lump is german for rascal
This photograph shows Picasso walking through the streets of Saint Tropez with his 2nd wife Jaqueline Roque and their friends, circa 1957-8 The group is returning from a lunch for which Picasso would have paid with a cheque. He knew the cafe owners would never bank the cheque but frame it and keep it instead!
Picasso’s companions include the Toreador Luis Miguel Dominguin and his young wife the Italian actress Lucia Bose. Lucia Bose had been Miss Italia and in the late 60s appeared in Fellini's Satyricon. Behind Picasso walks his son Paulo with their dachshund, Lump.
In 1957 the Life photographer David Douglas Duncan stopped off at Villa La Californie on his way home from an assignment in Afghanistan. He was driving a Gullwing Mercedes and accompanied by his dachshund, Lump. During his sojourn chez Picasso, he produced several notable books on the master but perhaps none more intimate than this
The blurb
One spring morning in 1957, veteran photojournalist David Douglas Duncan paid a visit to his friend and frequent photographic subject Pablo Picasso, at the artist’s home near Cannes. As copilot alongside Duncan in his Mercedes Gullwing 300 SL was the photographer’s pet dachshund, Lump. Photographer and dog were close companions, but Duncan’s nomadic lifestyle and his other dog — a giant, jealous Afghan hound who had tyrannized Lump — made their life in Rome difficult. When they arrived at Picasso’s Villa La Californie that magical day, Lump decided that he had found paradise on earth, and that he would move in with Picasso, whether he was welcome or not.
This joyous, previously untold story of artist and his dog offers an uncommonly sensitive image of Picasso. Lump was immortalized in a Picasso portrait painted on a plate the day they met, but that was just the start.
In an explosion of forty-five paintings inspired by Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, Picasso replaced the impassive hound in the foreground with jaunty renderings of Lump. Now, as a gift from the artist to his hometown as a youth, all of those luminous canvases are the centerpiece exhibition in the Picasso Museum of Barcelona. Fourteen of the paintings are reproduced here in full color, juxtaposed with Duncan’s dramatic and intimate black-and-white photographs of Picasso and Lump, bringing full circle the odyssey of a lucky dachshund who found his way from reluctant road warrior to furry, super-stretched icon of twentieth-century art.
I love the look of horror on Jaqueline's face here!
Douglas Duncan and Picasso in a Duncan photo overpainted by Picasso
0 comments:
Post a Comment