The Picasso Museum in Paris

Living in Thailand August 1986

Humsafar Volume 8 Number 1

It’s thirteen years since Picasso died, in April 1973, at Mougins in the South of France. It was my last year of school and I turned up for class that day in mourning, dressed head-to-toe in black. One continues to hear the stubborn cliché: ‘But a two-year-old could paint it!’ As he got more daring and varied in his projects, Picasso came to represent that onslaught which 20th century art wrought on our accepted ways of looking. Only now do we see through his eyes.

The cliché has a curious truth to it: Picasso’s approach to art was refreshingly childlike. The outlined, simplified objects, slap-dash painterliness and absolute doggedness regardless of criticism are a two-year-old’s traits.

The recently opened Picasso Museum in the Hôtel Salé, in the heart of the Marais in Paris, is not to be missed. In a city where the museums are bigger and more concerned with pulling crowds, this newest addition – modest but comprehensive, curated with an eye on history – is a must-see.

The Marais is a burgeoning quartier of teashops, Jewish delis, gay bars and independent bookshops. It hides some of the city’s finest hôtels particuliers. The Hôtel Salé is a gem of its kind. Its name alludes to its builder, a collector of salt tax, although in the 18th century it was called the Hôtel le Camus and then the Hôtel le Juigné. It is a capital work of private architecture from the age of Louis XIV. The dimensions of the building are unprecedented for the period, and the extraordinary staircase in the entrance hall is one of the most beautiful in Paris.

The young Balzac frequented the Hôtel Salé when he lived with his parents in the nearby rue du Temple. The palatial building made a lasting impression on the great novelist, who mentions it several times in La comédie humaine.

The state initiated the project of a Picasso Museum and the building underwent restoration between 1974 and 1980. What we have now is a modern space for the display of Picasso’s works, as well as facilities for research and the conservation of the artist’s drawings and archives. In one stroke, Paris has gained a restored monument and a contemporary museum.

Since 1968, death duties in France are payable either in currency or in works of art. This is all the more interesting if the works of art are considered an integral part of French cultural heritage. Picasso’s 203 paintings, 158 sculptures, 29 reliefs, 88 ceramics and almost 1500 drawings (along with engravings, sketchbooks and other objects) form the bulk of his legacy to the French state.

This rich heritage spans Picasso’s long life, and covers the amazing richness of his genius: early years in Barcelona, the Blue and Rose periods in Paris, the years of Cubism, Guernica and his post-war late style. Separate rooms are devoted to Picasso as an engraver, to ceramic works, to his work for the theatre. A sculpture garden has been created in what was the service courtyard. The formal gardens behind the museum provide a restful escape, with their spare wire constructions open to the elements.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in 1881 in Spain. His artistic genius surfaced early and never abated, characterised by master draughtsmanship and continuous technical innovation. His relationship with Paris dates from the very beginnings of the century when he lived there in great misery and poverty - but later with the splendour of greatness.

He was one of the few artists who sought constantly to enlarge the techniques used in painting: collage, constructionism, assemblage, cut-outs, cut-metal, objet trouvé, mixed media techniques in engraving. All these we now take for granted but Picasso was the first to explore their possibilities to the full. Some of the small assemblages in the museum are perfect examples of their kind, using, for example, tissue, wood, leaf skeletons, string, thumb tacks and a butterfly in the same composition.

His totally original sculptures exploit this tendency in unusual ways. Looking closely at a bull’s head, one sees it is in fact a bicycle saddle with handlebars for horns. Woman with a Baby Carriage is constructed from the ceramic parts of a kitchen stove and a cake tin. This use of domestic objects to represent a homely, everyday image of family life is particularly effective. Picasso would push two of his children – Claude and Paloma – to the beach in just such a push-car.

Many paintings represent or are inspired by similar scenes from the artist’s often-turbulent family life. Two of the most beautiful, illustrating his tenderness for his son Paul, and his interest in the theatre and the circus, are Paul as Harlequin and Paul as Pierrot. These circus motifs are continued in a 1922 canvas Portrait of an Adolescent as a Pierrot. Family life resurfaces again in 1954 with a nostalgic old man’s treatment of a typical domestic scene. Claude Drawing with Françoise and Paloma represents Picasso’s second family, having broken up with Françoise Gilot, his mistress of ten years. It is a picture suffused with tenderness.

As well as family, the human form in Picasso’s life undergoes radical transformation. In the 1904 realism of The Frugal Meal the etched lines and hollow features underscore Picasso’s preoccupation with the downcast and poor of his Paris years. One of the most balanced and toned canvases of his Rose Period is Two Brothers – a study in chiaroscuro blending Grecian ambiance – bucolic, serene, sensual – with the statuesque grace of the saltimbanques – those travelling musicians and acrobats hinted at in the off-side drum flecked with colour. In many ways this is a Spanish painting – earth colours, sensual joy in nudity, the return to the circus performers of his youth.

Picasso’s treatment of the human form undergoes a further shift of emphasis in his Classic Period. This is characterised by the monumentalism of the figures, isolated in Mediterranean landscapes minimally rendered between the hard blues of sea and sky. Proportions are distorted to bring out the timeless, deified aspects of these running, strangely stone-like presences. They are like gods descended to earth. The Pipes of Pan and Family at the Seaside beautifully epitomise these classicising tendencies.

The museum houses work from Picasso’s final years – much of it never before on public view. The enigmatic canvas The Young Painter, executed in 1972 and believed to be his last complete work, is a tantalising child-like portrait, perhaps an idealisation of Picasso himself as a youth, executed briskly in an off-hand fashion. In it the young painter gazes out candidly from the unpainted surface, brush poised at the beginning of his creative voyage. It is a fitting final statement from one of art’s great masters.