Lydia Gasman, longtime professor of art history at UVA who was widely recognized as a preeminent Picasso scholar, died in Charlottesville last week at the age of 84.
Gasman’s graduate thesis precipitated a sea change in the understanding of Picasso’s work. Late in life, she added to the list of languages in which she was fluent—there were five—one that she shared only with the artist she most admired: "she demonstrated that she could crack the code of Picasso’s cryptic texts, an almost superhuman task that no other scholar had seriously attempted," her Daily Progress obituary reads.
Lyn Warren, who owns Les Yeux du Monde, says of Gasman, who was her thesis adviser while she was in graduate school at UVA: "It’s hard to summarize anything about her, because she was larger than life." Warren says that Gasman’s enormously popular classes were like "performance art."
"She knew everything there was to be known about everything, and she was weave this all into a masterful whole," Warren says.
Her paintings have been displayed as widely as in Romania, where she was born, and Tel Aviv, where she lived before moving to Charlottesville, in 1981, to teach at the university. There will be a memorial service tonight at Les Yeux du Monde, where Gasman’s abstract paintings will show, as planned, through February alongside works by David Summers.
Les Yeux du Monde is at 841 Wolf Trap Rd. in Charlottesville. The memorial begins tonight at 5:30pm.
