London - Royal Academy of Arts
25 January — 2 August 2020
Picasso and Paper is a vast exhibition arranged with chronological concision, from the blue and rose periods, through cubism, surrealism, neoclassicism, Minotaurs and to the obsessive investigations into Manet and Delacroix.
Paper as a medium was for Picasso a tool to explore his ideas through all his long career and a material with limitless possibilities.
He experimented with everything from newsprint and napkins to decorative wallpaper.
Picasso’s work with paper showcases his constant drive to invent and innovate.
Picasso spent decades investigating printmaking techniques, sourcing rare and antique paper from as far as Japan – and all without losing his compulsion to draw on every last scrap.
The exhibition starts with a dog and a dove that he draw and shaped with a pair of scissor, creating a tridimensional creature when he was not more than nine years old.
La vie (the Life) opens the view on the blue period, started after the suicide of his friend
Carlos Casagemas, characterized by austere color and doleful subject matter as prostitutes, beggars and drunks. The paintings and drawings of Picasso's Rose Period represent more pleasant themes of clowns, harlequins, and carnival performers, depicted in cheerful vivid hues of red, orange, pink and earth tones.
After this period, Picasso found inspiration in Oceanic and African art known as his African Period, this phase retained the warmth of his Rose Period but conveyed a shift in both style and subject matter. Rather than produce figurative portrayals of performers, he began to depict abstracted, African mask-inspired depictions of all sorts of figures culminating in the masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
That colossal modernist icebreaker, was pieced together out from different drawings, many of them displayed in this exhibition.
Passing through the fractured forms of the cubism he simplified the form for his collage art where the violin is the undisputed protagonist.
During the First World War, Picasso was involved in a theatrical venture for Parade of Jean Cocteau composed for Russian ballet, as we can see in a small section in the exhibition, before he moved to a neoclassical style after his voyage in Italy.
Really interesting is the contact of Picasso with the Surrealism, started with the introduction with André Breton and continued with his relationship with Dora Maar.
Minotaur drawings and prints of the 1930s will carry on different time in his career.
Picasso casts himself as a monstrous figure, half beast, half man, crouching, full of brute potential, over the bodies of sleeping women.
The Remains of Minotaur in a harlequin costume (La Dépouille du Minotaure en costume d’arlequin) a beautiful watercolour is an example of this genre where he joined his two alter ego the minotaur and harlequin of the Rose period.
The masterpiece of the exhibition is the five meters length collage Femmes à leur toilette (Women at Their Toilette 1937-8).
It is an outsize assemblage of postcards, coloured paper and lengths of wallpaper simulating brickwork, parquet, garish furnishing fabrics and so on, ripped and snipped and bound together with overpainted elements – three female heads and one more in the mirror’s reflection, a painting within a painting. Paper holds a fascination in itself.
The exhibition ended with the Henri-Georges Clouzot’s famous 1956 film Le mystère Picasso, in which the 75 year old artist is shown performing his genius for a crew of film-makers against the clock. He is drawing on unprinted newspaper, using the new felt-pen inks, among other media, and Clouzot shows both sides of the page. Picasso sits before the easel, in a pair of shorts, working up image after teeming image; which appear, on the other side, like a kind of brilliant animation emerging at high speed before your eyes.
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