Picasso, l’étranger
This catalog adopts an innovative point of view on Picasso and his work by offering the original approach of around twenty international thinkers, from fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, history, geopolitics, philosophy, museum studies, art history or law.
Picasso remained hostage to the fine arts for a long time. It is through the prism of social sciences that the Picasso the Foreigner catalog addresses his relationship with France. In an unexpected polyphony, alongside the works and documents exhibited, plural voices are summoned here (law, geography, anthropology, sociology, history) completing the analyzes of art historians. By tackling, often for the first time, the “Picasso object”, they reveal – a major paradox – that the now legendary painter was considered a pariah during his first four decades in France. Stigmatized or ostracized because he was a foreigner, committed, an avant-garde artist, the young Picasso lived from 1901 under constant police surveillance: so many dates recorded, repeated fingerprints, identity photos on which he appears a criminal. But Picasso does not submit, he explores, he advances and obsessively constructs his masterful work, immediately celebrated in the Western world but rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, committed to preserving French “good taste”. What strategies does the artist use to navigate a country shaken by waves of xenophobia and hampered by often obsolete institutions? How does it build its networks to impose the standards of its own universe – inclusive, innovative, subversive? Beyond his artistic genius, Picasso revealed impressive talents as a political strategist. By inhabiting his position as a foreigner and global artist, he becomes a powerful vector for the modernization of France. With its multiple “spheres of belonging”, it is as if, as a pioneer of 21st century models, it exploded the traditional borders of nation-states, announcing new contemporary cosmopolitan forms.
Doesn’t the odyssey of a foreign Picasso in France echo the rebirth of our ordinary xenophobias? Doesn’t it resonate today for all these subordinate existences which encounter the rejection of others? By combining tools and concepts at the crossroads of several disciplines, this catalog places Picasso at the heart of our most contemporary concerns.
Fayard
September 2021
196 x 255 mm
288 pages
EAN: 9782213718408