Art Basel Rides the Picasso Wave with Masterpieces and Some Critique

The museum world has made it all but impossible to forget that this year marks the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death. There are the 50-some exhibitions organized by the governments of Spain and France, and then there are offbeat events like “It’s Pablo-matic,” the polarizing show at the Brooklyn Museum co-curated by standup comedian Hannah Gadsby.

To say that Art Basel has gotten the Picasso memo is a bit redundant—there are Picassos of varying quality and value at the fair every year—but this year brings a few extra-notable paintings, an insightful installation, and some critique.

Eye-catching Picassos at the fair include Le peintre et son modèle (1963–64) at Helly Nahmad, a depiction of the artist’s second wife Jacqueline Roque that Artnet reported has an asking price of $11 million. Over at Acquavella Galleries is Le peintre et son modele dans un paysage (1963), also from the Jacqueline era.

The most elaborate homage to Picasso at Art Basel, however, is at the honorary booth of the Fondation Beyeler (dealer Ernst Beyeler was one of the founders of Art Basel back in 1970), where curator Raphael Bouvier has installed two masterpieces in a highly unusual manner. One of the paintings, the Cubism-era Femme assise dans un fauteuil, 1910, hangs comfortably on a wall, but the other one, Femme (Epoque des ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’), 1907, is still in its crate. Nearby, a hyper-realistic, life-size sculpture of a wall painter by Duane Hanson is arranged such that it looks as though he is not quite finished painting one wall of the booth. (The two Picassos come from the Beyeler’s collection; the Hanson is on long-term loan from the artist’s estate.)

“We wanted to give an insight into the work in progress behind the creation of an exhibition,” Bouvier told ARTnews at Art Basel’s VIP preview on Tuesday.

Bouvier said he was impressed with another Picasso-related piece at Art Basel, one that is easy to miss if you are not paying attention. In the Art Unlimited section of the fair, London gallery Hollybush Gardens has the installation work A Fashionable Marriage, a tableau from 1986 by the Zanzibar-born, England-based artist Lubaina Himid in which figures from William Hogarth’s iconic 18th century painting Marriage a-la-Mode: The Toilette are co-opted to a comment on racism and sexism. In the background are pictures Himid cribbed from Picasso, including his famous portrait of Gertrude Stein—from 1905, when Picasso was drawing inspiration from African masks—and some images from the later bullfighter painting, onto which Himid collaged words from a newspaper headline: “CUT OUT THE BULL.”

One thing is clear: for better or worse, 50 years after his death, the most famous artist of the 20th century continues to inspire.