Pablo Picasso
Harlekin mit gefalteten Händen (Arlequin, les mains croisées), 1923

Alfred Flechtheim and Pablo Picasso

Picasso’s position in modern art is unique. Through the creative restlessness that led him to invent a number of new forms of artistic expression, he had a lasting influence on his contemporaries and successors. When he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1906/07, the key work in Cubism, he had already been through his so-called Blue and Rose Periods of artistic independence. He lived in Paris from 1904 onwards where he met the art dealers Wilhelm Uhde and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Both viewed the unfinished Demoiselles in Picasso’s studio. Through their intervention, Alfred Flechtheim met the artist and others around him a little later. Even when Picasso changed his style over the years, Flechtheim’s love of Analytic and Synthetic Cubism did not diminish and offered works by Picasso and his contemporaries Georges Braque and Juan Gris for sale in his galleries.

When Picasso started to absorb the influences of Surrealism in the 1920s and gradually moved away from Cubism, he chose Paul Rosenberg as his dealer in Paris. Flechtheim was only offered individual works from his more recent phase.

Flechtheim did not live to see the creation or exhibition of the painting Guernica of 1937, a milestone in modern art along with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In this monumental work, Picasso succeeded in making a statement about political events of the time in a previously unknown and evocative way through the medium of art. The years that followed, especially the war, noticeably impaired his artistic work. However, after the war, a new phase of tireless activity started which brought forth numerous new creative works that lasted until his death in 1973.