Wandering around Bruges in July, we spotted a poster advertising an improbable-sounding art exhibition: Picasso in Bruges. We were strolling through the courtyard of Oud Sint Jan, Old St. John’s Hospital, an 11th-century hospital established to care for sick pilgrims and travellers. It’s one of Europe’s oldest surviving hospital buildings.
Today part of the hospital complex holds the Hans Memling museum which we intended to visit, but overlooked after being sidetracked by the Picasso poster. The diversion proved worthwhile though, as the exhibition turned out to consist of drawings and lithographs – all of them from a private collection – not just by Picasso, but also by the likes of Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and others. The exhibition was pretty extensive, spreading through a series of galleries on two floors that overlooked the beautiful hospital courtyard.
There were few oil paintings in the exhibition, though one of the first works we encountered was – Laura Knight’s La Grenouillere, painted in 1910. La Grenouillere was a riverside restaurant by the Seine a few miles outside Paris that had been frequented by Monet and Renoir. The name literally translates as ‘frog pond’ but doesn’t refer to ponds or frogs as such. At the time ‘frog’ was a slang term used by young men to refer to girls. Though that might have been one reason for the place’s attraction for the two painters, in the summer of 1869 both were drawn to paint the sunlit reflections on the water and the shades of greens and blues of the trees and the river. The two paintings would be amongst the first Impressionist landscapes.
I don’t know why Laura Knight chose to paint an almost exact replica of the central detail of Monet’s painting. Perhaps as a tribute: in 1907, Laura Knight and her husband moved to the artists’ colony in Newlyn, Cornwall where she began painting in an Impressionist style. This small work must have been painted there.
My favourite work in the exhibition was this small drawing in coloured chalk by Claude Monet called simply Campagne. There was another work by him, too – a pastel, sketched from the balcony of the Savoy in 1901, of Waterloo Bridge. Monet stayed at the Savoy three times after the hotel was recommended to him by Whistler. He used pastels and tan-coloured paper, bought on Charing Cross Road, after his paints, brushes and canvasses were delayed on the way from France.
There were several lithographs by Joan Miro on show, including a series entitled Terres De Grand Feu that had been produced for an exhibition that opened at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1956, before travelling to New York.
Matisse made hundreds of drawings, original prints and illustrated books. A biography of the artist at www.henri-matisse.net sums up the extraordinary creativity of the last 14 years of his life in these words:
This last art form included what Matisse called his ‘flower books’. These were beautiful objects in themselves, inspired by the tradition of the Medieval manuscript. Faces, body parts, lovers, fruit and flowers reveal Matisse’s exquisite arabesque lines, along with an extraordinary sense of colour. For the celebrated Jazz for instance, the images are characterized by brilliant colours, swirling lines and arabesques form series of jewel-like shapes, in themes which range from the circus to female forms amongst the sea. Matisse made his images from coloured stencils based on paper cut-outs.
In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he started using a wheelchair. […] However, Matisse’s extraordinary creativity could not be dampened. Une seconde vie, a second life, was what he called the last fourteen years of his life. Following and operation he found renewed and unexpected energies. This new lease of life led to an extraordinary burst of expression, the culmination of half a century of work, but also to a radical renewal that made it possible for him to create what he had always struggled for: “I have needed all that time to reach the stage where I can say what I want to say.”
With the aid of assistants he set about creating cut paper collages , often on a large scale, called gouaches découpés. By manoeuvring scissors through prepared sheets of paper, he inaugurated a new phase of his career. The cut-out was not an abdication from painting and sculpting: he called it “painting with scissors.” Matisse said, “Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated.” Moreover, experimentation with cut-outs offered Matisse innumerable opportunities to fashion a new, aesthetically pleasing environment: “You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk… There are leaves, fruits, a bird.”
And so to Picasso. Introduced by one of Robert Doisneau’s iconic photographs of the artist, the core of this exhibition consisted of prints from the 1950s. They included Dancer (1954), deftly created from a few coloured crayon strokes; Danse (1956), that creates a sense of joyous freedom out of a few black squiggles, two lines of scribble and two patches of coloured scrawl; and an autographed postcard of two hands, one giving, the other receiving a gift of flowers – again, the essence of simplicity, but vibrant and intensely emotional. There was also a magnificent little bronze statuette of a bull.
Then there were the doves. Picasso painted the dove as a symbol of peace repeatedly after the Second World War, reflecting his membership of the French Communist Party and support for the Mouvement de la Paix. In October 1944, less than six weeks after the liberation of Paris, Picasso, aged 63, joined the French Communist party. Shortly after, in an interview for L’Humanité, Picasso claimed that he had always fought, through the weapons of his art, like a true revolutionary. But he also said that the experience of the second world war had taught him that it was not sufficient to manifest political sympathies under the veil of mythologising artistic expression. “I have become a communist because our party strives more than any other to know and to build the world, to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy.”
In 1950 he was awarded the Lenin prize for his involvement in the Mouvement de la Paix, for which he had designed the emblem of a dove. His propaganda value as a prestigious artist was incalculable, and he generously donated time and money to the Party and associated organisations. He marched with the Front National des Intellectuels, but his contributions mostly took the form of paintings he donated for sale to raise money for related charities.
The matter of Picasso’s support for the Communist Party, even after Hungary in 1956, remains problematic. But it’s probably true to say that what really motivated Picasso politically, from Guernica onwards, was a deep commitment to peace, international understanding and equality. He avoided using overtly communist symbolism in his work and refused to work in the socialist realist style favoured by the party.
At the height of his involvement, Picasso toured Europe to promote the communist-supported Mouvement de la Paix, gave large donations to many communist causes, and produced a huge quantity of emblems, posters and portraits for communist publications on demand. His dove became a ubiquitous symbol of peace in the post-war era.
Also on display were preparatory drawings that Picasso made for the chapel in the town of Vallauris dedicated to peace. The drawings were prefaced by this panel:
Right up until the end of his life Picasso remained committed to world peace. Works that reflect the horror of war and oppression on the population are numerous. In 1951, to celebrate his seventieth birthday, the town of Vallauris organised a party in the castle chapel of the city. Pablo Picasso came up with the idea of painting the chapel with the theme of war and peace. This project was both political and artistic.Politically, Picasso was still very involved with the Communist Party as well as being Vice-Chairman of the World Peace Movement. Artistically, Pablo Picasso wanted to leave his mark by painting “his” chapel as other artists had done before him. In fact he really wanted to follow in the steps of Matisse who had painted the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, and Chagall who had painted the Chapel of Our Lady of All Graces d’Assy. However, contrary to Matisse and Chagall, Picasso left out any religious characters and painted a Temple of Peace. The actual work was completed very quickly but was preceded by about 300 preparatory drawings that Picasso drew between April and September 1952.
Picasso highlights
And what of Bruges? Well, what is there to add to the volume of words that have been written about this perfectly-preserved medieval town? We walked from one end to the other, arriving eventually on the banks the main canal that encircles the town, connecting it to the still economically-important port of Zeebrugge. Every vista beguiles the eye, but perhaps the best was the last, just before returning to the railway station: the begijnhof, a section of the town reserved for the Beguines, lay sisterhoods of the Roman Catholic Church, founded in the 13th century in the Low Countries, communities of widows or elderly unmarried women who vowed to serve God by tending the poor and sick, though without retiring from the world and taking vows like nuns.
We queued for frites in the main town square, ambled through the antiques market, visited the lace museum, lay on the grass beneath the turning blades of the still-working windmills on the canal bank, and drank tea across from the town hall as the horse-drawn tourist carriages driven by women in straw hats trotted past over the cobblestones.
Bruges gallery
That's How The Light Gets In 
I hope you found time to see Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, Gerry! We detoured there for a flying visit en route to Paris from Calais! We both want to re-visit Bruges with more time to spare. I particularly enjoy your artsy blogs!
I’m afraid we didn’t see the Madonna – we missed the Memling museum in the same complex as the Picasso exhibition as well. There’s never enough time. Have to go back!