Focus on Le Repos (Picasso) and explore the Exhibition.
1932 was the year of Picasso's first retrospective exhibition, which was held at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris and Kunsthaus in Zurich. It was as a result of this exhibition that Khokhlova realised that her husband had been having a long-term affair, after witnessing the many canvases that Picasso chose to exhibit featuring intimate portraits of Walter. This marked a transition in Picasso's artwork, which now openly showcased Walter as his muse. In an exhibition catalogue, Robert Rosenblum wrote about the importance of this event in Picasso's artwork.Marie-Thérèse, now firmly entrenched in both the city and country life of a lover twenty-eight years her senior, could at last emerge from the wings to center stage, where she could preside as a radiant deity, in new roles that changed from Madonna to sphinx, from odalisque to earth mother. At times her master seems to worship humbly at her shrine, capturing a fixed, confrontational stare of almost supernatural power; but more often, he becomes an ecstatic voyeur, who quietly captures his beloved, reading, meditating, catnapping, or surrendering to the deepest abandon of sleep.
Kunsthaus Robert Rosenblum