The evening was joyful. It happened at the Hotel Salé, which has housed the Picasso Museum for thirty-eight years, in the Marais. Have you been there before? Well you’re going to go back, because if you didn’t like Picasso, you’re going to understand why, and finally love him. And if you’ve always loved it, like the Eiffel Tower, Beethoven’s Fifth, Brillat-Savarin and the moonlight in Maubeuge, you’ll love it without feeling overwhelmed, without repeating the words “genius”, “talent “, “monster”, “huge”, “master”, and so on, and the most poisonous. Through the humorous freedom of his hanging, the stylist Paul Smith makes you see the Picasso paintings that you have seen a hundred times, admired, disadmired, he makes you see them as if all these masterpieces now covered the walls of the squat occupied for ages by your whimsical old aunt, a sixty-eight old woman, and collector of everything, curator of her own exhibition, hanging up her cubist fads, pinks, blues, everywhere, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the hallways and the stairs, from the Picassos to the toilets. Copies ? Not even. Just repros ripped from the culture pages of weekend supplements over the years. A Picasso back down to earth.
The author of this miracle was there, in person, looking more and more like Bill Nighty… Don’t you see? But if, the actor I talked about last week, the boss of the Herald in the series Power games. Brief. He was there, radiant, passing and returning on the photocall, embracing enamored fans, and Antoine de Caunes. He could be proud to allow us to finally look at Picasso from the height of a man, as we used to say, when we still allowed the icon of line 12 (Montparnasse-Pigalle) to love bullfighting, to despise Dali, to not giving a damn about the war of 14 like that of 40 and of not having done everything he could have done to save Max Jacob from Nazi barbarism.
An image that is tarnished day by day
It was about time he arrived, the stylist from Nottingham, for the star of Malaga’s scribbler dims day by day in the merciless light of young vindicators. They don’t like Picasso, we despair in the high spheres of culture. It is that in addition to the defects mentioned above, he was also a naughty narcissistic macho, who only painted women cut into pieces, cubes, and if it was only in art, but in life too, he traumatized them, as evidenced by the testimonies of each of them.
This backlash is the ransom of a deification organized for nearly a century by merchants, intellectual luminaries and a whole people of devotees. Without forgetting himself, organizer of his glory. And Cocteau.
This is probably how we should understand the presence in the exhibition of five contemporary artists: three Blacks, three women, an Argentinian, and not a single European male. If the artistic relevance of their works escaped me, on the other hand the political skill of this skilful combinatorial quota obviously serves as a counter-fire to the increasingly noisy hostility of today’s young people who, inevitably for the wrong reasons, do not like Picasso.
We would perhaps have done better, to pervert the rebellious youth, to give them the sensational book by Claude Arnaud, Picasso all against Cocteau, which has just been released by Grasset, where it is recalled that The Ladies of Avignon were not those of the bridge where one dances, but those of carrer Avinyo, in Barcelona, where the prostitutes made business with priapic painters.
In three weeks, on April 8 exactly, it will be the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death. Falling in my turn into this ugly commemorative mania, I am surprised that we did not have a word, on this Sunday, March 5, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the death of Stalin, which Picasso made, on that day , such a lovely portrait.