John Szoke Gallery at TEFAF New York, Spring 2017

TEFAF Maastricht, the world’s most important art fair, opens its second New York event on May 4 (through May 8) at the Park Avenue Armory. While TEFAF’s first New York iteration opened last October and featured fine and decorative art from antiquity to 1920, the spring fair is dedicated to modern and contemporary art and design. John Szoke Gallery of New York (booth 41), specializing in works on paper by Pablo Picasso and Edvard Munch, is one of only a few print and drawing dealers among the 93 exhibitors.

Both Picasso and Munch were unusually innovative printmakers and each produced a substantial graphic oeuvre. It was impossible for the gallery to show anything like a comprehensive sampling of their work in a single booth. Szoke has thus focused the display on a selection of extraordinary works that represent some of these artists’ most intensely personal reflections on love and human relationships. The gallery will show 14 prints and drawings by Picasso spanning his entire career, and ten prints by Munch, all works from his most productive artistic period between 1894 and 1902. Apart from his famous etching, Le Repas frugal (1904), the prints by Picasso on view here are all portraits of individual women. An exquisite early pencil drawing shows the daughter of the Symbolist poet and critic Charles Morice in a modest, pensive pose (1906); however, most of the other sheets depict the lovers, mistresses, and wives whose features Picasso tended to document obsessively during his notoriously fraught and complex relationships with them. Visage de Marie-Therese (1928), for example, is one of the artist’s earliest portraits of his young mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and his first masterwork in the medium of lithography; the close cropping and framing of the image allow for an intimate focus on the exquisite details of his lover’s face. Francoise Gilot is the subject of the austerely beautiful Françoise (1946), a lithograph printed by Fernand Mourlot, with whom Picasso began exploring the technique more extensively, while Portrait de Jacqueline (1959) is a striking artist’s proof of a linocut printed in colors showing Jacqueline Roque, his second wife. But the star in this context is a fine impression of La Femme qui Pleure I (1937, seventh and final state), Picasso’s monumental master print in drypoint, aquatint, and etching, in which he revisits one of the central figures of the painting Guernica of the same year, his iconic response to the human suffering inflicted by the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. While the artist’s primary mistress during this period, the tempestuous Surrealist photographer Dora Maar, is thought to have been the model for this figure, some scholars suggest that she is an amalgam of various women in his life. The woman’s hand on the left, with its long red-painted nails, are thought to represent those of Maar while the bitten-down nails on those of the right hand might be those of Marie-Thérèse Walter.

If Picasso frequently portrayed these women as melancholy or teary, all but undone by his wicked ways, the artist’s masculine posturing in his own images of himself with women suggests that he nevertheless saw himself to as a winner in the game of love. By contrast, Munch’s prints here indicate that love for the gloomy Norwegian was typically charged with anguish, rejection, and despair. In Vampire II (1895–1902), based on four earlier paintings of the subject, he boldly combines lithograph and woodcut in an erotic image that references his tormented experience of love at the behest of a threatening female (it is not clear if she is kissing or biting the man she enfolds). In Ashes II (1899), a lithograph based on a painting of the same name, a defeated male figure cowers in the corner of the image next to a standing woman, her disheveled hair and open bodice pointing to a recent sexual encounter (on another impression of this print, Munch inscribed the words “I felt our love lying on the earth like a heap of ash”). But perhaps the most arresting of the artist’s prints on view here is Jealousy II (1896), again based on a painting of the previous year. The figure gazing bleakly out at the viewer on the left is Munch’s friend, the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski; in the right background, Munch shows the writer’s wife, Dagny Juell, with whom he had an affair, nude under an apple tree, with a clothed male figure identifiable as a self-portrait of the artist himself. While he dramatically conflates their story with that of the biblical Adam and Eve, in this powerful image he nonetheless chooses to foreground the jealousy of his rival.