Long before recycling became an environmental concern, Picasso showed that there was beauty in the refuse of daily life. No one would have missed the old nails and bits of cloth and string that he put into his pictures of guitars. Nor, one hopes, the single button that lent itself so perfectly as a sound hole for his Guitar of May 1926. Picasso even created from cardboard a guitar in three dimensions, leaving the tape with which he constructed it clearly visible.
For many artists, paper was merely a preparatory medium, a ground upon which to work out ideas before translating them onto canvas or bronze. For Picasso, paper was not only for draft, nor simply a means to an end. With Femmes à leur toilette (1937-8) he demonstrated how effective collage could be on a grand scale. Measuring 4.48 metres wide, the collage is daubed with gouache, and features clashing wallpaper samples pasted onto canvas to evoke the drama of a domestic scene.
Later, Picasso looked at Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), and recreated its figures, stripping them of all decorum, and transferring them from canvas to cardboard. His freestanding paper people from the early 1960s seem to rebel against their painterly forebears.
In their forms, these figures harked back to the paper cut-outs Picasso had made from his earliest youth. The London exhibition features a remarkably accomplished dog and a pigeon which he appears to have cut from paper without any use of drawing at the age of just eight or nine. A decade-and-a-half later, he was still cutting shapes from paper, only this time they were slightly more ambitious – a cuttlefish, a pear, the fret of a guitar.
Picasso had always been resourceful. His earliest surviving print, depicting a Bullfighter Seen from Behind (1900), was made by engraving and heating the base of a wooden salad bowl. During World War Two, resourcefulness became necessary, and Picasso took to cutting, tearing and burning paper into shapes with new abandon. Materials were hard to come by in Paris during the German occupation, but behind the blackout blinds of his studio, Picasso fashioned from his store of scraps a knife and fork, a goat, a bird, glove, a row of dancers, and most poignantly of all, a series of skulls, which he also painted. A burned paper napkin served to represent his lover Dora Maar’s deceased white bichon. It was no accident that many of these wartime shapes resembled ghosts.
An old napkin with holes burned into it for eyes may not have the immediate impact or appeal of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon or La Vie. Indeed, it would be easy to dismiss much of Picasso’s ephemera as the insignificant flotsam of everyday life. The fact that he kept it, however, and went to such care to preserve and date – with day, month, year, sometimes even time – even swift sketches on paper – suggests that he wanted to be remembered for far more than his finished masterpieces. The piles Picasso left behind document his daily existence. They are the thoughts, the half-thoughts, the distractions out of which so many of his ideas grew.
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