Picasso and Paper at the Royal Academy of Arts

Jo Manby

‘Even in his eighties and nineties, he remains like a machine; voraciously devouring paper’ – Jo Manby reviews the Royal Academy of Arts’ spring 2020 headline exhibition, ‘Picasso and Paper’. The show opened on 25 January and was due to run until 13 April but is temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

1943. Montparnasse on the Left Bank, like the rest of Paris, is German occupied territory.

Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau are sitting outside the bistro Le Catalan on Rue des Grands-Augustins, a few doors away from where Picasso lives. The place where Picasso first met Françoise Gilot in May the same year.

Sunshine streams through the screen of leaves, glancing off fragments of gilding on the door of Le Catalan and the fenders of the cars whipping down the dusty street.

A child begins to cry. Cocteau sighs with impatience. Picasso rips a circle out of the paper tablecloth and makes an impromptu mask, holds it over his face.

The child stops crying and laughs instead.

‘Maman! Look at the funny man!’ The child’s mother glances over her shoulder and shrugs, more interested in the German officers at the next table, her cigarette and her glass of Dubonnet.

 Picasso and Cocteau laugh too and Picasso pockets the mask. One for the ever-expanding archive. 

***

This scene arises from my imagination. But Paris was occupied. Picasso did live up the street from Le Catalan. He and his fellow artists and poets frequented it, and they scribbled jokes and drawings on Le Catalan’s paper tablecloths on a regular basis.

Over in London more than 75 years later, a selection of these preserved jeux de nappes, or tablecloth games, as they are known, is displayed between vertical sheets of toughened glass at the Royal Academy’s spring 2020 headline exhibition, ‘Picasso and Paper’. Picasso’s Mask (Paris, 1943), made of a fragment of a torn, printed-paper tablecloth, is attracting a lot of attention.

The show brings together over 300 works spanning paintings, drawing and sculpture by the artist and is billed as ‘the most comprehensive exhibition devoted to Picasso’s imaginative and original uses of paper ever to be held.’ The RA posted on Instagram on 18 February that it was running ‘an informal competition’ to see which work in the exhibition would attract the most selfies. Mask, according to the post, was definitely winning.

Who wouldn’t, having seen photos of Picasso’s 1000-yard stare, long to look out at the world through eyes (paper cut-out, at least) that he himself had seen through? It’s hard to imagine how the other visitors milling around the gallery could suddenly fragment into the kind of Cubist vortex we see in Study for Head of a woman (Fernande) (Horta del Ebro, 1909). But this exhibition brings fresh insights into Picasso’s unique artistic vision and the formation of some of his most celebrated masterpieces, which are contextualised by the preliminary and subsidiary works and studies associated with them. Unusually, it is the works on paper, down to the detail of associated ephemera, that receive the spotlight.

What makes this curatorial approach possible is the fact that Picasso never threw anything away. During the Second World War, paper was in short supply in France as well as elsewhere. Paper mills on the outskirts of Paris were, like other factories, requisitioned for the German military. This accentuated Picasso’s natural instinct for gathering as much paper, and using it as resourcefully, as possible. In 1979, Musée National Picasso-Paris was bequeathed a huge collection of paper-based works by Picasso’s estate and it holds over 100,000 of his written and printed documents in its archives – an artist, as the promotional line goes, known for ‘keeping everything’.

The exhibition opens with two beguiling little paper animal cut-outs (probably made freehand by Picasso, aged 8 or 9) and covers his entire 80-year career as an artist. The broad chronological sweep adopted by the curators makes sense and the viewer moves from room to room confidently anchored in the reality of the artist’s working life as he progressed through each new chapter of his tireless stylistic development. It’s hard not to become obsessed with what type of support Picasso was working on at any given time, how the paint, ink, graphite or pastel stuck to it or was part-absorbed by it, and what he would make paper do for him next.

The range of preliminary paper-based works clarify the transitions between styles. In the section devoted to the Rose Period (1904-06), a major oil loaned by The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Harem (Gosol, 1906), is surrounded by works such as a sketchbook open at a study of a nude from a brothel in Gosol. This ancient Catalan village is where Picasso spent several months in 1906 and his palette, sketching style, and rhythm of composition were transformed. Three nudes (Gosol, 1906) is a palimpsest of gouache, ink, watercolour and charcoal laid over text in which Picasso makes references to ‘landscapes of fruits and flowers’. The pink and terracotta reflect the frescos and architecture of antiquity and a dry hot summer in the Spanish Pyrenees.

The Harem is a Rose Period dream-time version of the slightly later Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Paris, 1907) – considered to be the first Cubist work. Formed of fluid shapes and delicate layers of oil paint and pencil, the style is far more naturalistic than Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Yet the subject matter of the composition, as well as its saturation in rosy ochre and loose treatment, means that the piece falls into place as a step along the path towards Cubism. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Picasso was searching for something in The Harem – he just hadn’t quite reached it in 1906.

In the next room are some of the hundreds of studies he made directly for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, itself represented by a large-scale projection. By 1907, you can see Picasso’s thought process speeding up in time with his innovation. In his oil, Seated nude (Study for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’) (Paris, 1906-07), he has a different attitude to finish, already beginning in the Rose Period, but now, as soon as he’s worked something out, he stops and goes straight onto the next thing that he needs to accomplish in order to achieve his aim. In Five nudes (Study for ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’) (Paris, 1907), his final compositional sketch for the masterpiece, he applies blue watercolour onto flat, smooth wove paper like an ink pen line in his search for structure.

Picasso was always looking for new ways to innovate and he became adept at a broad range of printing techniques across the decades. His first foray into illustrated books was in 1911, when he created four etchings for his friend, the poet and painter Max Jacob’s novel, Saint Matorel. Later came the bold, cryptic and scarlet-coloured calligraphic symbols, like red bones from a reanimation ritual, that decorate lithograph reproductions of Pierre Reverdy’s poetry collection, Le Chant des Morts (The Song of the Dead, Paris, 1948), composed during the Second World War.

The exhibition also includes several etchings from Picasso’s celebrated ‘Vollard Suite’ – a set of 100 etchings in the neoclassical style made between 1930 and 1937, populated by his personal motifs of Minotaur, sculptor and muse. These prints were part of a deal with the famous art collector Ambroise Vollard, who paid Picasso in kind with works of art including one by Auguste Renoir and another by Paul Cézanne. Picasso used the opportunity of the commission to penetrate the darker areas of his own personality. The suite reflects his erotic and artistic obsessions, the demise of initially tender and loving then more brutal and abusive relationships, and the darkening political situation across Europe.

In Céret, in the spring and summer of 1913, Picasso may have found himself without glue. For Céret landscape (Céret, 1913), Glass on a pedestal table (Céret, 1913) and other works from this time and place, he uses dressmaking pins to fix papers in place. These form examples of the beautiful papiers-collés – works made from cut and pasted paper, yet closer to drawing than collage – which Braque and Picasso began to experiment with around this time. Another, slightly earlier piece that illustrates Picasso’s playfulness is Violin (Paris, 1912). Here he has cut out a violin from paper and pasted it inside a folded sheet with the watermark ‘L’Ecolier CF’ in pencil, so that the violin becomes the equivalent of a watermark. The work is hidden unless lit from behind.

The theme of the exhibition means that visitors are frequently faced with dramatic changes in scale, from the massive collage Femmes à leur toilette (1937-38), consisting of torn, pasted-up samples Picasso acquired from a wallpaper supplier, to the tiny Woman seated in an armchair (Royan, 1940), made of string and pieces of printed cardboard sewn onto a piece of pharmaceutical packaging and painted in oil. While this tiny artefact is like a precious reliquary, something to carry around and treasure, both pieces also reflect how resourceful Picasso was during this period of wartime scarcity. What comes over is Picasso’s curiosity and appreciation of the tactile qualities and expressive potential of paper. It’s like he’s constantly assessing what he can make out of it, what it can do for him.

In the final sections of the show there is a change in tempo: more works on display, a wider variety of paper and media. It is here that Picasso’s numerous de-(and re)-constructions of masterpieces by other artists are well represented – such as his variations on Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-83). Created sporadically between 1959 and 1962 and including oil paintings, prints and paper sculptures, the series reveals the artist’s analytical compulsion. He is like a watchmaker learning his craft by taking apart a hugely intricate timepiece and figuring out how to put it back together. Picasso’s complex, colourful linocut on Arches wove paper, ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ after Manet, I, (Mougins, 1962), is emblematic of his work ethic. One spark of inspiration was enough to fuel a ravenous surge of experimentation. There’s no standard hierarchy of human figures, as in Manet’s Le Déjeuner. It’s not so important where the eyes go or what shape the face is – that’s not the point. As in the improvisatory spirit with which he tore Mask from a paper tablecloth, it’s Picasso’s irrepressible compulsion to create, by any means possible, that comes across most powerfully.

I had the impression of the exhibition ending on the crest of a wave; a kind of paper crescendo. His thoughts run quicker than his hand, with new ideas tumbling over one another to be next in line for visual expression. Even in his eighties and nineties, he remains like a machine; voraciously devouring paper.

It was during these final years of his life that Picasso created many of his greatest prints, and, in one of the last rooms, we find Picasso’s printing press itself. Coming across this mechanical device is like stepping into an area of his studio. Its metal components gleam dully, the wooden parts are worn with use; some Picasso magic is breathed into life. As if to further embed the intensity of the artist’s feeling for the materiality of the printing process, the press is displayed alongside the original copper plates which he created to illustrate a 1968 French translation of the 15th century Spanish dramatist, Fernando de Rojas’s only surviving work, La Célestine (1499).

Over the course of ‘Picasso and Paper’, the show’s curators, Ann Dumas (RA), William Robinson (Cleveland Museum of Art), and Emilia Philippot (Musée national Picasso-Paris), reveal paper to be the one underlying, connecting element present throughout Picasso’s extensive oeuvre. Their thoroughness in sifting through the various collections of his work at their disposal, and the engaging manner in which his productiveness is represented, make for an utterly fascinating selection. For Picasso, paper was not simply a ground to work on: it fuelled the fire of inspiration for his work in its own right. With the exhibition behind me, following the crowds out onto the street, I was left with a sentiment similar to that expressed by the personal secretary and close friend of Picasso’s, Jaume Sabartés. Quoted in the exhibition handout, he is recorded as having said: “To this day, I remember him lost in a mountain of papers.”

‘Picasso and Paper’ opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on 25 January and was due to run until 13 April but is temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.