2023-10-23 17:12:07
Do you like to get lost discovering unexpected surprises? You will love the abundant exhibition that the Center Pompidou devotes to Picasso’s drawings. On the contrary, are you afraid of river collisions? This anthology of more than 900 sheets and notebooks may make you dizzy. Especially since the two curators, Anne Lemonnier and Johan Popelard, have strived to disseminate the works through 50 thematic or technical sections, as many as the number of years that separate us from the artist’s death!
Aerial rails
They deliberately set aside the idea of a chronological journey to better immerse us in the crucible of Picasso’s creation. For the Andalusian artist, the paths of the pencil are in fact anything but linear. The same man at a table inspired him, in 1914-1915, to create a classical, then cubist, representation, shaded or favoring light lines. Thirty years later, a bull, initially massive and black like an archaic idol, transforms, over the course of a series of prints, into a refined silhouette, geometrized in a few lines. It is because this gifted designer, capable of delivering perfect anatomical studies at the age of 12, will refuse throughout his life to let himself be locked into a style, eager to constantly explore new languages.
The collection of the National Picasso Museum in Paris, rich in more than 1,800 drawings and illustrated books, provided most of the selection, supplemented here by works from the National Museum of Modern Art, as well as loans from French institutions and European. To deploy all these leaves, without suffocating the visitor, scenographer Jasmin Oezcebi imagined aerial picture rails suspended from cables. They unfold in concentric circles around a central heart which houses around fifty of the artist’s notebooks, gold mines of his compulsive creativity. Alongside are other groups, for example his studies inspired by The Women of Algiers by Delacroix – confronted with the painting exceptionally lent by the Louvre –, or the drawings which surrounded the birth of Ladies of Avignon where Picasso borrows from the primitive arts as well as from Michelangelo and Cézanne.
The multiple avatars of the Picasso line
All around, certain sections focus on pastels, inks, glued papers or makeshift supports that the player artist scribbles, going so far as to draw on his own knee (as shown in a filmed archive). Others happily explore the different avatars of the Picasso line: alternately deployed in an arabesque, then a single continuous line, agitated with baroque loops, reticulated lines like a spider’s web, bristling with erasures. In this forest of scattered works, the visitor does not know where to turn, as there are so many entrance doors.
Fortunately, everywhere, nuggets abound, Here two Acrobats to the crown, poor and melancholy sovereigns. There, the superb Confidences of the painter and his model, painted for a tapestry cardboard and decorated with pieces of floral wallpaper. Further on, a tiny skull made of torn paper or even this Self-portrait with a clear line, a look full of confidence. Elsewhere, Picasso’s poems, rarely shown, boldly combine drawing and calligraphy.
The commissioners even took care not to omit anything that is debated today, such as scenes of rape or murder. While specifying that it is “places of outlet or catharsis”, in no case an apology for crimes. Way to confront here all the power of imagination of the minotaur, without locking him in the labyrinth of his biography.
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