Picasso and Giacometti in Paris blockbuster exhibition

Picasso/Giacometti
Musée Picasso and the Alberto et Annette Giacometti Foundation
National Picasso – Paris Museum
October 4–February 5

For the past 20 years there have been a number of exhibitions that have expanded on the work of Picasso, presenting him in association with other artists – there have been Picasso and Matisse, Picasso and Braque, Picasso and de Chirico, Picabia and Leger.

Now the Musée Picasso and the Foundation Giacometti have mounted a major exhibition of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966).

Like the previous exhibitions featuring the work of Picasso and his associates, this exhibition provides something of a dialogue between two of the most important artists of the 20th century. Picasso/Giacometti tells the compelling story of two artists who, by looking at and possibly learning from each other’s work and despite their personal differences and age difference seem to be close in spirit.

The exhibition on two floors of the museum brings together more than 200 artworks of these two artists from the collections of the Musée Picasso and the Foundation Giacometti, along with borrowed artworks from French and foreign collections.

It has also brought together a collection of archives from the Musée Picasso and the Foundation Giacometti, showing new, significant documents, sketches, notebooks, and annotations. These documents clarify the unknown relationship between these two artists a relationship both friendly and formal, and the mutual interest that they shared during key moments of their careers, despite their 20-year age difference.

Among the documents is a small notebook of Giacometti’s in which he has done a drawing of a Picasso painting he had just seen. There is also a letter that Giacometti wrote noting that Picasso was the first person to turn up at one of his exhibitions.

There are not as many of Giacometti’s elongated stick figures as one might have thought would be included but there are a number of investigations into the figurative form which show him experimenting with ideas about the figure notably with his Femme cuillaire (Spoon Woman) where he has combined a spoon shape with that of a stylised antique stele form.

Overall the exhibition provides new insights into each of the artist’s work and the viewer is able to see the visual connections between the artist’s work. This is particularly noticeable in two works – Picasso’s La chevre”(The She Goat) and Giacometti’s Le Chein (The Dog). The dog is based on the Afghan hound owned by Picasso. Both see the artist paring the figures back as though flaying them to their essence.

The exhibition is in eight sections, which is partly chronological and partly thematic, presenting the different aspects of their paintings, sculptures and drawings.

Along with tracing the development of their art from their youth to their modernist creations, the exhibition shows the links between their artworks, such as the influence of non-Western art, the impact of the Surrealist movement and the return to realism in the period after WWII

The exhibition includes Giacometti’s Suspended Ball of 1931, a work  Picasso considered to be one of the great surrealist artworks with ambivalent sexual connections.

Both artists dealt with notions of sex and death, struggling to express their own sexuality and relationships with women as well as having to confront death both at a personal level as well as the wider social issues of death and dying. Picasso early on in his career had been affected by the suicide of his friend Casagemas, which resulted in his painting Death of Casagemas. Other paintings explored the terror and death such as his more abstract work The Figures by the Sea”(1931) where large voluptuous figures devour each other. 

Sex and death was a preoccupation of Giacometti’s at various times and can be seen is his sculpture Femme egorgee (Woman with her Throat Cut) (1933) a bronze which was exhibited at the Auckland Art Gallery show of works from the Scottish Galleries.

Although they are both often considered avante garde artists, their work had a major emphasis on the figure, which was dealt with in different ways. The interest was not in the figure as such but the way in which the figure stood for ideas about the way in which artists perceive the world and how figures and other objects inhabit space and time.

They were also looking for the inner person: Picasso by seeming to turn his figures inside out or examine their interiors and Giacometti by refining the figure down to its physical core.

The final two works of the show are installations of standing figures. Giacometti’s The Forest is a small work of seven figures reduced to mere trunks with one surreal head resting on the ground.

Opposite is Picasso’s large bronze The Bathers, which consists of six almost abstract figures, one of which is mounted with a small, squeezed face that could have been made by Giacometti.

A major catalogue accompanies the exhibition, richly illustrated, along with new essays by art historians and the curators of the exhibition as well as an anthology of historic texts dedicated to the two artists.