Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks
Cover of Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks, 2023 © Pace Gallery
New York – Pace announced last year its presentation of Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York, marking the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The exhibition was on view from November 10 to December 22 of 2023; this exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Madrid (FABA). Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks will offer a unique and intimate view of the ways in which Picasso worked, tracing the evolution of his observations and ideas into plans for his compositions across painting and sculpture.
Photo Courtesy of Pace Gallery, Pace Publishing
Pace has been extremely fortunate to have worked with the Picasso family mounting extraordinary exhibitions over the last 40 years. This collaboration with FABA will mark Pace's thirtieth show featuring Picasso's work and its eighth major solo presentation dedicated to the artist. As part of the gallery’s presentation, Pace Publishing will produce a new book focused on the sketchbooks in the upcoming exhibition, which will be available to purchase onsite and online upon the show’s opening in November.
Photo Courtesy of Pace Gallery, Pace Publishing
The sketchbooks featured in the upcoming show at Pace in New York—which will be displayed chronologically—date between 1900 and 1959, spanning almost every period of Picasso’s career. These artworks will be contextualized by a rich body of research about the events of Picasso’s life, assembled by curatorial advisors and Picasso experts Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn. Additionally, monitors installed atop the tables in the gallery space will show images of all the pages from the sketchbooks in the exhibition, with each monitor running on its own loop to allow visitors to experience every sketchbook from cover to cover. A film about the making of the artist’s War and Peace murals in the French city of Vallauris will also be presented in the exhibition alongside his drawings for the project.
Offering a window into Picasso’s imagination and creative process, each of the sketchbooks in the show is connected to well-known bodies of work by the artist, from his youthful experimentations in Spain and France around 1900 through the revolutionary developments of his time in Paris and his final years in the South of France. These sketchbooks—exhibited alongside related ceramics, paintings, photographs, and archival materials—shed light on Picasso’s approach for many of his major works, including his iconic painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Dora Maar in an Armchair (1939), part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and his large-scale War and Peace murals, completed in 1952. Sketchbooks in the exhibition also feature pages of poetry by the artist, who often wrote in a lyrical, stream of consciousness style in both Spanish and French.
Photo Courtesy of Pace Gallery, Pace Publishing
Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks will open nearly 40 years after Pace’s presentation of Je Suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso, a landmark exhibition organized by Arne and Marc Glimcher at the gallery’s East 57th Street space in 1986. Je Suis le Cahier, the first exhibition to introduce Picasso’s sketchbooks to the world, traveled to numerous art institutions internationally following its run at Pace, including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, and the Kunsthaus Zurich. Pace and Atlantic Monthly Press published a catalogue—edited by Arne and Marc Glimcher—devoted to the exhibition, and this book remains a key resource on the artist.
Pablo Picasso was perhaps the most influential artist of the 20th century. Though Spanish, Picasso worked mainly in France, and his first mature phase in Paris was his Blue Period, followed by the Rose period. With Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he pioneered the style of Cubism without which modern and contemporary art would be radically different. Another of his most enduring images, the iconic Guernica, immortalizes the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. With Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Surrealism, and the incorporation of “primitive” imagery, Picasso and his contemporaries Georges Braque and Marcel Duchamp challenged the trajectory of the arts and rebuilt the context in which future generations of artists practiced.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
For more information about the book and the exhibit, visit here. For more information about other titles from Pace Publishing, visit here; please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here for more information about past, current, and future exhibits. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
