‘You are what you keep’ the artist once said, and a stunning exhibition at the Royal Academy proves his point. Daisy Dunn explores the master’s love of ephemera and creative clutter.
Picasso would have little time for today’s neat and minimalist interiors. He surrounded himself with clutter, knowing that even the tatty, mundane items other people threw away could have artistic interest. He hoarded everything, from old newspapers, scraps of wrapping paper and used envelopes, to packets of tobacco, bus tickets and paper napkins. When his piles of papers grew too high for his table tops, he would clip them together with bulldog clips and suspend them, chandelier-like, from the ceiling.
By the time he died in 1973, aged 91, he had accumulated thousands of assorted bits and pieces, a number of which have gone on display at the Royal Academy in London as part of an exhibition dedicated to his passion for paper. Three hundred works of art and items from his collection, spanning more than 80 years, reveal the extent of his hoarding – and the extent of his vision.
The artists’ studios that Picasso drew were seldom as chaotic as his own. One of his preparatory sketches from 1903 for ‘La Vie, a melancholic painting from his Blue Period, depicts a single canvas positioned neatly on an easel. The Sculptor’s Studio, from 1931, is as tidy as can be. But photographs reveal a different picture: Picasso relished mess. His studio at La Californie, his villa in Cannes, was crammed with stuff – scrolls of paper, boxes, and jars of paint filling every imaginable surface, even the chairs.
“Picasso once said, ‘You are what you keep’, and I think he did have a highly developed sense of posterity,”’ says Ann Dumas, co-curator of the Picasso and Paper exhibition. “He was very conscious of keeping and recording things, so I think it was part of his self-definition.”
He took newspapers and responded to their stories by sketching on them in pencil or ink. There was little, in fact, he would not scrawl on. If a sheet of packaging was covered in pattern or text, he would draw over it, his own handiwork merging with the print until the two were barely distinguishable. The effect could be comical, as when he took an ink pen to a photograph of a model in Vogue and extended her legs so they poked coquettishly out of her ball gown.
As for many artists, chaos meant creativity, and in his hoards Picasso found the perfect objects with which to animate his still lifes. His friend, the artist Georges Braque, is usually credited with inventing modern collage at Sorgues, north of Avignon, in 1912, but Picasso was quick to take up the art form. That year, he assembled his celebrated Still Life with Chair Caning, using a piece of oilcloth for the seat of the chair. His genius lay in finding the right object for each space, and in maintaining form while disturbing the picture plane. In 1914, tobacco packaging and newspaper were among the materials he used to create his collage Glass, Bottle of Wine, Packet of Tobacco, Newspaper. There was, as often, a relationship between the material and the object it represented.
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