Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L'amour fou Poster

This poster reproduces Pablo Picasso's Deux femmes enlacées (1936) and was produced in 2011 for the exhibition Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L'amour fou at Gagosian's West 21st Street gallery in New York.

The exhibition was curated by Picasso biographer John Richardson and by art historian Diana Widmaier-Picasso, Marie-Thérèse Walter's granddaughter. It brought together more than eighty paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints made between 1927 and 1940, tracing Picasso's decade of work inspired by Walter, one of his most important models. The painting reproduced here shows two entwined female figures, a composition tied to the artist's Le Sauvetage series, which depicted Walter's near drowning and rescue.

Picasso (1881–1973) painted Walter obsessively between the late 1920s and 1940, moving between tender portraiture and forms bent toward abstraction. The Gagosian exhibition placed this canvas within that sustained body of work rather than presenting it as an isolated image.