until Sunday September 15 2024

Musée Picasso Paris
5 Rue de Thorigny
75003 Paris
France

T : + 33 (0)1 85 56 00 36
https://www.museepicassoparis.fr

The exhibition analyzes the modernity of Pablo Picasso's conception of the image by exploring the artistic and extra-artistic
sources of his work and their modes of appropriation.

Pablo Picasso’s work is arresting for the richness and breadth of the artist’svisual culture. Celebrated by the avant-gardes as the scourge of academicism, Picasso however always maintained that he was the heir to a long pictorial tradition. His ambiguous relationship to art history raises the question of his sources and the manner in which he appropriated them. A frequent visitor to
the Louvre, Picasso accumulated a lifetime’s worth of photographs, postcards, reproductions, posters, magazines and illustrated books in addition to the works in his personal collection. This wealth of material, which provided the artist with a rich iconographic repertoire, reflects his new way of thinking about the image, liberated from the domain of art and from historical time. That said, there is no literal quotation in his work: his variations on the paintings of the great masters are first and foremost deconstructions; his forms and compositions are always hybrid. Based on four themes that run through Picasso’s work, the hero, the Minotaur, the voyeur and the musketeer, this exhibition highlights how the artist’s paintings, sculptures and drawings derive from a complex amalgam of source images.

Pablo Picasso L'enlèvement des Sabines, 1962 © Centre Pompidou, Mnam-Cci, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn / Christian Bahier / Philippe Migeat © Succession Picasso 2024