Picasso at Palazzo Te., Poetry and salvation

The exhibition Picasso at Palazzo Te. Poetry and Salvation, curated by Annie Cohen-Solal, in collaboration with Johan Popelard, is the key event of the 2024 cultural programme featuring the theme of Metamorphosis, and in particular the relationship between Giulio Romano and the poem by Ovid that inspired the construction of Palazzo Te between 1525 and 1535.

Presented by the Fondazione Palazzo Te in partnership with the Musée National Picasso in Paris and the artist’s family, a collection of approximately 50 works by the iconic 20th-century artist will be showcased at Palazzo Te from 5 September 2024 to 6 January 2025. Some pieces are being exhibited in Italy for the first time.
In 1930, four hundred years after the creation of the Room of the Giants in Mantova, Picasso made a series of engravings inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This fascinating project offers a direct dialogue with Giulio Romano and the Renaissance paintings in the palazzo. Behind the artist’s engagement with the mythological tradition, however, there lies a remarkable adventure. Emigrating to France in 1900, branded by the police and the Académie des Beaux-Arts as a foreigner, an anarchist and avant-garde artist until 1944, Picasso was initially welcomed by a small group of marginal poets. It was through poetry and these poets that he found the means to overcome the challenges of being a foreign artist in French society. This led to his innovative use of metamorphosis as a creative strategy, positioning him as a mercurial artist that few critics, particularly in France, could fully comprehend.

“Why focus on poetry, a seemingly minor area in the overwhelming body of work of Pablo Picasso? How do we explain the way, from 1935 onwards, poetry became another means of expression for this genius who, upon his arrival in France in 1900, did not speak a single word of French, and when he did, it was consistently poor?
“The key to understanding Picasso’s success,” – says exhibition curator Annie Cohen-Solal, author of the book “Picasso the foreigner: an artist in France” – “can be found in his unique position as a foreigner in France, his boundless creative energy, his compassion for society’s most marginalised individuals, particularly poets, and most importantly, his exceptional political acumen that allowed him to navigate the challenges of French society. Despite facing discrimination and exclusion for half a century, Picasso worked hard at establishing social connections across the country, opting to settle in the provinces in 1955 instead of the capital. He valued artisans over the Beaux Arts academics, embraced the Mediterranean as his cultural home, and achieved global recognition on his own terms – a rebellious response that echoes the spirit of Palazzo Te’s history.”

Patti Smith and Annie Cohen-Solal

Picasso esule

Annie Cohen-Solal and Niccolò Ammaniti with Michele Fusilli

When Picasso died in 1973, the French state welcomed his work with pomp and circumstance, assimilating it into its own history. Yet how many remember that the artist, upon his first entry into Paris in 1900, was immediately booked by the police? How many imagine the climate of suspicion he was subjected to throughout his life as a foreigner and avant-garde artist in a country obsessed with “national purity” and “good taste”? Writer Annie Cohen-Solal has devoted her literary output to great artists who faced exile and, thanks to numerous hitherto unpublished archival sources, now offers a captivating and original interpretation of the creator of Guernica. Picasso. A Foreigner’s Life (Femina Essai Prize 2021) is a feverish and passionate tale that reaches into the present, evoking our most pressing concerns: “Doesn’t the scandal that sees the greatest artist of the twentieth century branded because he is a foreigner,” the author writes, “harken back to the current regurgitations of ordinary xenophobia?” Curator of the two exhibitions Picasso at Palazzo Te. Poetry and Salvation and Picasso the Foreigner at Palazzo Reale, Cohen-Solal will speak in dialogue with writer Niccolò Ammaniti, author of an excerpt inspired by the book. Michele Fusilli will conduct the meeting.