From drawings and prints to collages and cutouts, Pablo Picasso liked to experiment.
“Picasso and Paper” at the Cleveland Museum of Art is an opportunity to learn something new about the influential artist and how he created.
“He used traditional techniques, things like printmaking and drawing, but then he also used paper for things like collages, sculptures, experimental photography,” said Britany Salsbury, curator of prints and drawings at the museum. “We can see really clear connections between these works using paper and some of his best-known works.”
Nearly 300 pieces from throughout the Spanish-born artist’s life are on view in “Picasso and Paper,” which CMA organized with the Royal Academy of Arts in London and in partnership with Musée national Picasso-Paris. Originally planned for 2020 in Cleveland, the exhibit was delayed due to the pandemic. It opens to the public on Sunday and continues through March 23.
The exhibit is organized chronologically, starting with animal cutouts Picasso created as a child and moving immediately into his Blue Period, when he was a young, starving artist and mourning the loss of a friend to suicide.
Picasso’s study drawings for “La Vie” are displayed next to the large oil painting in CMA’s collection.
“He considered several different groupings of people, considered the subjects in different poses before he settled on the final composition,” Salsbury said. “What we've been able to find out about the painting over the years is that he actually painted ‘La Vie’ over one of his earlier paintings that he had originally traveled to Paris to exhibit.”
His work and life literally became more rosy in the years to follow, influenced by travel in the summer of 1906 to the Pyrenees Mountains near the border of Spain and France with his romantic interest and model, Fernande Olivier.
“They were both really deeply affected by the sort of ochre tonality there, and Picasso began to incorporate that into his work. Literally the coloration that he was seeing around him, but also the warmer … tone that his life had taken on with a new love interest,” Salsbury said.
Women and their bodies are featured in many of the works on view, an inevitable part of exhibiting Picasso’s work as the women in his life were regular subjects of his art and experimentation, Salsbury said.
One of the signature works of the exhibit is “Women at Their Toilette,” a large collage created with wallpaper, newspaper, wrapping paper and other materials in the late 1930s.
“It was actually originally intended to serve as a design for a tapestry that was not realized until many decades later because he kept the collage in his studio for many years,” Salsbury said.
The three women in the piece are his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar, a Surrealist photographer.
“We see them in a space that may be the artist's studio with what appears to be a portrait of the artist himself,” she said, adding that it is the first time the work has been exhibited in the U.S.
Other collage work in the exhibit includes instruments in his Cubist style created with found materials, such as cardboard and newspapers.
Throughout the show, there are also sculptures, etchings, prints, drawings and more in various styles, from neoclassical portraits to anti-war statements.
Picasso created up until his death in 1973 at age 91 in France.
The exhibit is also an opportunity to move away from the idea of Picasso working as an “isolated genius,” Salsbury said.
“By showing the many printers who he collaborated with, the sort of mutual influence that he had with some of the women in his life who were also artists in their own right, it allows us to think about who he was and what his practice was like in an entirely new way,” she said.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, please call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
