Bisected Man

Just had to show you the "artifact" Picasso provided to the Art Institute. After all, it is the equivalent of reading a great writer's rough draft, so it is right not to display it under normal circumstances.

For me it was not just the interest of a favorite painting that might have been very different from the way I have always known it. More than that I can best say in a different format.

A POEM:

IN THE CLOSET 47 YEARS

To begin,

When Picasso painted his pink masterpiece
Mother and Child it was 1921, and the young
Family actually had the father included, squat-seated
Along the left margin, solid, bearded, curly,
Masculine, stolid; forming a cup-shape composition
Alongside the familiar Madonna-like mother and child.
However,

When Picasso completed his pink masterpiece
He had removed the man and restretched the canvas
Without him, with only traces of the bearded face
Visible on the new tacking margin.
The remainder was cut off for storage
By the artist himself in some symbolic closet:
Hair, beard, one leg, one thigh,
One buttock -- like half of a broasted chicken
Pulled off the spit and stacked in the corner.

Meanwhile,
She and the child were loved and admired for 47 years husbandless
Until Picasso located and donated the fragment to Chicago
During the tumultuous bloody year of 1968.
After nearly a half-century in the closet, but
Now on occasional display coupled with the
Ex-wife, the half-man is on separated display,
Still faceless and nearly-still-forgotten.

To conclude,

The feminine side of Picasso clearly must have
Moved the artist to lop off the masculine side of the masterpiece
So bluntly: No visible blood was shed during the amputation.

New Rooms for Old Friends

Fernand Leger's 1927 Composition in Blue and Pablo Picasso's 1921 Mother and Child are among several old friends which now have new rooms. Perhaps the best part of the exhibit rooms, to me, were seeing these old friends in their fresh, bright new digs. It was almost a housewarming party for these and other paintings looking young and, well, modern.

Leger has always seemed to me to be an under-appreciated cubist. His work is at times as intriguing and creative as Picasso's. On the other hand, it seems to me that the cubist Picasso is seen by some as the only Picasso; I have always loved the warm color and soft round shapes in Mother and Child.

By the way, in about 1968 Picasso visited the Art Institute and remarked that he had a fragment of this work that he had removed during the composition. He had cut the left hand edge of the painting and narrowed the work, and he had saved a portion of the image. The artist graciously offered it to the Art Institute and it is now in their files (but not on display). It was the apparent father, sitting to the left and making the composition a "cup" shape. Not all the male image is on the remnant, as the canvas was restretched; X-ray examinations have shown part of him still there, under the image and under the frame.

While the remnant is not shown here, and should not be generally shown, it was on display for a period of time in a Picasso display.