COLUMBUS — An exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work at the Columbus Museum of Art explores the unsettled genius of the master as he navigated through different techniques during the period surrounding World War I.

Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change showcases more than 50 paintings, photographs, costumes, and drawings by Picasso that demonstrate a mix of cubist and classical styles. The exhibition will be shown at the museum through Sept. 11 and covers a period from before the war started in 1912 to after the war in 1924.

“The fact that Picasso is going back and forth from cubism to more figurative drawing … this restless creativity that constantly explores, constantly looks, constantly experiments — that is the heart of the show,” said Nannette Maciejunes, executive director of the museum on Broad Street in Ohio’s capital. “This [period] is the first time he does it, but he does it throughout his career. From now on he will never again do one style of painting.”

The exhibition is a collaboration with the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and was curated by the CMA’s chief curator, David Stark; Martha Lucy, consulting curator at Barnes, and guest curator Simonetta Fraquelli of Milan, Italy, a specialist in early 20th-century European art.

The Columbus exhibit was inspired by a masterwork owned by the museum: Still Life with Compote and Glass, created by Picasso in 1914-15. The museum wanted to do more than a still life show depicting Picasso’s career, and Stark said it seemed fitting to choose the period around the first world war, which is in the midst of its 100th anniversary. Picasso and French artist Georges Braque had already developed the cubist movement in Paris, and by the end of the exhibition’s period, Europe was being introduced to the surrealist movement, Stark said.

“This is a good place in terms of Picasso’s style,” Stark said. “He had already been working in Cubism for about five years, and by the time you hit 1912, in the so called late cubist style, he was being playful, experimenting with different techniques and introducing different kinds of shapes and innovative materials into his paintings.”

Pieces in the show were loaned by major European collections, including from three Picasso museums in Europe, the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and the Musee National Picasso in Paris; American collections; and private collections, with major support from private collector Ferdinand Howald, who loaned much of his collection of American and European art to CMA and other museums.

The show is a story that navigates visitors through different artistic and personal moments in Picasso’s life. In addition to paintings that depict the fragmented technique the artist is known for, visitors will see in his drawings and paintings both major and slight transformations from a strict cubist style to classical and traditional realist form.

“It isn’t just this simple juxtaposition between cubism and realism. There are all these iterations, there are these distortions and there is something highly realistic … he’s just moving on that continuum,” said Maciejunes.

The side-by-side paintings, Pierrot, which was loaned to the show by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Harlequin with Violin, loaned by the Cleveland Museum of Art, are good examples of Picasso’s vibrations between drastically different styles. Both done in 1918, they depict the same figure in different moods, but while the melancholy Pierrot clown figure is painted in a more realistic style, Picasso paints Harlequin in clear cubist style.

Pencil drawings of friend Max Jacob and wife Olga Picasso, done in 1917 and 1918 respectively, are extremely realistic in nature, while the 1915 drawing, Reclining Woman, is highly fragmented.

A 1920 oil on canvas called Studies shows an array of techniques by Picasso, his different artistic forms compartmentalized almost like a modern-day photo collage.

“A lot of people don’t understand that Picasso was able to paint like a very skilled traditional painter when he was a teenager and that the decision to adopt and embrace an abstract style was conscious and the decision of an artist in full command of all the traditional painting techniques,” Stark said. “He was drawing on skills he had within him, and was using them at the time in his career and the time in history when the time seemed right to express himself in this more traditional mode.”

Picasso worked in other media, and visitors will get to see at this exhibition costumes the artist created for the 1917 avant-garde ballet, Parade, and rare, delicate drawings and portraits in charcoal and pencil. 

Accompanying the show is the exhibit, Pablo Picasso: 25 years of Edition Ceramics, an installation of 40 ceramic pieces created by Picasso with other French potters between 1947 and 1971.

Included in the gallery is a fascinating array of photographs taken by Jean Cocteau, the writer of the Parade ballet, of Picasso, Olga, and others having a fun day at different Paris locales on Aug. 12, 1916. The photos, which were unearthed in the 1970s, were taken the day Cocteau convinced Picasso to design the costumes for his ballet.

Another room of the exhibit displays the works of artists that influenced Picasso in some way, both negatively and positively, including Braque, Henri Matisse, and Diego Rivera. Picasso considered Matisse an equal in artistic talent, and so there was much competition there, while Picasso saw Rivera as less talented, and so their rivalry was less so, Stark and Maciejunes said.

Many of the works in the exhibition, such as The Guitar, a piece painted by Braque in 1917 and 1918 — just a few years after he was wounded in action in the war and had brain surgery — depict artist struggles within wartime.

Unlike Vincent Van Gogh, who thoroughly chronicled thoughts and concepts behind his work, Picasso was oftentimes cloaked in mystery. Art historian theories behind Picasso’s variation in technique are many, including that Picasso was responding to a movement during the war to condemn Cubism as a German movement that was a threat to French culture

Although Picasso, who was of Spanish descent, couldn’t have bought into that theory since he, himself, developed Cubism along with Braque, he might have been aligning himself with a more acceptable means of expression, Stark said. 

A lesser theory was that Picasso’s wife, Olga, wanted the couple to align themselves with Paris’ upper class, and to that end, thought he would be more comfortable in social circles if his art reflected a more traditional style, Stark said.

But the theory that sticks most with art historians was Picasso’s resistance to status quo, the idea that the master artist would not — and could not — stay within artistic restraints.

“Sometimes the most radical thing an artist can do is to go backwards, or in this case taking what seems to be a more traditional route is almost the shocking and radical thing he could do. So not only does he start producing these exquisitely realistic and traditional looking works that could have been produced by, say, a 19th century French artist, he continues Cubism at the same time, and that is what is even more revolutionary,” Stark said.

“When an artist changes his style, very often or maybe more often than not, he leaves the old style behind but Picasso continued both simultaneously.”

Picasso lived to be 91, dying in 1973.

For more information on Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change, go to columbusmuseum.org.

Contact Roberta Gedert at: rgedert@theblade.com or 419-724-6075 or on Twitter @RoGedert.

First Published July 31, 2016, 4:00 a.m.