Picasso at the Berggruen Museum is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik
The Daily Pic: In 1936, the Spaniard captured elegance without settling for it.
(Collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Museum Berggruen © 2013 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo by Lucy Hogg)
Picasso's "Dora Maar with Green Fingernails" is now on view in the renovated home of the Berggruen collection, one of the state museums in Berlin. The space is so tidy and bon-bourgeois that it comes close to denying the risk championed by its modernist pictures: daring visual experiments are almost reduced to being tasteful decoration. In this 1936 Picasso, however, you see how the Spaniard managed the trick of combining a winning and accurate vision of bourgeois elegance, and a radical style that stays in tension with it. This is elegance viewed and understood by an art that refuses to settle for it.
For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
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