Exhibitions

Lydia Corbett, Sylvette David ‘Sylvette With African Mask in Vallauris’, 2024, 76 x 61cm

8th March 2024 – 6th April 2024

‘Encounters with Picasso & the Making of Art’ Friday 8 March 16:00, a talk with the artist & Lucien Berman. Then join us for the preview on Friday 8 March 17:30 onwards, all welcome!

Meet the artist Saturday 9 March 11:00 – 13:00.

www.penwithgallery.com

Lydia Corbett, also known as Sylvette David and known to art lovers all over the world as “The Girl with the Ponytail”, is Pablo Picasso’s last living muse. 

Born in Paris in 1934, Sylvette was invited by Picasso to his studio in Vallauris at the age of nineteen after he caught sight of her the previous year through an old pottery window and became fascinated by her.  Picasso internalised her as his muse, in drawings and a series of lithographs, and she regularly posed for him from that fateful meeting onwards.  The meeting would alter Sylvette’s life. Sylvette David was for Picasso, his last, unobtainable love.

For many years Lydia Corbett has divided her time between homes in Devon and Provence. A hugely talented and still prolific artist in her own right, Corbett’s works tell the story of a woman who shared Picasso’s artistic life for a time and intertwined it with her own, continuing to develop her strong artistic voice.

The exhibition at the Penwith Gallery is one of Corbett’s most comprehensive, bringing together early and late works, the watercolours and oils of the past thirty years alongside ceramics which the artist has gathered and repurposed, using them as a blank canvas for her self-portraits and recurring motifs. Many of the works attest to a return to source – memories of Picasso, of the inner life of objects. Corbett recaptures Sylvette as a girl, the subjects of her art through a process of assimilation and reduction – a vase of flowers, an old kettle, a church, the horses, the hammocks, the dappled sunshine of Camaret in Provence and the Mediterranean Sea.

Lydia Corbett is a visionary artist, no less visionary for her failing eyesight, as her subject is focused on inner vision, inner presence.  Lydia Corbett’s Retrospective Exhibition at the Penwith Gallery is curated by the artist along with Lucien Berman, Jason Lilley and Tom Leaper.

My Life’s Inspiration:
Pablo Picasso, Lydia Corbett & Alice Corbett

At Soho Home, Duke of York Square, SW3 4LY
25 September – 8 October 2023

Private View: Wednesday 27th September, 7pm – 9pm

In celebration of the 50th Anniversary year of Picasso’s death, David Simon Contemporary presents an exhibition of original works on paper by Pablo Picasso alongside paintings and ceramics by his last surviving muse, Lydia Corbett, known as “The Girl with the Ponytail”, with ceramics by her daughter, Alice Corbett, at Soho Home, Chelsea.

Lydia Corbett, née Sylvette David, was the subject of more than seventy paintings and sculptures by Picasso, after meeting in 1954. Recalling memories of her life as a young woman, she has learned a new way of working – with her ‘inner eye’. Working directly onto canvas and wooden panels, she creates bold and powerful compositions in oils, often with
charcoal. The exhibition also includes the collaborative achievements with her daughter, Alice Corbett, working together in ceramics. Lydia transfers images of memories and her imagination in a direct way by working with her hands, using the sense of touch and feel as well as vision.

Although best known for her paintings, ceramics have played an important role in Lydia Corbett’s life from a young age, working in clay before she even started painting, as the daughter of a potter. Early works are completely sculptural, typically defining little statuettes. These often became the subjects of her paintings, like props or characters upon
the stage. The latest series of ceramics is a remarkable enterprise with her youngest daughter, Alice Corbett – an established fine art ceramicist. Working in white stoneware, these particular pieces are often slab-built vessels and coiled sculptural forms. After the clay has become leather-hard they become three-dimensional ‘canvases’ for Lydia to develop
with the decorative designs. Faces appear in her familiar style, some awake and some asleep with closed eyes. This is perhaps a reference to the artist connecting with her ‘inner vision’.

Complimenting this body of work is a collection of works on paper by Pablo Picasso, from the 1950s and 1960s, including scarce editions of linocuts and etchings. These are all original works and signed by Picasso.

This significant exhibition coincides with the launch of a major book by Lucien Berman on Lydia Corbett and her position within Picasso’s work. The publication, Sylvette David / Lydia Corbett: Painter and sculptor in clay focuses on Corbett’s ceramic oeuvre across her lifetime. This cloth-bound hardback limited edition book is available to be pre-ordered through the gallery and will be signed by both the author and the artist.

The art critic and writer, Edward Lucie-Smith, says of Lydia Corbett’s work, that “it arrives at a particularly crucial moment in the story of Post-Modern art. Lydia Corbett’s work is better known to art history under the name Sylvette David as the young model who obsessed the ageing Picasso. Unlike his other muses, there was no sexual relationship. Good reason, maybe, why she survived the Minotaur of the Modern Movement so successfully.

As Picasso’s likenesses of her make clear, the Sylvette-now-Lydia who obsessed the ageing master for this brief period in the immediately post-war years represented a new generation of free-spirited young women, innocently living life to the full. Sylvette was the archetype of the girls of that time. Which, of course, is why she fascinated the artist. It’s not too much to say that, while he appropriated her, in the years that followed she successfully stole herself back. Which of them was truly responsible for creative theft? Given the circumstances, it is difficult to say.

Lydia Corbett’s art holds up a mirror to what has been a rich and complicated bohemian life – husbands, lovers, children, grandchildren. Making art, rather than just inspiring it, came gradually. Whatever their source, they often have great charm. I enjoyed looking at them, and, yes, I enjoyed meeting her. She’s still a muse in old age.”

EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH

Notes on Lydia Corbett:

Lydia Corbett was born in Paris in 1934 to an influential art dealer based in the Champs Elysees, and his wife, a studio potter. She was brought up on the Île du Levant, a small Mediterranean island near the French riviera. Between the wars the coast from Collioure to Saint-Tropez had already embodied a classical Arcady for painters. Picasso in his studio at the château Grimaldi had created art throughout the summer of 1946 culminating in painting La Joie de Vivre. Corbett has assimilated her own experience of the light of the Côte d’Azur, into her paintings. At the age of nineteen Lydia had moved to Vallauris in the south of France with her mother who worked at a pottery studio in the town. It was here that she had
a chance encounter with Pablo Picasso in 1954.

‘Picasso was a comic, he liked laughing and joking and behaving like a bit of a clown – a clever one.’ ‘I love to paint figures quickly. He taught me a lot without saying a word’. She would sit for him in an armchair while Picasso painted her in his simple studio, surrounded by many of his own pots. Francoise had left Picasso by this time and he was lost without his wife and two children. He told Sylvette that he found her company as a model of great consolation to him and gave her a portrait of her. Picasso gave Lydia a huge amount of confidence in herself as a painter, although it was not until she was in her forties that she started to paint, once her children had grown up.

The relationship between Picasso and Sylvette David is still alive in their work. Our understanding of Picasso’s great portraits of Sylvette, is enlivened and enriched by this exchange with the muse turned artist. This dialogue continues through time and art, where the restlessness of modernism is the abiding presence behind almost all her art of the last
decade.

Corbett moved from Paris to England in 1968 where she pursued her own painting career, presenting twelve solo exhibitions in London. In 1991 she exhibited in Japan, and in the USA in 2004. In 2014 an exhibition of her watercolours were shown at Theater Bremen, concurrently with a major exhibition of Picasso’s work inspired by her, ‘Sylvette, Sylvette, Sylvette’ held at the Kunsthalle Bremen. These two exhibitions were the subject of a film produced by ARTE broadcast in England and Germany. Exhibitions with David Simon Contemporary 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2022. Lydia Corbett’s paintings are in the permanent collections of Musée National Picasso, Paris and the Vatican Collection.

Notes on Alice Corbett:

Alice Corbett, born in London, spent much of her childhood in Devon, growing up in a world of creativity, as a third-generation ceramicist.

She graduated with a degree in Interior Architecture at Kingston University, Alice’s interests lead her to explore the world of ceramics. Continuing her studies at Richmond College, her passion for clay and its applications has brought her journey into the realm of ceramic sculpture, with a focus on form and texture. Her work is collected internationally.

Alice, whilst brought up with the knowledge of the relationship between her mother and Picasso, has long been inspired by Picasso’s modernist architecture contemporaries especially Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. These influences, along with her connection with nature – long beaches with pebbles, shells, rocks, boulders, and cliffs – ever-changing colours and textures, by woodlands and forests, silver birches and trees that have lived for centuries are reflected both in her individual works as well as her collaborative work with Lydia.

In 2021 Alice began working on ceramics with her mother in collaboration. Alice concentratied on the forms and Lydia on the decorative design and finish. These ceramics are very sculptural and made in white stoneware clay. The structures are either slab-built forms or coil pots. With the ceramic forms built, Lydia draws into the clay in her characteristic style, scribing and incising. Lydia then adds some of the glazes and the works are finished by Alice before their final firing.

About David Simon Contemporary:

The gallery, based in Castle Cary Somerset, was established in 2006 and represents some fifty contemporary artists through a programme of monthly exhibitions, with a balance of established and emerging painters, sculptors and ceramicists. It has represented Lydia Corbett since 2016 and Alice Corbett since 2021. In addition to its stable of living artists, the gallery represents a number of artists’ Estates and deals in 20th Century and 21st Century Masters, particularly original works on paper. Notable examples since 2020 are exhibitions of Picasso works on paper, a School of Paris exhibition, including works by Dali, Dufy, Miró, Chagall, Matisse, Braque and Magritte; and St Ives Modernists which included original paintings and signed works on paper by Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Ben Nicholson and William Scott in 2021 and 2023.

David Simon regularly stocks signed, original prints and drawings by Modern Masters including Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron, William Scott, Henry Moore, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso.

Lydia Corbett/Sylvette David
The Dance of Life

2nd April 2023 – 29th April 2023

At: Fosse Gallery Fine Art,
The Manor House, The Square, Stow on the Wold, Cheltenham,
Gloucestershire GL54 1AF
01451 831319
mail@fossegallery.com

You may view the exhibition in full at:
www.fossegallery.com

01451 831319