Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris

Through April 25, $20, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org.

by A.D. Amorosi

visual art

Bringing forth everything from violent color schemes and overwrought angles to his peculiar use of the Minotaur, Pablo Picasso's time spent in France between the World Wars was his mightiest. The influence that Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres had on Picasso in turn inspired fellow painters and friends (Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Juan Gris), all of whom blossomed into the mixed bag that was the early-20th-century School of Paris. This group's collectively fresh sense of objectivity took on the pains of war and the wont of sex with a brisk measure of symbolic emotionalism — or rather the symbolism that developed first into Synthetic Cubism. On the dusky Picasso side of the ledger, that translates into pieces such as Self-Portrait with Palette (1906) and Three Musicians (1921). But leapfrog over Picasso's long shadow to find the delight of Jean Metzinger's Tea Time (Woman with a Teaspoon) (1911) and Marc Chagall's kaleido-collaged Half Past Three (The Poet) (1911). Even to those familiar with these legendary avant-gardeners, this exhibition's unveiling of 200-plus paintings, drawings and sculptures promises to peel like an onion and blossom like the first buds of spring.