Probing Picasso

Although Patricia Leighten first became interested in Pablo Picasso's work while she was studying art in England a long time ago, she notes that her interest greatly increased when she attended a retrospective on Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1980.

While in graduate school at Rutgers University, Leighten was able to go the museum and study his work very closely. She says she had a revelation about what he was doing in his collages, about which she will speak at a lecture Sunday at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The lecture will spotlight Picasso and other artists featured in the "William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism" exhibition. Leighten graduated from Rutgers in 1983, and she is now a professor of art history and visual studies at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Leighten says her revelation was recognizing that Picasso was commenting on political issues in his collages. At the time, she had been reading a history book about the left wing movements in Paris just before World War I, and Picasso's collages from 1912 brought in those issues by gluing newspaper onto the works in a way that "made those articles on political subjects completely readable," she says.

"He doesn't state a position, but he simply plays with the controversial aspect of it," she says.

Her revelation made her decide to study the political movements in which Picasso was involved for her dissertation, but because this subject was so broad, she focused on his involvement with the anarchist movement from his earliest years in Barcelona up to World War I in Paris. During her lecture Sunday, she will "talk about his politics and the political culture that he thrived in."

One work she will discuss is Picasso's "Boy Leading a Horse," which is a 1906 painting with nothing obviously political about it, Leighten says. She says the magnificent work features a nude boy and a nude horse in a very nondescript landscape.

"I'm going to show how the ideas expressed there actually do relate to a notion of a better society than the one that he found himself in at the beginning of the 20th century," she says.

Another piece she will focus on is "The Architect's Table" by Picasso, which she describes as "really one of his great Cubist works." She notes that Cubism has political overtones. Although she will mostly focus her talk on Picasso, Leighten will also discuss works by other artists in the exhibit, such as Edgar Degas, Andre Derain and Juan Gris.

After the lecture, there will be a book signing for her second book, "The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris." She says the book looks at the larger culture of artists who were involved with the anarchist movement. She adds that many modernist artists were attracted to anarchism, and it relates to why their art developed to a level of pure abstraction so quickly.

Three points Leighton says she hopes people take away from the lecture are: That the world in which Picasso and other Parisian modernists lived was a highly polarized and politicized society; that Picasso and others were drawn to the anarchist movement both for its criticism of government corruption and its positive vision of a more egalitarian future society; and that Picasso's art responds to this culture, and he expresses its ideas in different periods of his art in various ways.