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Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn

Jozefacka, Anna, with Lauren Rosati (2023)

This title is in print.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (18)
Exhibition
Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn
September 14, 2023–January 14, 2024

In 1910 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) embarked on a decorative commission for the Brooklyn residence of artist, collector, and critic Hamilton Easter Field (1873–1922), whom he had met in Paris the year before. The artist’s brief called for as many as eleven panels to line the walls of Field’s home library and form an enveloping aesthetic whole. The proposed room offered Picasso his first opportunity to move beyond easel painting and apply his radical Cubist style to decorative painting formats of challenging size and proportion. Working from his studio in France, the artist completed a group of figure and still life compositions, but the commission was never realized.

The exhibition is the first to present this little-known chapter of Picasso’s Cubist period and provides an occasion to consider Cubism in relation to decorative painting conventions and architectural space. It brings together six extant canvas panels and related works, as well as archival material on Field, Picasso, and the site of the commission.