Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou

This poster featuring Deux femmes enlacées (1936) 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 art historian Diana Widmaier-Picasso, who is Marie-Thérèse Walter’s granddaughter, 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, it revealed Picasso’s secret muse in a dramatic new light in depictions that metamorphosed her athletic form in endlessly inventive ways.

This painting of two entwined female figures recalls the subject of the artist’s Le Sauvetage series—the dramatic rescue of Walter from nearly drowning—and is tinged with a sense of both inertia and eroticism.