Picasso, the eater of images

Paris. Visitors to the “Picasso iconophage” exhibition are strongly advised to read its very comprehensive catalogue, which analyses the master’s various sources of inspiration. The authors offer an overview of the way in which the artist combined, without any hierarchy, the images that fed his iconographic repertoire. A Herculean task, because it takes courage – or recklessness – to tackle Picasso. As Cécile Godefroy, head of the Picasso Studies Centre at the museum and curator with Anne Montfort-Tanguy, curator at the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou, writes in these pages: “To approach Picasso’s work is necessarily to confront a whirlwind of data and images […] Thousands of paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, poems and sketchbooks made up Picasso’s studio collection at the time of his death.

But, faced with this “whirlwind” – or tsunami – of works and documents covering the walls, the viewer feels like he is drowning. In other words, the visual demonstration struggles to reach the quality of the theoretical approach.

However, the introduction to the route is relevant, with an emblematic canvas by the Spanish painter: Studies (1920). We can speak of a pictorial collage that juxtaposes a female profile of neoclassical inspiration, cubist still lifes and a couple of dancers by Auguste Renoir. This puzzle, without any formal or thematic logic, perfectly illustrates the principle of free pictorial association practiced by Picasso.

The Minotaur, image of Picasso’s hybrid practice

The exhibition is structured around five independent sections: “Minotaur”, “Heroes”, “Voyeur”, “Atelier” and “Musketeer”. The Minotaur is undoubtedly the richest example of a theme that runs through the painter’s entire work. This monstrous animal, half-man, half-bull, is the very image of Picasso’s hybrid practice. Around the splendid Minotaur running (1928), one of the rare major paintings by Picasso here, we can find, pell-mell, a reworking of a rock bull drawn by Abbé Henri Breuil, the Horse attacked by a lion by Théodore Géricault or even Goya’s representations of bullfighting. Can we really understand with the help of these fragments that the Minotaur is the animal onto which Picasso never ceased to project references to himself? The frequent appearances of this representative of a natural and imaginary bestiary can be explained by Picasso’s desire to claim the part of animal nature in human beings – in himself, in particular. How can this be signified? It would have been necessary to show at least one of these magnificent and terrifying scenes of the Minotaur embracing or rather raping a woman. It is with the famous Rape of the Sabine Women by Poussin, exposed in the chapter “Heroes”, that we find a form close to this erotic violence.

Elsewhere, “Voyeur” is a vast and very – too? – ambitious theme. Degas’ series dealing with the brothel, entitled “La fête de la patronne” (1878-1879), inspired Picasso’s series of 39 engravings in which Degas appears as a client of a brothel, which we would have liked to have exhibited more widely. The difference is telling. Keeping his distance, Degas remains totally motionless, unable to have a direct confrontation with the female nude. In Picasso, on the other hand, the scopic drive does not stop at the entrance of The origin of the worldThe painter’s body is as much at stake as that of the model, the power of painting as that of sex.

Let us end, however, with “Atelier”, a quasi-universal theme in painting. For this grand finale, the curators have brought together, on the one hand, an imposing “iconostasis”, a set of sixty-six etchings illustrating Celestinea 15th-century Spanish tragicomedy, all on a huge sheet of copper. No less impressive are the walls covered with hundreds of documents from Picasso’s various workshops. The master, no doubt, found his way there. One wonders if the viewer would achieve the same feat.