*Until 30 August portraits by Pablo Picasso of Sylvette painted at Vallauris in 1954 are on view in PICASSO: PEACE AND FREEDOM at Tate Liverpool.

Lydia Corbett

For her tenth exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery, Lydia Corbett (née Sylvette David) has brought together watercolours which in a variety of ways explore themes which have haunted her work across the years, brought now to a new mellowness by a sense of spiritual urgency, a wish to share her positive and optimistic outlook with anyone who will listen. Probably it is this overriding, affirmative message in her current work which gives to her considerable range of subjects and themes the impact of a coherent ensemble, the sense of a strong, harmonious whole.

Impressionable and flighty as Lydia Corbett must have been at the time when, still under twenty, she became for some months an important figure in Picasso’s inner circle on the Riviera. Inevitably, individual incidents and memories from this overwhelming time have remained strongly with her and continue to crop up in her work. In the aftermath of this period, however, she was to mature in a different direction altogether.

Separated from the struggle for dominance around Picasso – which her own appearance in Vallauris had gently interrupted for a while - Corbett now sought a spiritual equilibrium, eventually finding this in large part through her own painting. It was another painter from that original circle who came to influence Corbett, the Russian-born Marc Chagall, who typically once said: ‘when I paint, I pray’. As with Chagall, so her own paintings have a strong emotional dimension. References to music feature frequently, speaking of her continuing search for some form of embracing harmony. It is a gentle, caring world of still lifes, flower imagery, spring promise, autumnal abundance, set against a changing background sometimes provided by the villages and landscapes of the West Country where she now lives, at others by the unmistakable contours of Provence where she still spends much of her time. More than ever, mothers, children, angels loom large in these latest wistful, meandering compositions. An impulsive, almost coquettish quality, combined with an irrepressible wish to celebrate life’s smaller achievements, along with a strong sympathy for the animal world may also account for references in her work to the life of St Francis, of whom Chesterton wrote, ‘a certain precipitancy was the very poise of his soul’, a phrase which in many ways sums up the spontaneous, eccentric, unpredictable charm which is so much a part of Lydia Corbett’s enduring appeal. 

Biography

LYDIA CORBETT (née Sylvette David) born Paris 1934.  She grew up in an artistic environment (her English mother being a painter, her father an established dealer in contemporary art), though she received no formal training.

In the 1950s she met Pablo Picasso at Vallauris on the Riviera.  Following the artist’s separation from Françoise Gilot, his meeting with Lydia (then still Sylvette) introduced a new phase in his work and she became the model for a cycle of some forty paintings and drawings (the Sylvette cycle) as well as many ceramics and a series of folded metal sculptures.

In 2003 in Picasso et les femmes at the Chemnitz Museum, Germany many of these works were shown in a section of the exhibition devoted to the Sylvette cycle. In 1968 Lydia Corbett moved to England and has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1989.

On the occasion of the Tate Gallery’s 1993 exhibition of Picasso’s sculpture and paintings, a documentary film on Picasso and Lydia Corbett was shown on BBC2. In 1991 she exhibited in Japan and in 2004 in the United States.

One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007 and 2009.

*Until 30 August portraits by Pablo Picasso of Sylvette painted at Vallauris in 1954 are on view in PICASSO: PEACE AND FREEDOM at Tate Liverpool. New watercolours by Lydia Corbett (nee Sylvette David) will be on veiw at Francis Kyle Gallery in September 2010.

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