On May 1, the much anticipated “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée Picasso, Paris” exhibit began its three-and-a-half-month stint at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Paul and I were lucky to attend a members' preview last Friday.
Considered to be the 'Picasso collection by Picasso', the works on display represent the actual pieces that Picasso kept for himself and his family over the course of his career. these paintings, sculptures, and photographs represent the works that had such special meaning for Picasso that he refused to sell them or sought them out late in his career to purchase back.
The exhibit is arranged in seven different rooms and takes you through Picasso’s varied career, from the beginning to days before his death. The exhibit includes everything from informal sketchbooks to iconic masterpieces, and Anne Baldassari, chairman and chief curator from the Musée National Picasso, describes the carefully selected collection as “a true chronology of his life.” You get a feel for his love of women through various nudes and portraits of his lovers (Olga Khokhlova, Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot), and the exhibition explores his constant experimentation with styles (blue and pink periods, African art-inspired works, grotesque surrealism and radical cubism). Picasso was famously quoted as saying, “Give me a museum and I’ll fill it,” and he has now filled seven rooms of one.
The last time a full-scale Picasso collection graced the AGO was in 1964, with the groundbreaking Picasso and Man retrospective. As one of the world's highest-attended exhibits for the year, the show marked what current AGO Director and CEO Matthew Teitelbaum calls the museum's "coming of age."
For an artist so ubiquitous, freshness is a nigh-unattainable goal, but this comes close. Musée director and chief curator Anne Baldassari has built a clear-eyed narrative that pushes back against the rigid categories of Picasso’s long career. We were fascinated to see how his art was affected by the relationship he found himeslf in at the time and that he switched from abstract to realism with ease. Many of my preconceived notions about the artist and his creations were tossed out of the window.
Balsassari has been carrying that flag since 2008, when the Musée closed for renovation and the show, with its seven-decades’ worth of the artist’s output, hit the road. It’s been the art-world equivalent of a stadium rock show, reliably drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors from Sydney to Moscow to San Francisco, to name a few.
It would be shocking for it to do anything less here. Of a generation of modern artists, Picasso is surely the most bankable, both the reason the Musée sent the show on the road, and why so many institutions competed to host it (the AGO spent three years securing exclusive Canadian rights.)
Picasso made some 50,000 works on his life, surely not all of them good. There’s a temptation even here, in so carefully hand-picked a display, to feel a devolution into shtick. This is our fault, not his. Picasso’s ubiquity, on coffee mugs, calendars, in cartoons and parodies and T-shirts and whatever else, has always threatened to cheapen his legacy, but significantly, it never has. That’s why, when a Picasso show of this magnitude and significance comes to your home town, you go.
We did and I anticipate more than one return visit to truly take in the incredible output of this genius!
