Philip Guston — Musée Picasso
The Picasso Museum is hosting a stark exhibition of Philip Guston, The Irony of History, which, behind the appealing idea of a meaningful encounter, is unfortunately spoiled by a display whose pacing is rather weak and largely awkward.
This scenographic setup abandons the potential explosiveness of this encounter and instead confines itself to a presentation that devolves into justificatory accumulation. The project, which is nevertheless appealing in its intention to reveal Guston’s graphic and political radicality, runs up against an exhibition dramaturgy that seems designed to accommodate a broad audience, but at the cost of a loss of intensity.
Perhaps an unfortunate precaution meant to awkwardly spare a public not very familiar with the painter. Guston’s style, marked by strangeness, formal invention, and the gravitational tension of caricature, truly comes into its own only at the end of the exhibition route, after having endured the litany of an erratic plunge into his work. This layout delivers, paradoxically, an almost ill-tempered image of his art.
Yet the exhibition invites viewers to revisit a courageous, committed, and radical artistic journey whose satire undermines the powers of the era by holding up a mirror to their grotesque absurdity and stale conservatism. A corrosive negative of artistic practice that would have deserved a more thoroughly documented treatment.
This continues up to the late figurative canvases, which blend in a kaleidoscopic flatness the anxieties of a material age in which every object becomes an allegory and every being becomes a monster.
Precious for history, for art history, for critical memory, this gathering will leave little trace in the collective imagination. Through excessive restraint, it fails to invent the invisible thread that might connect the two sometimes antagonistic impulses (a tension that, indeed, had to be acknowledged to propose a parallel plunge into their works) of Guston and Picasso. For it is precisely in this radical tension between the grotesque and the tragic, between the love of beauty and the necessary shaping of truth, that what is plastically explosive in their work is revealed.
Philip Guston, The Irony of History, Musée national Picasso-Paris, 5 rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris, from October 14, 2025 to March 1, 2026, admission 12 to 16 euros.
