Picasso and the Allure of Language

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
August 20, 2009–January 3, 2010

Throughout his life, Pablo Picasso had close friendships with writers and an abiding interest in the written word. Building on the rich collection of artworks and materials at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Gertrude Stein Archives at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, this exhibition is the first to survey the relationship between art and literature, and painting and writing, in Picasso's work. Displaying approximately 80 objects, the exhibition begins with an examination of Picasso's early associations with writers such as Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob, and concludes with the postwar period.

Publication
Picasso and the Allure of Language is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. For more information, please visit the Gallery's Bookstore.

Exhibition and publication organized by Susan Greenberg Fisher, the Horace W. Goldsmith Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Made possible by an endowment created with a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional endowment support provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; Ketcham Family Memorial Fund; George and Schatzie Lee Fund; Carol and Sol LeWitt Fund; Leah G. and Allan C. Rabinowitz, Yale College Class of 1954, Fund; and Edward Byron Smith, Jr., Family Fund; and with support provided by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Image: Pablo Picasso, Dice, Packet of Cigarettes, and Visiting-Card, 1914. Collage. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. © 2009 Estate of Gertrude Stein. Used with permission of Estate of Gertrude Stein. © 2009 Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery is a major traveling exhibition that draws upon the Gallery’s renowned collections of American art from the colonial era to the Gilded Age. The exhibition begins its national tour at the Speed Art Museum, in Louisville, Kentucky, and travels to the Seattle Art Museum and the Birmingham Museum of Art, in Alabama. The exhibition is timed to correspond to the closing of the permanent collection galleries of American art during the renovation of Swartwout and Street Hall. Rather than putting these treasures in storage, the Gallery is continuing its educational and public service missions by sharing its rich collection of American art with new audiences around the country.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness explores the creation of a distinctive American visual language over two centuries. Through the stroke of a paintbrush, the distinctive spout of a flagon, hand-coloring on a print, or carvings on wood, the 230 objects in the exhibition reflect the diverse religious, cultural, and artistic heritages of their makers. Not bound by the traditions of their original cultures, these artists and craftsmen gave fresh energies to the objects they created in the New World. The exhibition includes icons of American art, such as John Trumbull’s original series of eight Revolutionary War scenes, traveling for the first time as a group since the artist presented them to Yale in 1832; Winslow Homer’s Old Mill (1871); Albert Bierstadt’s Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail (ca. 1873); and Thomas Eakins’s John Biglin in a Single Scull (1874). The Gallery’s unparalleled collections of American decorative arts are represented by colonial gold objects such as the only surviving gold thimble; masterpieces of furniture by Alexander Roux and Henry Connelly; the earliest pair of American candlesticks, created by America’s first native-born silversmith, Jeremiah Dummer; and flamboyant silver objects made by Tiffany & Co. By including objects of daily life such as ceramics and a child’s chair, this exhibition reveals the rich material texture of the American experience. Collectively, these paintings, prints, photographs, and decorative arts present a vivid portrait of a young country as it struggled to invent a nation and to define itself geographically, politically, socially, and artistically.

Related Publication

This exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, with an introduction by David McCullough and essays by Jon Butler, Joanne B. Freeman, Howard R. Lamar, and Jules David Prown, and copublished by the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press, available in hardcover and paperback at the Gallery’s Bookstore.

Exhibition and accompanying publication organized by Helen A. Cooper, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, with Robin Jaffee Frank, the Alice and Allan Kaplan Senior Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture; Elisabeth Hodermarsky, the Sutphin Family Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; and Patricia E. Kane, the Friends of American Arts Curator of American Decorative Arts, all of the Yale University Art Gallery. Made possible by generous funding from Happy and Bob Doran, B.A. 1955; Carolyn and Gerald Grinstein, B.A. 1954; Mrs. William S. Kilroy, Sr.; Mrs. Frederick R. Mayer; Nancy and Clive Runnells, B.A. 1948; Ellen and Stephen D. Susman, B.A. 1962, for their special support of the audio tour; the Eugénie Prendergast Fund for American Art, given by Jan and Warren Adelson; and the Friends of American Arts at Yale, and supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council of the Arts and the Humanities. Image: John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, 1786–1820. Oil on canvas. Yale University Art Gallery, Trumbull Collection