Picasso and the Louvre Culture

Under the title of this exhibition, two great stars of art collide, and it is uncertain which one outshines the other. The relationship between Picasso and the Louvre was characterized by mutual fascination, rivalry and sometimes open aversion. This can be demonstrated in a number of anecdotes. The most famous occurred in the summer of 1911. Picasso had just rented a house in Céret in the south of France when the news of the Mona Lisa’s disappearance from the Louvre spread, and he rushed onto the train back to Paris. Across from the newspaper Paris Journal A certain Géry Pieret, former secretary and friend of the poet Apollinaire, declared that it was he who had stolen the Mona Lisa. Four years earlier, Picasso had acquired two old Iberian stone heads from the same man, also stolen from the Louvre.

Now the poet worried about the painter at the Paris train station. The two nervously searched for ways to get rid of the suspicious objects. They finally gave them anonymously to the editorial staff of Paris Journal away. Apollinaire was arrested, however, on suspicion of complicity in the Mona Lisa robbery, and Picasso was summoned as a witness. When asked whether he knew the arrested person, he is said to have replied: “Never seen him.” Whether he actually denied his friend so blatantly is not clear from the documents that the Louvre-Lens has compiled on this anecdote for the exhibition. In any case, Apollinaire was released and the Mona Lisa was seized in 1913. The thief was an Italian employee of the Louvre.

The exhibition does not want to dwell on such anecdotes. She is concerned with the background to a 70-year ambivalent relationship. Since his first visit to Paris at the age of nineteen for the World Exhibition in 1900, Picasso had been a regular visitor to the Louvre, especially the ancient Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Oriental sections. In the exhibition design, which was excellently designed by the Scénografiá office, you can chronologically pace the stations of the interrelationship between the museum and the artist in a longitudinal room and immerse yourself in individual cabinets with examples of possible influences. The young curator Dimitri Salmon was more concerned with suggesting than with formal evidence.

The juxtapositions seem a bit far-fetched in the show

Can the large almond-shaped eyes of the preliminary studies for Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” be traced back to this or that Iberian sculpture? Did Picasso’s return to the classically rounded figures have to do with his interest in Greco-Roman grave steles from the Louvre’s collection of antiquities? Is it fair to assume that the sculpture “The jug carrier” (La porteuse de jarre, 1935), made from a few pieces of wood and nails, was the model of the “great woman offering offerings”, which Picasso had drawn up thirty years earlier in the ancient Egyptian section of the Louvre? The visual hungry Picasso absorbed all the suggestions so much that direct influences are usually difficult to detect. The Italian author Ardengo Soffici described him as a “hunting dog that roams the Egyptian and Phoenician first floor halls of the Louvre in search of prey” and soon snaps at a sphinx, a basalt bust, a piece of papyrus or a sarcophagus.

The hypothetical upholstered juxtapositions appear a bit far-fetched in the show. But they invite the visitor to actively combine motifs and shapes. And the documentary processed episodes of the direct contact between Picasso and the Louvre bosses provide interesting insights into the suspicious mutual observation. In 1937, for example, the director of the Museum Jeu de Paume Picasso’s “Still Life with Wine Jug and Bread” from 1921, which was still part of the Louvre and specialized in contemporary art from abroad, wanted to acquire. However, since public purchases had to be approved by the commission of experts in the great council chamber of the Louvre, this place became the battlefield of an almost palpable degenerate controversy, in which Commissioner Maurice de Rothschild made himself famous with the exclamation that such smear did not even get into his toilet. The purchase was refused, and Picasso himself amused himself by commenting that the commission was quite right, that his picture had failed and was too bad for the Jeu de Paume.

During the war, some of the Louvre’s halls were used as sorting depots for the private collections looted by the Nazis in Paris, and dozens of Picasso’s works passed through that place, including the 1906/07 gouache “Buste de femme” from the Alphonse Kann collection, which is now the Berlin Museum Berggruen belongs. Picasso’s relationship with Georges Salles, who was director of the Louvre until 1957, was particularly close after the war. Picasso suggested painting his portrait, which should allow him to enter the portrait gallery of the Louvre directors as a painter. After repeated preparatory work, one day, while sitting as a model, he casually asked Salles whether it was true that his colleague Georges Braque was going to paint a ceiling in the Louvre. After Salle’s affirmative answer, he suddenly no longer felt like completing the portrait and declared that he now had other things to do.

“Are all the wrong roads leading to the Louvre and the Academy?”

The official recognition of his work by the Louvre took a long time. A major retrospective was organized for him in 1955 by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which is housed in a Louvre wing, but does not belong to it. The Louvre was only officially honored when President Georges Pompidou gave instructions in 1971 to hang eight selected works by Picasso in the Grande Galerie next to the old masters. “Rocking Chair” (1947) or the “Girl with the Play Hoop” (1919) were emblazoned in the immediate vicinity of the Mona Lisa or Watteau’s “Arlequin”. A year and a half later, Picasso died at the age of 92, and his wife Jacqueline decided to bequeath his private collection to the Louvre. It was an eclectic ensemble of around 50 works by, among others, Louis Le Nain, Chardin, Ingres, Cézanne, Matisse. The idea of ​​a state Picasso Museum in Paris was already in the air and received an additional boost when it became apparent that the inheritance tax would be paid after Jacqueline’s death in the form of a transfer of ownership to the state. Dozens of paintings, drawings, ceramics and prints went into the Musée Picasso, which opened in 1985, alongside Picasso’s private collection.

“Do all the wrong paths lead to the Louvre and the Academy?” Wrote the newly minted Académie Française member Jean Cocteau in a tribute to the exhibition in 1955, and went on full-bodied: “I greet the magnificent Picasso with my academic sword.” With Picasso, the path was rather the other way around. He, who rummaged around early on at the Parisian flea markets and in the ethnographic collection of the Musée de l’Homme, smuggled something completely different into the academic institution. Before the opening of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris in 2006, to which the collection of the Musée de l’Homme was transferred, a selection of his masterpieces was exhibited in the Louvre. The distinction between high and popular culture was never important to Picasso.

Les Louvre de Pablo Picasso. Louvre-Lens, until January 31, 2022. Catalog 39 euros. Info: