than two thousand works in total. This part of Picasso's overall body of work is represented in the Collection of Prints and Drawings of the National Gallery in Prague by a seminal collection dating to the years 1904 - 1968, ranging from the early Blue and Rose periods to the artist's late work. The collection enables us to gain a relatively representative insight of the artist's use of the means of expression of this medium.

The first part of the exhibtion of Pablo Picasso's prints from the years 1904 - 1905, presented at an earlier date (November 18, 2008 - March 1, 2009), focused on the artist's earliest prints from the collection entitled Les Saltimbanques, created after Picasso arrived in Paris in 1904. Later, in 1913, the collection was published by gallery owner Ambroise Vollard.

The second part of the exhibition, Pablo Picasso's prints from the years 1909 - 1968, opens with works from the years 1909 - 1912, rendered mostly in drypoint - "Still Life with a Bowl of Compote", 1909, "Two Nudes", 1909 - and pointing to the late works of Paul Cézanne. The artist's own stylization, however, is more radical and dramatic. "Still Life with a Bottle", 1912 (drypoint) belongs among the pinnacle achievements of Analytical Cubism. Both prints were published in Paris by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in 1912.

The collection on exhibit also includes Picasso's 1914 collage "Still Life with Glass, Bottle and Card", which indicates Picasso's and Braque's effort at re-establishing a connection between the world of their art and that of reality, which had been severed by Analytical Cubism. The Classicist etchings of the 1920s represent Picasso's return to figural themes, as exemplified by "Three Bathing Women" of 1921. The 1930s in Picasso's work are defined by elements of Expressionism and Surrealism - such as in "Female Head", 1933.

Further development in Picasso's graphic oeuvre occurred particularly in the years 1948 - 1968. Picasso began staying more often in the south of France, experimenting with graphic techniques and litography. He would frequently revisit mature Classicism, citing works by old masters such as Diego Velázquez, El Greco, or Lucas Cranach, in order to re-interpret them as a peculiar and altogether original form of metaphor - as exemplified by "David and Bathsheba", 1947 (litograph).

In Paris, Picasso collaborated with the printed Fernand Mourlot, a collaboration which in the years leading up to 1962 gave rise in rapid succession to 350 lithographs. Among them is also the "Head of a Bull", 1948, and "Woman with a Hairnet", 1949.

In 1953 Picasso mastered the technique of the color linocut, as in "Bacchanalia with a Bull", 1959, but even his works in this new medium represent some of the masterpieces of 20th century prints in the variety of their form, line and surface.

It is in this context that the exhibition would also like to commemorate the figure of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979), the Paris-based gallery owner, who opened his first gallery in the Rue Vignon in 1907 and subsequently became a proselytizer of the young Cubist artists - Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. His gallery was attended by collectors focusing on modern art, such as Hermann Rupf, Wilhelm Uhde, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Sergey Shchukin, Ivan Morozov, and also, from as early as 1910, the Czech collector Vicenc Kramář (1877 -1960), who ranked among the most eminent pre-war collectors of Cubism.

In 1922, returning from exile in Switzerland, Kahnweiler opened his next gallery in Paris, this time named after his associate, André Simon. Misfortune continued to plague him also during the Second World War. Because of his ethnic origin, he was forced just before the outbreak of war to formally assign his Galerie Simon to his niece, Madame Louise Leiris. In 1957 the Louise Leiris Gallery succeeded in renewing cooperation with Picasso, who granted the gallery the exclusive right to represent his work.

In 1968, the National Gallery in Prague received two pictures, Picasso's Rape of the Sabine Women, 1962, and Fernand Léger's Two Lovers in a Landscape, 1952, from an anonymous French donor; in fact none other than Kahnweiler. Several years later, one year before Picasso's death in 1972, Kahnwailer also donated to the National Gallery in Prague a collection of 15 prints from the years 1948 - 1968.

Olga Uhrová

National Gallery in Prague - Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art
French 19th and 20th century art, Veletržní Palace, 3rd floor
Dukelských hrdinů 47, Praha 7

Exhibition ticket grants entry to the entire permanent exhibition of 20th and 21st century art at Veletržní Palace (including the Collection of French 19th and 20th Century Art on the 3rd floor).

Entrance fee to the exhibition is part of the entrance to the permanent exhibition.
Entrance fee: 160,- CZK
Reduced: 80,- CZK
Family ticket: 200,- CZK
REDUCED ENTRY AFTER 4 PM.

Open daily excerpt Mondays, 10 am - 6 pm.

www.ngprague.cz

Contact information for journalists: Petra Jungwirthová, spokesperson for the National Gallery in Prague
mob.: 606 166 513, e-mail: jungwirthova@ngprague.cz