There are ongoing exhibitions on Pablo Picasso’s startingly contemporary works at the Pace in Palo Alto, California, and Arkas Art Centre in Izmir, Turkey. This month, a show on the way he worked with paper opens at London’s Royal Academy of Arts while a museum dedicated to him (and his contemporary Giacometti) arrives in Beijing in June. There’s no doubt of the Spanish painter/ sculptor’s enduring reverence within the art world, but now the founder of Cubism cements the same name for himself in ready-to-wear. Moschino, for one, transposes his masterpieces like Femme au beret et a la robe quadrillee (Marie-Therese Walter) (1937) onto ’80s-tinged cocktail dresses while the debut of Satoshi Kondo at Issey Miyake features abstract prints of humans embracing done in a vein reminiscent of his impasto technique. Over at Marni, similarly bold strokes and colours lend a cool joie de vivre to otherwise rustic smocks and fit-and-flare dresses. Whoever said that an artist can’t also play muse?
This story first appeared in the January 2020 print issue of FEMALE.