The Curator's Eye: Two Kinds of Women

This month, Gunnar Nordstrom wanted to do something special at his eponymous gallery – a show of illustrious artists: Picasso, Miro, Chagall, Renoir, Dali. The big guns.

“Creating an exhibit of this kind isn’t as easy as meeting with an artist in representation and discussing the next exhibit’s direction,” he explains. “Modern masterworks are not readily available; they’re rare and often expensive.”

But hung together, they can shed illuminating light on one another, as the Picasso and Miro shown above do in the show. “They share historical similarities and juxtaposed iconography, and they’re by two important Spanish artists. Picasso’s lovely 1922 drypoint etching Femme au Miroir is a sitting nude, but reserved – much different from later works by Picasso also on display. His later women got a little pornographic. As he aged, women started finding him grotesque, so a lot of the later work is harsh on women.” But he was a still-dashing forty in 1922, adored as the world’s first true celebrity artist. His 1922 woman “holds a mirror and gazes into it, daydreaming of beauty, fashion and the future.” 

In Joan Miro’s 1969 Fashion Frenzy, says Nordstrom, “the figure becomes abstracted and movement is integral, not static or posed. The frenzy of fashion, color, design, movement and energy are all captured here with broad strokes, delicate lines and interpretive suggestion. Miro said, ‘My characters have undergone the same process of simplification as the colors. Now that they have been simplified, they appear more human and alive than if they had been represented in all their detail.’ 

Pablo Picasso, Femme au Miroir (Woman looking into a mirror), 1922, drypoint etching, 7 x 5.125 inches, edition of 50

FOCAL POINTS

Price range for Modern Masters works:
$5,000–$35,000

Top price paid for a Miro:
$17 million

Weight of Miro’s World Trade Center tapestry destroyed on 9/11:
6,000 pounds

Value of Picasso painting damaged by Vegas billionaire Steve Wynn when he put his elbow through it:
$139 million

Name Wynn gave himself after doing so:
“The Clouseau of collectors”

Number of Picassos coming to Seattle Art Museum from Paris in October:
Over 150