Art
Picasso’s picks
by Jill Trevelyan
A stunning exhibition of what the artist himself collected provides many insights into his work.
Pablo Picasso had a disdain for the world of connoisseurship and the idea of a carefully assembled group of precious objects. “I am not a collector,” he declared. In fact, he was that other kind of collector – a compulsive hoarder. His early companion Fernande Olivier recalled Picasso’s “mania” for collecting all kinds of things that stimulated him visually: glass trinkets, rustic pottery and tribal masks as well as paintings.
When he died in 1973, Picasso left an extensive collection of paintings and works by other artists. Now housed in the Musée National Picasso in Paris, part of this collection has been loaned to the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane – the first time it has been shown outside Europe. It makes a fascinating and surprisingly intimate exhibition. Supplemented by letters, memorabilia and large-scale photographs of the artist’s studio, it gives an insight into Picasso’s taste, temperament and working practice.
It also provides a useful context for his art by showing more than 70 Picassos alongside work by his contemporaries and predecessors.
Picasso’s collection evokes the excitement of the young artist’s Paris in the early years of the last century. The art of the past had become more accessible than ever through books and reproductions, but this was also a period of major exhibitions, ranging from the old masters to the post-impressionist innovators: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne. Such riches presented dilemmas for young artists, ones that were central to the “modern” experience. How to reconcile the painting of the past with the challenge laid down by the post-impressionists and produce a truly contemporary art? How to incorporate the lessons learned from “naive” painters and non-Western art, including the masks and wooden carvings of Africa and Oceania? “I saw that everything had been done,” Picasso said. “It was necessary to break away to create a revolution and start from zero.”
Prodigiously talented, inventive and ambitious, Picasso was in the right place at the right time. As a young man, he mastered one style after another, switching back and forth between radically different modes of representation with a speed and confidence unparalleled in the history of Western art. He was by no means alone in his quest, however. Part of a gifted circle that spanned the worlds of painting, literature, music, dance and theatre, he fed off the energy and ideas of others.
According to Coco Chanel, “Picasso did a great job of hoovering up anyone in his path.” Others used stronger language, comparing him to a cannibal, a plunderer and a thief. The metaphor of theft is one Picasso did not shy away from: “If something is to be stolen, I steal it,” he admitted. All artists feed off the art of others, past and present, but Picasso had an extraordinary ability to assimilate everything he came across and use it to revitalise his own practice. He was a voracious consumer of images.
Picasso’s art collection, then, was a working tool: an inspiration, a goad and a backdrop for his own practice. It was part of a much broader archive of images that nourished his work: postcards of peoples of the world in regional dress, newspaper illustrations and tourist chromolithographs. His vast collection of photographs, for example, included an image of a Maori man, taken by the American Photo Company in the 1880s.
All this contributed to the clutter of the studio, as the photographs displayed in the exhibition attest. They show paintings – by Picasso and others – sitting on the floor, pinned to the wall, propped on tables and surrounded by tribal masks, toys, musical instruments and curios. In one photograph, a nonchalant Picasso hangs a Matisse portrait, his cigarette dangling perilously close to the canvas.
The exhibition is structured thematically, so that works from Picasso’s collection are interspersed with his own art under broad headings such as “The Primitive in Art” and “Surrealism”. So two Degas prints of brothel scenes are installed next to the works they inspired, Picasso’s raunchy Scenes erotiques; and a study for the radical proto-cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is displayed next to an African mask. This approach allows the curators to link certain works, but it misses a number of connections that occur across the exhibition. For in Picasso’s art, “style” is infinitely fluid and mutable. There is no contradiction between apparently disparate sources; they all feed into the great melange of his art.
Picasso’s quirky collection contains some oddities, such as a copy of a Louis Le Nain and a landscape “attributed” to Gauguin, and probably not by him at all. But there is plenty to justify a trip across the Tasman, including important works by Matisse, Miro, Modigliani, Renoir, Corot and others. Among the three fine Cézannes is a magnificent late Chateau Noir, while Braque is represented by a superb cubist collage. Paintings by the “naive” Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau include the life-size Portrait of a Woman, a work of monumental clarity and mesmerising detail that obsessed Picasso from the moment he saw it. He acquired it from a second-hand dealer for a mere five francs; “You can paint over it,” the dealer encouraged him.
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