Diana Widmaier Picasso and Jack Cowart

As the nearly 150 works in After Picasso: 80 Contemporary Artists demonstrate, artists from around the world continue to wrestle with and take inspiration from Picasso's legacy. Few artists have engaged with Picasso quite so intensely as Roy Lichtenstein, the iconic pop artist and Ohio State alum, who made works revealing close study and analysis of Picasso’s oeuvre for almost five decades. For this year’s Lambert Lecture, Diana Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter and cocurator of the major exhibition Picasso.mania—a major exhibition now on view at the Grand Palais in Paris also exploring Picasso’s pervasive influence—joins Jack Cowart, executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, for a very special conversation exploring the interconnections between two titans of 20th-century art.

The annual Lambert Family Lecture is made possible by generous support from the Lambert Family Lecture Series Endowment Fund, which promotes dialogue about global issues in art and contemporary culture.

Jack Cowart is the founding executive director of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which among other activities oversees Lichtenstein’s archives and the creation of a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work. A distinguished art historian with special expertise on Lichtenstein and Henri Matisse, Cowart was previously deputy director and chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1992–99); head of the Department of 20th Century Art at the National Gallery of Art (1983–92); and held curatorial positions at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. He received his PhD in the history of art from Johns Hopkins University in 1972. In 2001, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication awarded him a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Diana Widmaier Picasso is a French art historian who lives in New York and Paris. She is the cocurator of Picasso.mania, an exhibition that, akin to After Picasso at the Wex, surveys the master’s persistent and widespread legacy. Her other current projects include a catalogue raisonné of the sculptures of Pablo Picasso and the forthcoming book Pablo Picasso and the Craftsmanship in Vallauris in the 1950s. The granddaughter of Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérèse Walter, she curated the acclaimed exhibition Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou with John Richardson at the Gagosian Gallery in 2011. Ms. Picasso has a master’s degree in private law (Panthéon-Assas University, Paris) and a master’s in art history (Paris-Sorbonne University). She contributed an essay on Pablo Picasso and his American collectors to the catalogue for Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection, on view at the Wexner Center in fall 2014 as part of its 25th Anniversary Season.