Picasso.Mania — Les Galeries nationales du Grand Palais — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 7, 2015 → February 29, 2016

The twenty or so solo or group exhibitions since 1973 that have focused on the study of the posterity of Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre testify to its impact on contemporary art. The exhibition at the Grand Palais takes a simultaneously chronological and thematic approach to the critical and artistic highlights of Picasso’s career and the myth that gradually built up around his name.

From Cubist still lifes to the Musketeers in the exhibitions in Avignon in 1970 and 1973, the exhibition is punctuated by works by Picasso from the collections of the Picasso Museum in Paris, the Musée National d’art Moderne, and the artist’s family. They are presented in a way reminiscent of the artist’s arrangements in his studios and the exhibitions that he personally supervised (Georges Petit gallery in Paris in 1932, Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970, and 1973).

The great stylistic phases (Cubism, last work), and emblematic works by Pablo Picasso (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Guernica) are put alongside contemporary creations, grouped by artist (Hockney, Johns, Lichtenstein, Kippenberger..), or by theme, in a great variety of media and techniques (video, painting, sculpture, graphic arts, film, photography, installation).

David Hockney’s Polaroid montages and multiscreen videos echo Picasso’s Cubism and his exploration of a multifocal space. In the early 1960s, Pop artists on both sides of the Atlantic (Lichtenstein, Errό…) took hold of the portraits made in the 1930s which established the archetypal image of Picasso’s painting.

The Shadow (1954) was the starting point for a series of four paintings begun by Jasper Johns in 1985 (The Four Seasons are presented in the exhibition). Showing the impact of Picasso’s public image on the imagination of 20th-century artists, Martin Kippenberger twice (in 1988 and 1995) interpreted David Douglas Duncan’s photographic portraits of Picasso and Jacqueline.

Variations inspired by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica demonstrate the importance of those paintings in the history of modern art and beyond that in the collective imagination (neither work is present because they can be transported).

The birth certificate of modern painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the source of variations by Faith Reingold, Robert Colescott and others which comment on the ethnocentric, masculine dimension of the modernity of which the work has become emblematic.

One room shows how Guernica has become a universal social and political icon: a historical interpretation of Guernica by Emir Kusturica; the revelation of the symbolic role played by its transposition into a tapestry now on the walls of the United Nations Security Council building (Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009); the use of Picasso’s painting in the American artists’ struggle against the Vietnam war; and protestors brandishing the image in street demonstrations.

Rineke Dijkstra’s video installation, I see a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman, 2009-2010) illustrates the presence of Picasso’s work in artists’ imagination today in a wide range of expressions from cinema to digital imagery, video and graphic albums.

General curator: Didier Ottinger, assistant director of the Musée national d’Art moderne — Centre Pompidou

Curators: Diana Widmaier-Picasso, art historian and Emilie Bouvard, curator at the Musée national Picasso-Paris

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