A trip around the Grand Palais is not enough to take in the complete 'Picasso and the Masters' exhibition – a grand tour of the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay and Musée Picasso is also necessary, writes LARA MARLOWE.
PABLO PICASSO’S first teacher was his father, José Ruiz-Blasco, a professor at the fine arts academy and director of the local museum in Malaga. The boy started painting at the age of seven, knew he wanted to be a painter by 11, and was admitted to the academy at 14. At 18, he dropped his father’s name, and used only his mother’s surname of Picasso thereafter.
Picasso was such a prodigy that his father allegedly gave up painting when he saw the boy's talent. In the first room of the Picasso and the Mastersexhibition, we see Ruiz-Blasco, painted by a colleague in 1895. The portrait is almost photographic in its realism, yet its style, and Picasso's father, are decidedly 19th century.
In the same room hangs Picasso's 1901 self-portrait, Yo, Picasso (I, Picasso). Only six years separate Picasso from the image of his father, but they seem a century apart. The pale Ruiz-Blasco wears conventional clothing, and there's a beaten look in his eyes. Picasso stares boldly from the canvas, in artist's smock, a bright orange scarf at his throat, palette in hand.
The difference between father and son is more of character than epoch. The young Picasso seems too eager to challenge the self-portraits that hang around him – Poussin, Goya, Delacroix, Gauguin. Picasso knew the Prado and Louvre museums by heart. He decried himself as the heir of Rembrandt, Velázquez, Cézanne and Matisse, saying, “A painter doesn’t come from a void”. Goya and van Gogh were his “best friends”, Cézanne his “father”.
But Picasso had a rebellious streak. “I paint against the paintings that count for me,” he said. He was creating his own imaginary museum, adding what he found lacking in real-life collections. “One must do what is not there, what has never been done.” Seeing Picasso’s canvases alongside these masterpieces, one imagines him as a vandal marauding through a museum, slashing the paintings that preceded him, then replacing them with a magic flick of the sword.
Ensconced in her red armchair, Ingres's Madame Moitessiercorresponds to the "canon of beauty" that Picasso scorned. His Grand nu au fauteuil rougeis allegedly based on Ingres's masterpiece, but Picasso's dislocated figure, with her octopus limbs, lopsided breasts and the open jaws of a shark, is in fact a portrait of his disintegrating marriage.
Picasso’s early charcoal drawings of statues from Greek and Roman antiquity show him to be a fine draughtsman. As a young man, he said, he “could draw better than Raphael . . . But it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child”. Once the classical beauty of his Blue and Rose periods had passed, Picasso only occasionally displayed the ability to paint slowly and carefully, in a style reminiscent of Ingres, as in the exquisite 1923 portrait of his Russian wife Olga, on loan from a private collection.
El Greco inspired the colours and elongated figure of Picasso’s early paintings.
In Boy Leading a Horse(1905-6), he transposed the horse and servant in El Greco's Saint Martin Sharing his Coat with a Poor Man(1597-1599). Saint Martin has disappeared from Picasso's canvas; it is totally different, yet somehow traceable to El Greco.
IN THE AGE OF photography, Picasso understood there was no point in painting life-like images. “It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is,” he said. “What interests us is the disquiet of Cézanne, what Cézanne teaches, the torment of van Gogh, the tragedy of the man. Everything else is false.” The paradox of Picasso is that this most original painter cannibalised others’ work through his entire career, always transforming it into something else. Picasso liked to quote van Gogh: “In life and in painting, I can do without God. But I cannot, suffering, do without something that is greater than me, that is my life – the power of creating.”
Van Gogh was right, Picasso told André Malraux: "The need to create; it's a drug. You must invent; you must paint." Picasso's interpretation of the masters reached fever pitch in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Working intensely on series for concentrated periods of time, he produced 15 variations of Delacroix's Women of Algiers in their Apartmentin two months in the winter of 1955-56, then 58 paintings inspired by Velázquez's Las Meninasbetween August and December 1957. For his Rape of the Sabine Womenseries in early 1963, Picasso combined elements of paintings by Poussin, David and Delacroix to represent an event in the eighth century. Picasso was allegedly inspired by the Cuban missile crisis, but I couldn't help thinking of the Gaza Strip before his images of women and children being trampled by sword-brandishing horsemen.
Four of the world's most famous nudes – Titian's Venus and Cupid and an Organist(1548), Goya's The Nude Maja(1797-1800), Ingres's Odalisque in Grisaille(1823-34) and Manet's Olympia(1863) are exhibited alongside Picasso's Nude Reclining with a Catand Reclining Nude with a Man Playing the Guitar.Picasso painted the latter canvas in one day. In his variation on Titian's masterpiece, Venus's genitalia, anus and breasts are lined up in a row, as if being served on a platter. If you listen to the visitors around you, you're likely to hear them say they prefer the masters to Picasso.
But art isn’t meant to be pretty, Picasso seems to answer. “Art is not chaste,” he said. “It should be forbidden to ignorant innocents. It should never be put in contact with the insufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Or if it is chaste, then it is not art.”
Through the seven decades he spent dismantling the artistic canon, Picasso never lost his sense of humour. To celebrate his 90th birthday in 1971, the Louvre temporarily exhibited a selection of Picasso’s work – an honour never before accorded to a living artist. “Speak to me with respect!” he teased friends. “I’m going to be hung in the Louvre!” Surveying works by Goya, Velázquez and Zurbaran in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie, where his works were about to be shown, the ageing painter joked: “You see, it’s the same thing! It’s the same thing!”
The fine art of blockbusting exhibitions
PABLO PICASSO, left, was probably the most original, path-breaking artist of the 20th century, so it seems fitting that a show of his work and the masterpieces that inspired him is breaking records and habits.
The body which organised the show at the Grand Palais, estimates that 700,000 people will see the exhibition before it closes on February 2nd, making it the most successful event in 15 years. A historical anecdote: Picasso participated in the first exhibition at the Grand Palais, with the Spanish contingent, when it was inaugurated for the 1900 World's Fair. He was 19 years' old.
To prevent the Grand Palais becoming unbearably crowded, only 500 visitors can be admitted each hour. Despite unusually long opening hours – 12 hours a day, five days a week, plus 10 hours on Thursdays – the RMN could not keep up with demand.
So the RMN decided to open the exhibition non-stop for its last 83 hours, from Friday, January 30th until 8pm on Monday, February 2nd. No one is sure how many art-lovers will venture out at 3am to see Picasso, but with queues of two and a half hours for much of the past three months, it's a good idea to book in advance on www.rmn.fr.
Overnight cultural events are not new to Paris, which has pioneered Nuit des musées and Nuit blanche events, but in summer. The last three nights of
Picasso and the Masterspromises to be le happening of the cultural season. Breakfast will be available in the museum.
The exhibition is comprised of more than 200 works by Picasso and some of the greatest painters of all time: Titian, Velázquez, El Greco, Zubaran, Rembrandt, Poussin, Ingres, Manet. Sixty museums and private collectors have loaned works. The curators negotiated for three years, and succeeded only because they were able to offer the loan of paintings from French museums in exchange. The total value of the paintings shown is estimated at €2.4bn, believed to be the most valuable exhibition ever in France. Though the public loves
Picasso and the Masters, art critics have likened it to a circus or "best of" compilation, without intellectual cohesion. The exhibition will earn more than €1 million for the RMN, which had to fend off demands by the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay and Musée Picasso for a share of the profits. Though the bulk of the exhibition is in the Grand Palais, the Louvre is showing Delacroix's
Women of Algiers in their Apartmentwith the Picasso "variations" it inspired. Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe is staying in the Musée d'Orsay, where it is joined by Picasso's versions of the painting.
The success of
Picasso and the Mastersis one example of a recession-driven cultural resurgence. French cinema, theatre, and concerts are all breaking records. Analysts suggest that culture is less expensive than foreign holidays or designer clothes, and helps to take one's mind off the crisis.