Picasso: Consuming images

The Musée national Picasso-Paris is presenting its new temporary exhibition entitled ‘Picasso Iconophage’ from 11 June to 15 September 2024 on the ground floor. The exhibition analyses the modernity of Pablo Picasso's conception of the image by exploring the artistic and extra-artistic sources of his work and their modes of appropriation.

Pablo Picasso's multi-referenced work is striking for the richness of its visual culture. The artist, celebrated by the avant-gardes as the scourge of academicism, never ceased to present himself as the heir to a long pictorial tradition. His ambiguous relationship with art history raises both the question of sources and the question of how they are appropriated. An avid visitor to the Louvre, Picasso accumulated a lifetime's worth of photographs, postcards, reproductions, posters, magazines and illustrated books, not to mention the works in his personal collection. This accumulation, which provided the artist with a rich iconographic repertoire, is symptomatic of a new way of thinking about the image, free from the artistic field and historical time. Nevertheless, there is no literal quotation in his work: his variations on the paintings of the great masters are above all deconstructions; his forms and compositions are always hybrid. The exhibition highlights how Picasso's paintings, sculptures and drawings form part of a complex network of source images, through four themes that run through his work: the hero, the Minotaur, the voyeur and the musketeer.