#musee picasso

The result, to my mind at least, is a spectacular rearrangement of Picasso museum’s permanent collection, combining the museum’s masterpieces with works by modern and contemporary artists. In a broadly chronological tour of Picasso’s artistic journey covering the whole of Picasso's creation and the most emblematic subjects of the artist's work, Smith has imagined a joyful dialogue between the masterpieces conserved in the museum and more contemporary works that invite us to take a new look at the collection while underlining the ever-present character of Picasso's work. The exhibition is punctuated by works by international contemporary artists such as Guillermo Kuitca, Obi Okigbo, Mickalene Thomas and Chéri Samba, all of whom contribute to the same desire to open up new perspectives on the posterity of Picasso's work, by questioning his image or by taking up some of his plastic innovations.

From the onset, Smith makes it clear that this is not your standard show. A wall studded with bicycle seats nods to Smith as the master of ceremonies - Smith has always been a keen cyclist and nearly became a professional cyclist in his youth. But the wall opposite, bare but for Picasso’s Tete de Taureau (a bull’s head made from a bike saddle and handlebars), establishes the Spaniard as the artist visitors are here to see.

From there on, it’s a helter skelter ride through Picasso’s life: pages of Vogue covered with his subversive scribbles; explorations into Cubism hung on walls lined with brown Kraft paper; the sketches for the Demoiselles d’Avignon against a throbbing pink. Collages are hung among a panoply of hectic wallpapers acquired en masse from a failed factory in Pennsylvania. Among them is the Nature morte à la chaise cannée from 1912, considered to be the first fine art collage ever made and shows he was a master of invention that you feel that Picasso wasn’t afraid to try whatever was on his mind.

Brought on by the death of his friend Carlos Casagemas in 1901, Picasso’s Blue period reduced the artist’s palette to the one colour for a year. This time in the artist’s career is shown in a deep blue room, the lugubriousness of the Woman with the Cloudy Eye (surely one of the greatest portraits ever) heightened by the azure monotone of the space. Bullfighting sketches are enveloped in blood-red gloss, while the iconic paintings of his “Seated Women” series, including lover Marie-Therese and her successor Dora Maar, are shown amid roughly painted stripes.

This interplay of wall and work pulls Picasso’s stylistic use of stripes into focus, reinforcing the portraiture’s fragmentary psychological complexity. The loose late figurative works - mostly derided at the time of his death - now look contemporarily relevant, as a driving force for Basquiat and Baselitz.

Of course, these days Picasso can’t be taken on without critique: his misogyny; his careless attitude to Africa and its artefacts. It says more about current English ‘woke’ sensibilities with race and social justice than French ones that Smith and (from what my art gallery friend tells me) Debray, a little hesitantly, insert contemporary works among Smith’s selections. Two Louise Bourgeois pieces speak of the travails of womanhood. A new collage by the Congolese artist Cheri Samba shows the artist at a cozy kitchen table with a map of Africa and a mask hovering over the canvas. A dazzling 2016 trompe l’oeil by the Argentinian Guillermo Kuitca, of a road disappearing into a hectic Cubist landscape, reflects the enduring influence of Picasso’s 70-year career.

Overall though it’s joyous and vibrant in colour. Above all it’s a whimsical vitamin-packed exhibition that establishes the Spanish painter as a true master of colour by contrasting his greatest masterpieces with the shimmering, polychrome creations of Mickalene Thomas or Chéri Samba. Paul Smith has imagined a possible communion between the different movements, making audacious connections and a resolutely inventive layout of the works that opens up new perspectives on the posterity of Picasso's name in the modern world.

As for the critical reception, it has on the whole been very positive. There really hasn’t been the controversial outcry that you might think would happen when an outsider - no less than an Englishman and not even an artist - is asked to curate an artist close to the French artistic soul. Critics have been largely pleased that Smith’s colourful exhibition has shown Picasso in a fresh new way. Many have been won over by Smith undoubtedly keen eye for patterns, best displayed in one room where he has assembled works that use the principle of the stripe, which he has also placed, tone on tone, on multicoloured wallpaper.

Of course there others who are less charitable and continue to grumble in their wine glasses. Some have decried his lack of academic expertise in Picasso. But the fact that Smith said that he wasn’t an academic from the very beginning was already built into expectations.

And I think personally Paul Smith is doing himself a great disservice. If you’ve met Paul Smith you would know Smith is characteristically modest and self-deprecating in a way that Englishmen are raised to be (or were anyway).

To my mind, Smith plays down his own pure artistic credentials. Back in 1970 Smith started with a 3 square metre design wear shop that was open two days a week. In the following year, in the basement, he set up a small gallery, where he exhibited David Hockney, Andy Warhol and photographs by the iconic David Bailey, whom he was friends with. The success of that led him to have many exhibitions in both London and Japan - two of the coolest cultural places in the 1970s. Moreover these days he has art works by British painters including William Coldstream and Euan Uglow in is home and a wife, trained at the Slate school of Art, to help buy and curate art.

One direct criticism I heard was from a well credentialised French art critic whom my art gallery owning friend had over for tea - and I was also there. He was quite sniffy about the Picasso exhibition curated by Paul Smith. He dismissed Smith as lacking imagination and even being disrespectful to Picasso. He was referring to Smith bringing together Picasso's paintings from the 1950s and making a wallpaper out of them with the number 50 on it. But more glaringly he was perplexed that there was in one room that was devoted to the painter's famous sailor T-shirts, with paintings, photos, drawings and a mass of T-shirts hanging from the ceiling, hanging like a peasant’s washing line.

I almost choked on my tea as I couldn’t but help but suppress a giggle. To me it was obvious that Smith was being reverential by having Picasso’s sailor T-shirts displayed on a washing line as nod to his own tongue in cheek English humour. It was playful, not malicious. I think English humour was lost on him because I tried to educate him but clearly he just didn’t get it, or more likely, too pompous to admit he didn’t get the joke.

In all fairness - and for what it’s worth - I do have my own criticism, but a gentle one.

That is the wisdom of some more contemporary art pieces done by other artist to sit in contrast to Picasso’s pieces was questionable. I’m not questioning the merit of the piece in itself but in comparison to Picasso’s pieces. For example, next to a painting by Paul Cézanne from Aix, a pillar of art history and the jewel in Picasso's collection, one of the artists also invited, the Argentine Guillermo Kuitca had created a rather unconvincing puppet house that takes up the motifs of Mont Sainte-Victoire. It just didn’t fit. It is dangerous to measure yourself too closely against such a genius of art history that Picasso undoubtedly was.

I would say Paul Smith’s curated Picasso exhibition is a definitely worth seeing if one is in Paris. What outsiders don’t understand is how bringing in an outsider with his own unique and keen eye on colour and design as Paul Smith has, he could be saving the Musée Picasso from decline.

The truth is the Picasso museum used to be very popular with tourists as well as Parisians. Until recently, endless queues stretched out on rue de Thorigny in front of the entrance to the prestigious institution, the hôtel Salé. Alas this is no longer the case. Of course Covid can take some of the blame for until 2019, 60% of the museum’s visitors were tourists. However international tourists have returned and neither have Parisians.

I think one reason that those in the art world are now beginning to fret about is public disaffection. There have been a fair number of articles leading up to his anniversary that was keen to highlight Picasso’s sins: he is the incarnation of toxic masculinity as well as white privilege, an absolute misogynist, a pervert, a tormentor of Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, a rapist, a paedophile, a racist, a thief of African art…..and so on and so on. This is part of the opening salvo in the new war with the woke that is only now entering the French cultural discourse. So far the barbarians have been stopped at the gates because the French just see anything woke as an unwelcome American import.

But I think the real reason is the Picasso museum is a victim of its own success. In short France is saturated in all things Picasso. Under Laurent le Bon’s dynamic leadership (the last Picasso museum director/curator) he created a network, ‘Picasso-Méditerranée’, with 78 institutions which, from 2017 to 2019, hosted a travelling programme on Picasso in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Israel, Türkiye, and Morocco. That’s two intense years of what critics called ‘Picasso-mania’, with exhibitions of ‘Matisse-Picasso’ (in Nice), ‘Godard-Picasso’ (in Arles), ‘Picasso and the Ancient World’ (in Naples), ‘Picasso and the Performing Arts’ (in Izmir).

Moreover the Picasso museum was once seen as quite sniffy and stingy with its hoard of Picasso artefacts. But under le Bon’s direction that changed when the museum lent to anyone who asked, especially to regional institutions.

So on paper the idea was fantastic. But some critics say it’s been taken too far with curators thematising Picasso to the point of vertigo. In the last two years, we’ve had ‘Picasso under the Occupation’ at the Grenoble Museum, ‘Picasso the Illustrator’ at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing, ‘Picasso's Music’ at the Philharmonie, ‘Picasso, Baigneuses et Baigneurs’ at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, ‘Picasso the Foreigner’ at the Musée National de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, ‘Pablo Picasso's Louvre’ at the Louvre-Lens. And this doesn’t even include exhibitions at the Picasso museum itself such as ‘Picasso-Rodin’, ‘Picasso and the comic strip’, ‘Picasso in the image’, and ‘Picasso the poet’.

Indeed some now say Picasso-mania is drowning France in Picasso to the point where the inevitable question is asked: is Picasso out of vogue?

This would explain the decline of the Hôtel Salé, which has housed the world's largest Picasso collection since 1985. It’s not just artists like Picasso who have a blue period, museum curators do too. Cécile Debray has gone on record to say, “It's very difficult to supervise empty rooms”.

But just like artists like Picasso can’t be reduced to one colour or defined by their sins (as judged by the puritan police), so I don’t think you can keep a great artist down for long.

Picasso had a fertile mind that fed his creativity in so many ways than any other modern artist. He was modern, spontaneous and drew on paper napkins or newspapers. He was interested in everything around him and he was into everything from colours, objects and art forms. His creativity was rich because he was open minded. Picasso said that he spent his life painting like a child because a child is free.

Anyone who is engages with his art comes away with an invitation to have their soul filled with child-like wonder. That’s why I hope Paul Smith’s Picasso exhibition attracts a new and younger audience so that they can discover the artist for the first time, but also I hope they treasure their child-like soul for wonder against cynicism or nihilism, which is the best our western society can offer them because it is sick with impoverished souls.