Grand Palais Paris - Picasso et les maîtres

images courtesy rmn

Le Matador, Pablo Picasso, 4 octobre 1970 Huile sur toile, 145,5 x 114 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris © Succession Picasso 2008

Grand nu au fauteuil rouge, Pablo PicassoParis, 5 mai 1929 Huile sur toile, 195 x 129 cmMusée Picasso, Paris © Succession Picasso, 2008

L’Infante Marguerite, Pablo Picasso Cannes, 14 septembre 1957 Huile sur toile, 100 x 81 cm Museu Picasso, Barcelone

Let me take you to the Grand Palais, where I went to see a Picasso exhibition. No pictures allowed in the exhibition so I don't have images of Picasso's pictures other than those presented by the museum's website, but I took plenty of pictures of the beautiful Grand Palais for you. The place is so big and in the two side-wings of the building there are two exhibitions at the moment, Emil Nolde and Picasso. Unfortunately the "Grand Gallery" with it's magificent glass roof wasn't open to the public that day, but it sure looked good from outside too.

(BTW, I have been in love with this painter and his work ever since I was a little girl when I first saw reproductions of his paintings on postcards, in books...)

click here to read Press release and if you are interested, find an excerpt from the curator's introduction to the exhibition catalogue beneath the photographs

Anne Baldassari, Excerpt from the introduction to the exhibition catalogue:

"Bringing together 210 works from the most prestigious public and private, French and international collections, Picasso and the Masters at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais takes stock of this process.

Confronting past and present, going beyond changes in style and formal innovations, the exhibition presents, in a cross between thematic and chronological approaches, guided by Picasso’s painting alone : El Greco, Vélasquez, Goya, Zurbaran, Ribera, Melendez, Poussin, Le Nain, Dubois, Chardin, David, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Courbet, Lautrec, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Douanier Rousseau, Titien, Cranach, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Spanish, French, Italian, or German, these artists are the multifaceted framework of a narrow motif in which painting learns from painting.

Unprecedented pictorial cannibalism is at work in Picasso’s approach. He made painting of painting into a system. Breaking away from the academic procedures of the transmission and reproduction of tradition – copy, paraphrase, quotation – this new method put painting at the very heart of knowledge of the world. Transposition, mimicry, deviation, distortion are some of the figures in the strategy used by Picasso in the treatment of his favourite painters. He thus fertilised the modus operandi of modern and contemporary creation, sometimes also pulling it towards perverse duplication, irony and pastiche."