By Linda Dormont
Correspondent

This art lover has only good things to say about “Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris,” the new blockbuster exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Simply put, it is a privilege to see this show.

As Timothy Rub, director and CEO of PMA, reminded his audience at a recent press event, this is actually the third Picasso retrospective mounted by our great Philadelphia museum. The first was in 1958 (all Picasso); the second, 1992 (Picasso’s still lifes); and now we have a choice selection of 214 works by Picasso and his colleagues, who all lived and worked within the artistic milieu of Paris, France, in the early decades of the 20th century.

“Picasso’s the heart of modern art, but he couldn’t do it alone,” said exhibition curator Michael Taylor during a tour of the show, which is organized in thematic categories. “Picasso: The Early Years in Paris,” for example, encompasses the artist’s “Rose Period,” including “Woman with Loaves” (1906), an oil painting influenced by prehistoric Iberian cave paintings. This, we were told, was the first “Picasso” to enter the PMA collection.

“Picasso and Braque: Inventing Cubism,” in Gallery 2, will be perhaps the most popular stop in the exhibition. These essentially priceless paintings and works on paper cover the period between 1907 and 1914, when the Spanish artist and his friend George Braque (1882-1963), shared both technical and philosophical ideas in an artistic collaboration/competition that changed the course of Western art forever.

“Cubism introduced a code in which people and objects were depicted through autonomous lines and interlocking planes that operate according to their own logic,” said Taylor. “Picasso and Braque flattened, dissected and recomposed forms into a myriad of essential shapes and planes, then showed them from different angles.”

Picasso’s “Still Life with a Violin and a Guitar” (1912-13), for one, is a quintessential Cubist work. Employing graphite, plaster, oil paint and material on canvas, the artist created surfaces that brought outside materials into the interior of his painting, forcing the viewer to see his images from different perspectives and points of view. Like many Cubist paintings, the images are really there; you just have to discover them as you study the work before you.

Braque’s contributions to the genre involved similar “found materials,” such as newspaper clippings, wallpaper scraps and, in his case especially, trompe l’oeil surfaces, usually overpainted or etched with complementing images.

Juan Gris’ “Still Life: The Table” (1914) shows another master of collage and still-life at the top of his form. In this work, the artist incorporates diagonal, vertical and horizontal lines with an oval, while a newspaper headline, “Le Vrait et le Faux,” plays with the idea of artifice and ambiguity in the depiction of everyday objects on a simple wood table.

Taylor explained that Cubism was a revolutionary break from the accepted principles of Western art that had been with us since the Italian Renaissance. In other words, before these artists created a new way to view the world, works of art were expected either to represent or refer to the reality of the natural world. Cubism allowed the artist to deconstruct this world and rearrange its parts into whatsoever forms his or her imaginations or ingenuity desired.

Americans were part of the story from the beginning. First there were American art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein, who “discovered” Picasso, as well as Cezanne, Matisse and other, more neglected artists. Their famous salons on the Left Bank were also an entryway for American expatriate artists, including Arthur Beecher Carles, Charles Demuth and Max Weber, into the Parisian artistic community that the Steins encouraged and supported with their buying power.

The exhibition includes stunning period photographs by photographers such as Carl Van Vechten, Man Ray and Albert Eugene Gallatin. They show not only the Steins at the height of their influence, but Picasso, Braque, Miro and other artist/icons of the era working in their studios against a background of their paintings and sculptures.

Speaking of sculptures, it was a thrill to encounter Constantin Brancusi’s marble sculpture, “Mademoiselle Pogany III” (1931), atop its hand-carved oak base backed by a wood arch inspired by the folk art of the artist’s native Romania. One of only three extant versions of Picasso’s bronze sculpture “Man with a Lamb” (1943-44) was also here, as well as Jacques Lipchitz’s bronze masterpiece “The Prayer” (1943). Both these later works relate to the death and sacrifices entailed by World War II, when artists such as Picasso and Braque were still creating, using their talents to express their anguish about a world that seemed to have spun out of control.

It would be impossible in this space to do justice to the art in this exhibition. Suffice it to say, how many art lovers out there have seen Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)” in all its original glory? This writer has seen many reproductions of the work, but never got the point. In reality, it is beautiful! One can actually see the forward movement of a human figure in the full joy of descent.

You just have to see it for yourself!

“Picasso & the Avant-Garde in Paris”

continues at Philadelphia Museum of Art,

26th Street & The Parkway,

Philadelphia, PA 1910.

through April 25.

Info: 215-763-8100 or

www.philamuseum.org.