In Paris at the Pompidou Center they are showing “Picasso. Drawing to infinity”

“Picasso” is shown in Paris. Drawing to Infinity” is the most complete exhibition of graphics by the Spanish master to date. Among the 1,000 exhibits: drawings, pastels, print graphics, paintings and sculptures, there are also works that have never been exhibited before. In the huge hall of the Pompidou Center, crowded with Picasso, you can spend not infinity, but certainly the whole day, says Kommersant’s correspondent in France Alexey Tarkhanov.

The exhibition was organized to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), which is not a joyful occasion. And yet, this is an opportunity to remember that the great Spaniard lived the longest and happiest life among his brothers in the avant-garde, a significant part of which he spent in the rank of a recognized genius, a fabulous rich man, a favorite of women and a nightmare for gallerists. “Picasso” has become a household name for the artist; he has become a meme, the hero of films, cartoons, memoirs, monographs, caricatures and jokes. His works were never printed on sweets. This is partly why we have the feeling that we have known everything about Picasso for a long time and have already seen everything. Now, that’s not true.

Here, his entire life from 1900 to 1973 is exhibited in drawings, from easel graphics and commissioned illustrations to sheets of notebooks that served as his notebooks. We have the feeling that Picasso is always equal in his work, as always looking like himself in all his crafty photographs, where you just want to draw horns on him. Ilya Erenburg argued in all seriousness that Picasso was a real devil, but he did not argue with his old friend.

We count the change of periods and manners, and there are more than a dozen of them in the artist’s life, based on the main paintings. There are even more options in the schedule. If you forget that you came to a Picasso exhibition, you might think that the sheets of dozens of draftsmen are on display here. They all have only one thing in common – courage and clarity. Not a single sketch betrays even a shadow of doubt; the author instantly turns into lines the most complex forms in front of his eyes, as if he were simply tracing with an iron hand all the straight lines and curves outlined by someone before him. And even the tiny stand specially designated by the curators about the “mistakes” of the artist, where a rag and an eraser are as important as charcoal and a pencil, looks like just a small dead end on the path of the all-conquering drawing machine.

Almost everything is displayed in one room; the organizers avoided building separate rooms, except for two or three special occasions and themes. The drawings hang on stands, which in turn are suspended from the ceiling and twisted into a spiral. In this whirlpool, individual themes stand out, dedicated not to a period, not to a time, but to a specific work, such as a showcase with cardboard sculptures for “Lunch on the Grass” or a fence around Delacroix’s “Women of Algiers” borrowed from the Louvre.

We remember that in the 1950s, Picasso, as part of his familiar dialogues with the classics (not only with contemporaries Manet and Monet, but with Velazquez or Raphael, whom he simply portrayed as his neighbors in the studio), wrote 15 pictorial homages to Delacroix. The last of them was sold for $179.3 million at Christie’s in 2015, becoming one of the most expensive paintings in the world not only by Picasso, but also by contemporary artists in general.

These paintings are not here, but for the first time, small preparatory sheets from a notebook are shown, 71 drawings with animated odalisques in all imaginable poses, shaking off the stupor into which Delacroix plunged them. Most of all, they resemble a cartoon storyboard.

Speed ​​and productivity (the same Ehrenburg said that any plane not yet sketched was an insult to Picasso) more than once seduced photographers and filmmakers. They competed to see who could best convey his movements, either placing him in front of glass or forcing him to paint in the semi-darkness with luminous colors. These shots enliven the exhibition, but the greatest success is the artist’s work on a wall painting, filmed from the side without any special effects, with a wide brush. Picasso is all in a concentrated aimed movement. When he writes on the wall, his only problem is to reach the next line from the stepladder. Flocks of young girls who came to the exhibition gather to watch how the 70-year-old master does this, half naked, in his family’s panties stretched out and stained with lime on his butt.

For them, the very topic of “Picasso and His Women,” with its unprecedented artistic and mental distance between the images of Olga Khokhlova, Jacqueline Roque, Marie-Therese Walter and Françoise Gilot, is probably news. These are not even different women, but residents of different planets. Isn’t there a reason to think not about the artist’s misogyny, but about the fact that – no matter what he himself says – how much in his work depends on the woman with whom he is next? In comparison with them, Picasso of his own free will appears as a monster, a monster, a bull like the Minotaur, in whom he saw his second self. “The Minotaur Raping a Woman” is an example of this, although in the memoirs of Françoise Gilot the main noted feature of her lover is strange timidity, and not at all aggression. Whether Picasso’s work glorifies violence or, on the contrary, any rapist looks like an animal to him is up to modern moralists to decide. In any case, it was not for nothing that the poster for the exhibition was made of a portrait of Françoise Gilot, the only one of his friends who without hesitation left the artist and took revenge for her friend.

For a long time, no one seriously talked to the “general public” about creativity; they mostly munch on stories about inheritance, insults to children and girlfriends, and the dark sides of his, as they said in my Soviet youth, unfriendly attitude towards women. The new exhibition at the Pompidou Center is a great opportunity to talk with the artist himself without intermediaries: without enthusiasm, without moralizing and without hypocrisy.