'Private' face of Picasso shown

(ANSA) - Rome, October 16 - Works that Picasso kept alongside him throughout his entire life and by which he was inspired in different ways as time passed will be the center of an exhibition from November 10 until May 6 at Genoa's Palazzo Ducale. The show is the latest in a long string of ones marking the centenary of the Spanish genius's trip to Italy.
    There will be over 50 works from the Picasso Museum in Paris, from which the artist did not part up until his death. Entitled 'Picasso: Masterpieces from the Paris Picasso Museum', the exhibition is promoted by the Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, the municipality of Genoa and the Liguria regional government. It was organized by Mondomostre Skra and the Paris Picasso Museum and is part of the broader 'Picasso-Mediterranee' project started this year by the Paris museum that will run through 2019 and in which over 60 institutions are involved through shows on the "stubbornly Mediterranean" work of the artist. Curated by Coline Zellal, the Genoa event will use famous masterpieces and numerous photos to lead exhibition-goers along the artistic path taken by the Catalan genius, documenting the various periods of his career and styles he embraced and reinvented from the early twentieth century through the 1970s. At the same time, it will showcase the works he held most dear and the locations that inspired him. From preparatory sketches for 'Demoiselles d'Avignon' until the works of his final period, the exhibition will cover over half a century of experimentation, bearing witness to the extraordinary variety characterizing Picasso's paintings, in which his private life (relationships, love, homes) always played a major role. Thus, the rare photographs from the Bateau-Lavoir atelier show Picasso's social life in Montmartere and not only the sketches for 'Demoiselles d'Avignon'.
    In Rue des Grands-Augustins, the painter lived with Dora Maar and there are dozens of portraits of the woman plastering the walls of the atelier, while in the 'La Californie' villa in Cannes, the photos of his children Claude and Paloma closely echo the portraits he painted of them in the same period. In Mougins, the painter posed alongside his works inside his home and garden. The ten sections of works showcased at Palazzo Ducale decorated the walls of his homes and ateliers, were taken with him when he moved and constitute a true laboratory of shapes.