SAMs fall supershow needs no more fanfare than the First Avenue banners and window-wraps already proclaiming Picasso: Masterpieces From the Musée Picasso, Paris! And if SAM sells enough tickets, T-shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards, and posters to restore its recession-impacted staff and hours, we say fine. (Though the exhibit does carry a premium over normal ticket prices.) On view will be 150 works by the short sybaritic Spaniard (1881-1973), including Portrait of Dora Maar, painted in 1937 when she was 30 and her new lover 55. A French-Jewish surrealist photographer, she was raised partly in Argentina, so she and Picasso spoke Spanish together, making them equals to a degree not all his lovers during the period would enjoy. Unlike some of Picassos earlier, more severely cubist portraits, Maars pretty features arent so radically rearranged here; shes allowed a degree of elegance and respect that would lastthough with other concurrent loversfor nine years together. But eventually she was dumped, childless. She died in 1997, one year after Julianne Moore portrayed her in Surviving Picasso. BRIAN MILLER
Thursdays, Fridays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Wednesdays, Saturdays, Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Starts: Oct. 8. Continues through Jan. 17, 2010
