Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou

This poster featuring Buste de femme (1931) was produced in 2011, in conjunction with Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York. The exhibition, curated by Picasso biographer John Richardson and Marie-Thérèse Walter’s granddaughter, art historian Diana Widmaier-Picasso, gathered more than eighty paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints inspired by Walter, one of Picasso’s favorite models and enduring passions. Spanning the years 1927 to 1940, the show revealed Picasso’s secret muse in a dramatic new light in depictions that metamorphosed her athletic form in endlessly inventive ways.

This sculpture, which was described by critic Blake Gopnik as “a work of tragic genius,” is a plaster bust of Walter that at once celebrates and brutalizes its subject.