Famous Artists: What the Studio Tells

This famous shot by Jerome Brierre for Getty Images shows Pablo Picasso in his studio with movie star Brigitte Bardot during the 1956 International Cannes film festival.  Studios can provide a glimpse into the artist’s persona.

The evidence of his almost maniacal creativity litters the room, with a reproduction of his most scabrous cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – a scene from a bordello in which the whores regress into tribal witches – propped up at its exact centre, along with a sketch of a chunky odalisque, ceramic vessels with ripe female contours and the portrait of a matriarch who has jarring, angular facets instead of a face. –Guardian newspaper article

It is often the case that artists being photographed lose the animation that creates their art and pose stiffly, like Marc Chagall (above) in his studio in Vence, France, 1955

In the early 1960s Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning and his wife, Elaine, also an artist, decided to move to East Hampton, New York, where they had on occasion been weekend guests of Jackson Pollock.  This photo, part of a spread in Architectural Digest, shows the organized chaos of this artist’s workplace, and his approach to painting.