The Tamesis
Anne Baldassari, one of the world’s most important Picasso scholars, said Picasso himself was not interested in the development of attention. Baldassari was the chairman of the Picasso Museum in Paris from 2005 to 2014, and in 2012, he staged the largest Picasso exhibition in Hong Kong at the time: a solo exhibition with 56 paintings and sculptures from the museum’s collection.
“Picasso has always denied to establish ‘school’ or contribute to any art movement.” She added that he had gone through “he believed to be years of sterile academic training to represent the exact reality” and that he was “anarchist and free thinker” who seeks “full rest” with things that were before.
He also likes to stay away from the public’s eyes. Baldassari said that between 1906 and 1914, he fundamentally reshaped paintings, refusing to display his paintings or allowing them to be published or sold. She noted that only those who visited his studio or obtained works, such as his collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein, could see them.
Picasso actually did meet Asian artists in his life: “You can count them with one hand,” says Dareau, co-curator of the M+ exhibition.
How did the Picasso Museum decide to lend it to M+ performances? Dareau notes that the selected works achieve an “interesting and coherent dialogue” with the M+ collection and allow “the visitors to the exhibition to know nothing about Picasso to understand the feelings of different periods and styles of his career.” The Blue Period, the Cube Period, and Picasso’s Surreal Period had loans, in various media: painting, sculpture, painting, print and ceramics.
The largest Picasso loan from Paris and the end of the M+ exhibition is the “Holocaust in Korea”, which was completed in January 1951. The work is Dareau said, the only Asian-themed painting of Picasso showing a man holding a gun aiming a group of naked women and children in his armor. It is inspired by the past masterpieces of artistic history: Goya’s “The Third Day of May 1808” (1814), and Manet’s “Executive Emperor Maximilian” (a series drawn between 1867 and 1869).
