Following nine exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery since 1989, the French-born painter Lydia Corbett's newest works hold a quality at once lively and tranquil, a happy serenity manifest as much in her choice of subjects calling for celebration as in her flowing, allusive technique attributable perhaps in part to her reaching, at 72, the same age as that of her mentor Pablo Picasso when they first met each other in the spring of 1954.

Even today Lydia Corbett’s exuberance, which finds expression in a considerable range of subjects, echoes the unusually broad gamut of approaches Picasso adopted in treating her as a subject, from portrait drawings in a restrained, neoclassical idiom through to painting in his the full synthetic Cubist manner.  In the new watercolours homage is shown not to Picasso alone but also to other painters whose work has given her inspiration such as Gustav Klimt or Frida Kahlo, portrayed eying the viewer in a suitably bizarre manner from inside a ceramic vase. Other works evoke classical myths (Perseus, Medusa, a pensive faun).

With mellowing has come into Corbett’s work a crispness of memory. In her characteristic meandering approach a still life featuring flowers or food as its nucleus radiates to include representations of friends or literary heroes, or her cherished Madonnas and children, framed by glimpses of familiar landscapes in Provence or sometimes simply by the fish motifs set in a sea of golden scales so cherished by her admirers in Japan.  There are undoubtedly surreal elements in Corbett’s paintings, where brushwork in watercolour with a distinctly English flavour contrasts with a graphic approach owing more to Cocteau or Chagall; but chiefly it is a resolutely spiritual world of reverie which the artist shares with us in her gentle celebration of life’s pleasures. Affection, good humour and playfulness shine out of these lyrical compositions in which Corbett revisits and distils experiences of more than sixty years, many of these arising from those unforgettable months when she was absorbed into Picasso’s circle on the French Riviera of the mid-1950s.

Biography

LYDIA CORBETT (née Sylvette David) was born in Paris in 1934. Her childhood was spent in an artistic environment, (her mother being a painter and her father an established dealer in contemporary art) though she received no formal training.

During the 1950s Lydia Corbett met Pablo Picasso at Vallauris on the Riviera. Following the artist's separation from Françoise Gilot, the meeting with Lydia (then still Sylvette), introduced a new, positive 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 of this period. The 'heads of Sylvette', a series of folded metal sculptures which Picasso developed at this time, marked the next major innovation in his sculptural work.

Lydia Corbett moved to England in 1968 and has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 1989. In 1993, on the occasion of the Tate Gallery's major 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. She has held one-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2007.

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