Picasso Consuming images

The Musée national Picasso-Paris presents its new temporary exhibition "Picasso Iconophage" from June 11 to September 15, 2024 in the first floor spaces. The exhibition analyzes the modernity of Pablo Picasso's conception of the image by exploring the artistic and extra-artistic sources of his work and their modes of appropriation.

Pablo Picasso's multi-referenced work is striking for the richness of its visual culture. Celebrated by the avant-garde as the destroyer of academicism, Picasso never ceased to present himself as the heir to a long pictorial tradition. His ambiguous relationship with art history raises both the question of sources and the question of how they are appropriated. A frequent visitor to the Louvre, Picasso accumulated a lifetime's worth of photographs, postcards, reproductions, posters, magazines and illustrated books, not to mention the works in his personal collection. This amassed repertoire of iconography is symptomatic of a new way of thinking about the image, free from the artistic field and historical time. Nevertheless, there is no literal quotation in his work: his variations on the paintings of the great masters are above all deconstructions; his forms and compositions are always hybrid. The exhibition highlights how Picasso's paintings, sculptures and drawings are part of a complex network of source images, with four themes running through his work: the hero, the Minotaur, the voyeur and the musketeer.

EXHIBITION CURATORS

Cécile Godefroy, Head of the Centre d'Études Picasso, Musée national Picasso-Paris

Anne Montfort-Tanguy, Curator in the Graphic Art Department of the Musée national d'art moderne and professor of modern art history at the École du Louvre