Vintage floral wallpaper, wonky flyposters, green astroturf and brown kraft paper are not the usual backdrop for Pablo Picasso masterpieces.
But Paris’s Picasso museum has radically reinvented its rooms to win back a younger generation that is shying away from the influential Spanish artist over controversy about his alleged cruel treatment of women and his use of African artefacts.
A spectacularly colourful and playful rehang of a series of Picasso masterworks, paintings, sketches and ceramics opens this week, featuring major pieces by contemporary painters, including key Black female artists, in order to open up the debate on feminism, colonialism and race, and bring in young audiences for the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death.
As museums across the world from New York to Málaga and Bucharest prepare 50th anniversary exhibitions this year, the Paris Picasso museum chose not to flinch at controversy surrounding the artist, whose troubled private life – namely his allegedly callous treatment of his wives, lovers and muses – has become more of a focus for young audiences than his work since the #MeToo movement. There is also renewed debate over western artists’ use of African artefacts, which Picasso collected.
“We wanted to open up the museum, reach a wider audience and bring in all those debates: on women, post-colonial issues and politics,” said the museum’s president, Cécile Debray. “Bringing in new and contemporary artists shows that we’re open to all the debates on Picasso. We put these questions on the table and discuss them without claiming to have all the answers. We wanted to make Picasso relevant.”
One room, entitled Imaginary Journeys, explores Picasso’s personal collection of African objects, and how such pieces were appropriated by the avant-garde artists of the early 20th century. Hanging alongside is the Nigerian artist Obi Okigbo’s triptych, Landscapes of My Childhood Remembered, which examines ancestral stories and ritual, echoing the loss and trauma after the Biafran war.
A darkened room, In Times of War, looks at Picasso’s work during the second world war alongside a piece by the US artist Mickalene Thomas, from her Resist series examining the civil rights demonstrations and the Black Lives Matter movement. Thomas said Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, on the horrors of Spanish civil war, dealt with many of the themes that she did. “These themes of the mother with dying child, the war, death and pain” could be likened to “the familiar histories of what Black and brown people, especially mothers, face today”, she said.
Elsewhere, works by the artist Dora Maar, who was a major surrealist photographer as well as Picasso’s partner and muse, and the French artist Louise Bourgeois, reflect Picasso’s treatment of the human form.
Crucially, the show comes as the museum also hosts France’s first major exhibition by Faith Ringgold, the Black feminist American artist whose work includes rereadings of Picasso and the Paris art scene of the early 20th century.
The museum’s controversial move to give a “free-hand” to the British fashion designer Paul Smith to use “colour and kitsch” to redesign its rooms and rip down the standard formal white backdrop to Picasso’s work might once have been written off as yet another gimmicky partnership of high fashion and the art world.
But curators have welcomed the museum team’s painstaking effort to present and explain Picasso chronologically alongside other modern artists against Smith’s incongruous backdrops. It could spark a permanent rethink of how the museum, housed in a 17th-century mansion, hangs Picasso’s work in the future.
The museum’s unique collection of more than 5,000 works and 200,000 items from the artist’s studio and personal collection was given to the French state by his family in lieu of inheritance tax, and there is a constant pressure to find new ways to present them.
Smith admitted he had felt quite frightened of reinventing the rooms because he had little academic knowledge of the modern master and feared being accused of seeming disrespectful. But his jokey designs were seen as teasing out new views of the artist. One room hung with striped Breton sailor tops echos Robert Doisneau’s photographs of the artist at home in the south of France. Alongside, hangs a work by Chéri Samba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that uses the striped top as a symbol of western artists’ views of the African work which inspired cubism.
Another of Smith’s backdrops is deliberately badly papered with 1960s flyposters of Picasso’s exhibitions.
Smith said the typical modernist “white box” in which museums show modern art had its limitations, so he had done the opposite. “The white box, for today’s generation that is quite intimidating really,” he said. “For the world of pop we are in now, everything is very immediate on people’s phones, so it’s intentionally a very visual exhibition.”
The Collection in a New Light runs until 27 August at the Musée Picasso, Paris. Faith Ringgold Black is Beautiful runs until 2 July
