I don’t know of any artist who produced more than Pablo Picasso did. In all my travels, I can’t think of single museum I’ve gone to that didn’t have at least one of his works.
I think about Picasso now because of an exhibition of his at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Now till March 23, the museum will highlight “Picasso and Paper,” a collection of more than 300 of his works. Most is from the Picasso museum in Paris, but curators could have put together a Picasso collection from works elsewhere.
They might have been able to borrow some of the 15 Picassos inside the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand. His Femme à la résille, a gift from an American couple, would be one I’d have urged them to put into the exhibition.
Yet what I would have liked to have seen in the special exhibition in Cleveland were more works from Picasso’s African-Influenced Period. From 1906 to 1909, Picasso painted with a heavy influence on African sculpture.
Traditional African masks, their jagged, angular form, had no European predecessor. During this period, ancient Egypt shaped Picasso’s work, peculiar in an artist who studied mostly likeminded masters in Europe.
How did Picasso wrap his creative mind around Africa?
Those critics who study Picasso say he experienced a “revelation” while at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris — where else? — and decided to take his art interest to a place that his peers didn’t seem willing to go.
But Picasso had many such revelations during his career, a career he built on studying the works of the classical European masters. Picasso had periods that took him through Cubism, Surrealism, Neoclassism and forms in between.
His African-Influenced Period was a minor part.
But that’s what interested me most about Picasso when I traveled to Auckland, an odd place to discover so much of his artwork. For one thing, he never visited New Zealand, whose indigenous peoples had a significant influence on culture.
To be certain, Picasso had his influences. Yet he appeared to have his own vision of fine art, which I saw in the Cleveland exhibition.
I don’t think anyone who enjoys art should find this surprising, no more than they would to look at the body of art from Andy Warhol or Salvador Dali and not expect to see it has influences beyond the obvious
I’m thrilled at how the Cleveland Museum of Art has integrated the borrowed Picassos with the works of his it owns. Those pieces remain on display outside “Picasso and Paper,” but what I found most appealing about the exhibition was what I learned about Picasso here and in Auckland.
He was a hoarder. He kept all letters, every envelope … saving scraps of papers seemingly so insignificant that I wondered why he would have bothered to. I feel blessed that he did, because those letters, those papers give art fans like me a glimpse at what drove Picasso to greatness.
I’m lucky I live in a city that has an art museum like ours. No, I can’t compare it to the Louvre, the Hermitage or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but what art museums do? I wish more people would take leisurely strolls through art like Picasso’s, because they’ll enjoy it as much as I.
