Picasso, Lydia & Friends, Vol. V at Les Yeux du Monde

Opening Reception: Friday, September  13 • 5-7pm

• Pablo Picasso
• Lydia Gasman
• William Bennett
• Anne Chesnut
• Dean Dass
• Rosemarie Fiore
• Sanda Iliescu
• Megan Marlatt
• David Summers
• Russ Warren

Les Yeux du Monde proudly presents the fifth installment of an exhibition series orchestrated to honor the memory and scholarship of acclaimed Picasso scholar, beloved former professor of Modern Art at the University of Virginia, and sublime painter, Lydia Csato Gasman.

The exhibition features work by both Lydia Gasman and Pablo Picasso, the artist at the center of her scholarship, along with eight other contemporary artists whose work or thinking they inspired: William Bennett, Anne Chesnut, Dean Dass, Rosemarie Fiore, Sanda Iliescu, Megan Marlatt, David Summers, and Russ Warren. A portion of the proceeds from this show will benefit the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies, the non-profit organization that LYDM Founder Lyn Bolen Warren and Art Historian Victoria Beck Newman co-founded to preserve and disseminate Gasman’s scholarship.

Lydia Gasman’s groundbreaking Ph.D. dissertation, Mystery, Magic, and Love in Picasso: Picasso and the Surrealist Poets, 1925-1938 revolutionized the thinking around Picasso’s art. It was reverentially reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Picasso biographer, John Richardson, who noted, “Dr. Gasman did more to unlock the secrets of the artist’s imagination than anyone else.”

In her obituary for Gasman in The New York Times, celebrated art critic Roberta Smith praised Gasman’s contributions to the field and remarked:

“Fluent in several languages and equipped with a formidable memory, Dr. Gasman redefined Picasso studies. Most scholars had either analyzed Picasso’s art purely in terms of formal innovations and aesthetic progress or offered one-dimensional readings of his work in relation to his life story. Dr. Gasman found a middle way.

One of her more sensational achievements was to track down Marie-Thérèse Walter, the great love of Picasso’s life, in the south of France in 1972 and, over a period of several days, to conduct the frankest, most detailed interview about their life together.

But Dr. Gasman’s most far-reaching accomplishment was to tie the imagery of Picasso’s paintings to the life of his mind: his reading (especially the poetry of the Surrealists), his writings and notebook jottings, his psychic state and interest in all forms of mysticism, magic and ritual.”

Please join us in celebrating the remarkable accomplishments of Lydia Csato Gasman, and the extraordinary art of Pablo Picasso, William Bennett, Anne Chesnut, Dean Dass, Rosemarie Fiore, Sanda Iliescu, Megan Marlatt, David Summers, and Russ Warren.