Koch Foundation Gallery

Featuring Picasso's Seated Woman in Red Hat

The Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science has opened the recently renovated Koch Foundation Gallery featuring the permanent home for Pablo Picasso’s Seated Woman in Red Hat. The exhibition space includes several Picasso prints and one ceramic work by the artist also in the Museum’s permanent collection.

Seated Woman in Red Hat was created in the mid-1950s at the Malherbe glass studio in France. Picasso worked with the glass artisans to reinterpret some of his most famous paintings in the glass media named gemmail, a glass technique in which small shards of glass are layered and fused in together with a clear adhesive and then fired. The gemmail is a portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977), the French mistress and model of Picasso from 1927 to 1935, and the mother of his daughter, Maya Widmaier-Picasso. It is based on an oil portrait by Picasso completed in 1934.

The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), working with the Malherbe Studio of glass artists in France, created 50 pieces during 1954-1956 and is said to have hailed this technique as a new art form. In return for the Malherbe’s expertise and collaboration, Picasso gave one half of the collection to the Malherbe family and kept one half for himself. The pieces in Picasso’s portion of the collection were sold to private collectors throughout the world.

The glass work in the collection of the Evansville Museum was purchased by the celebrated industrial designer Raymond Loewy (1893-1986) during the 1950s. He donated it to the Museum in 1963. Mr. Loewy’s connection to Evansville was through the Museum’s Director Siegfried R. Weng.