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Stephen McCarty

Picasso. One of those historical figures so famous they fly solo in the name game.
But who, or what, is Picasso, really? An umbrella or drinks coaster? T-shirt, necklace or bobblehead? Shopping bag or small family car?
The commodification of the artistically prominent demands they be reduced to a token of modern life – an adornment, an implement, an everyday essential, even something in which to drive around – putting them everywhere and nowhere all at once. The more we see the signature “Picasso” the less we look at or think about his art, or consider the man himself.
Which is where M+, in partnership with France’s Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP), comes in. The special exhibition, “Picasso for Asia – A Conversation”, which runs at M+ until July 13, reveals a surprisingly slippery character while also showing us what and whom we didn’t know we didn’t know: the master behind the myth.

The contradictions barring the way to a fundamental understanding of Pablo Picasso are tricky, even for the experts, not least because the artist gave so few interviews. And because many ideas and opinions glibly attributed to him might not have been his at all.
“It’s so confusing, all the time,” admits François Dareau, MnPP research fellow and co-curator of the M+ exhibition. “We have only a few recordings of Picasso’s voice. But when you see all the quotes in books and articles, they are so well written it means that everything was rewritten by many other people. It’s very difficult to approach the real man behind the image. You don’t recognise his real voice.”
Perhaps, then, through the M+ “conversation”, the genuine Picasso will finally emerge, with his art doing the talking. The dialogue concept takes physical form in the juxtaposition of his work with that of numerous artists of Asian ethnicity. Represented, among others, are Feng Guodong, Wifredo Lam, Keiichi Tanaami, Isamu Noguchi, Haegue Yang, Simon Fujiwara and Hong Kong’s Firenze Lai Ching-yin and Luis Chan, their works, influenced to a greater or lesser degree by Picasso, reaching back over 80 years.

“We could have done a monographic exhibition, but we see plenty with Picasso,” says Dareau. “We wanted to do something quite different, bolder. Placing him in a dialogue brings something else: new visuals, new ideas, a fresh perspective on Picasso.”
A major Hong Kong show featuring treasures from a leading French museum and starring a Spanish painter acknowledges not just the international appeal of its subject, but also the ambition of its venue.
Putting Picasso into a face-off with another artist, then repeating the technique with many more artists throughout a large-scale presentation, is something M+ says has not previously been attempted.

“This is confirmed by our co-organisers in Paris, who have never done an exhibition like this about him,” says Doryun Chong, artistic director and chief curator, M+, and co-curator of “Picasso for Asia”. “They send their collection all around the world, usually for one-person exhibitions; but not only is this a group exhibition, it includes more than 30 artists ‘in conversation’ with Picasso. It’s not just me saying it’s a daring thing to do.”
Chong and Dareau have provided two comprehensive essays covering Picasso’s personality, childhood, legacy, image, influence, working habits, political position, mythological status, alleged misogyny and much more for the extensively illustrated book Picasso/Asia: A Conversation, which takes the place of the standard exhibition catalogue.

In “Invention of a Myth”, Dareau considers the significance that art history has accorded Picasso with reference to what he calls “the particular character of the myth that Picasso established”. This, he believes, rests on stereotypes still applied to an artist who has proved inexhaustible fodder for books, documentaries and films: “the child prodigy, the bohemian artist, the iconoclastic revolutionary, the exiled artist, the star, the opportunist, the millionaire, the magician, the monster, the political activist […] the genius and so on”, writes Dareau.
Refusing to accept such labels at face value has helped reinforce the purpose of the exhibition, even beyond having “this new narrative, this new way of presenting him”, he says. Which brings us back to what Dareau thinks of as the “figure” of Picasso.

“The figure for me is the image created around him, so, for example, I took [in the essay] the blue period, the pink period, the bohemian way of life,” he says. “I wanted to show that even if you consider the biographical facts like, yes, he was living in the poorest parts of Barcelona and Paris, in the public imagination there’s a poor artist struggling for his life or becoming the chief of the rebellion.
“But I wanted to point out that constructed narrative, because also, in the end, he was collected by wealthy collectors such as Gertrude Stein and I wanted to put that into perspective and not be fooled. It doesn’t mean that because Picasso said one thing or drew something that he was those things.”

The idea of Picasso as a chameleon extends to his relationship with Africa and Asia. Chong begins his essay “Remaking Picasso for Asia” with an examination of the 1951 work Massacre in Korea and Picasso’s reasons for painting it. Recalling Francisco Goya’s 1814 work The Third of May 1808, the painting features a particularly fearsome-looking firing squad about to murder a group of women and children. The catalyst for the work was the beginning of the Korean war (1950-53) and was seen in some quarters, writes Chong, as “Picasso’s effort to be validated by the Communist Party”, even if it meant tackling subject matter divergent from his normal fare.
“Asia is very far from where Picasso was, literally and metaphorically,” says Chong. Because if events in Korea provided a handy, if tenuous, foothold on the continent for Picasso, the artist was hardly planting a flag, even giving the impression that Asian art was of no interest. African art, disingenuously or not, was similarly dismissed: more contradictions, as it turns out.

“It’s true that Picasso was through and through a European artist – you can even say he was a Mediterranean artist. He spent most of his life in France after his youth, but didn’t go back to Spain much,” says Chong. “Then there was a period when he became a spokesman for pacifism after World War II, but he didn’t leave continental Europe for most of his life.
“But his influences were from different places, most prominently and famously from African art. And yet we have evidence that he dismissed any interest in specifically Chinese and Japanese art, which he called ‘decorative’ as a term of derision.
“My contention there,” adds Chong, “is that it’s historical fact that he is a descendant of a generation of artists who were irreversibly influenced by Japanese art. A whole generation that includes Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec – all artists he admired.
“So influence isn’t always direct or intentional or conscious, it can happen in many different ways.”
Nor is that influence always obvious.

“Now why do we put him in conversation with these Asian artists, many of whom weren’t connected with Picasso in any material way or professed to be influenced by him,” asks Chong. “It’s because I believe that serious artists are in conversation with other artists, whether in person or their imagination. They are all part of art history, so artists speak to other artists, their predecessors, their peers across time as well as across cultures, because that’s what artists do. They don’t create or think about their art in isolation.”
At least one conversation Picasso had in person was with Chinese ink painter Zhang Daqian, who travelled to France to meet him. In the book, Chong notes that the rendezvous was “described as a summit between two towering figures in modern art, in the East and the West”.
Meanwhile, Asian diasporic painter Wifredo Lam, the son of a Canton native who emigrated to Cuba, “moved to Paris in 1938 and quickly became part of the circle around Picasso”, writes Chong.

And curiously, despite his apparent attitude to the fruits of Far Eastern creativity, “Picasso kept a group of Japanese prints in his private collection throughout his life”, Chong’s essay adds. It was a comparable story with African art.
“One of Picasso’s most famous quotes,” Dareau says, “is about African art, which he said he’d never heard of. But we know he wouldn’t have done Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [1907], or most of his art, without knowing this.”
Picasso died in 1973, aged 91, so perhaps longevity distorted his opinions.
“He had such a long life that he could say something in 1910 and then something in 1960 that was different; it also depended on who he was talking to,” says Dareau. “It’s interesting that in the same sketchbook as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – he had 16 such sketchbooks working on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – on one of the pages there is this fake landscape after Chinese calligraphic art. So we know he was looking at this kind of work.”
Why, then, did Picasso deny his influences? Was he just being difficult?
“That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for eight years,” admits Dareau. One more seeming inconsistency that might be merely a sign of changing times and tastes. Received wisdom, if there is such a thing, has it that Picasso, not just the greatest artist of the 20th century, was never less than revered by contemporaries and the public. After all, why else would his name now be selling on so much clutter? But as Dareau writes: “One of the paradoxes around the painter, which persists to this day, is that he was one of the most acclaimed artistic figures of his era, even though his work was often mocked or misunderstood.”

For Chong, associated mysteries persist.
“Part of the motivation for us doing this exhibition is the idea that everybody knows who Picasso is, even in Asia, far away from his original context. But I think a large chunk of people who will run to a Picasso exhibition would also say, ‘I don’t understand his art; it’s strange, bizarre. I don’t understand modern art at all.’ It’s a typical thing you hear,” he says. “People are scared of what modern art does.
“So I find this contradiction interesting: the majority of laypeople who express scepticism or even confusion about modern art are still fascinated by Picasso. But why is that?”
At M+, 60 paintings and sculptures by Picasso and 80-odd accompanying Asian artworks might just provide the answer.
“The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia – A Conversation”, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, 38 Museum Drive, West Kowloon, until July 13; mplus.org.hk


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