Pablo Picasso’s The Spring Fontainebleau, 1921.short train ride from the center of Paris, the town of Fontainebleau is a picturesque tourist destination, widely loved for the rich forest that surrounds it and its magnificent, opulent palace. The town’s cemetery holds the remains of the writer Katherine Mansfield, among others, and its palace was contributed to by French monarchs throughout the middle ages, including Sun King Louis XIV.
Show curator Anne Umland recalls arriving at the MoMA in the 1990s and being struck by the differences between the paintings. “As a young art historian I just thought, ‘Wow, what was he doing that summer!?’ The fact that he painted such different-looking pictures side by side in the same space within the course of three months undid every notion of art history I’d ever been taught.
In a much smaller gallery that is roughly equal to the proportions of Picasso’s apartment in Fontainebleau, Umland places representations of all four paintings so that showgoers can get a sense of just how strange it was for the great cubist to be working on these enormous canvasses in such a compressed space. To add to the weirdness of the scene, Picasso himself measured 5ft 4in tall, so these 7-foot canvasses towered over him.
The year 1921 was an interesting time for Picasso to be working on a big, neoclassical statement, as artistic standards were in flux after the great war. Originally trained as a classical painter, Picasso was deeply conversant with the conventions and methods of the most traditional painting.
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