A Hong Kong Picasso Show Aims to Shed New Light on the Master

Yet Picasso himself was not interested in spawning a following, said Anne Baldassari, one of the world’s foremost Picasso scholars. Baldassari was the president of the Picasso Museum in Paris from 2005 to 2014, and in 2012 staged what was then the largest Picasso exhibition in Hong Kong: a solo show with 56 paintings and sculptures from the museum’s collections.

“Picasso always denied wanting to establish a ‘school’ or contribute to any artistic movement,” Baldassari said. She added that having gone through “what he viewed as years of sterile academic training in the exact representation of reality,” he was “an anarchist and a freethinker” who sought a “complete break” with what came before.

He also liked working away from the public eye. Between 1906 and 1914, a period of experimentation during which he radically reinvented painting, he refused to exhibit his paintings or allow them to be published or marketed, said Baldassari. Only those who visited his atelier or acquired the works — such as his collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein — could see them, she noted.

What is also true is that during his lifetime, Picasso actually met few Asian artists: “You could count them with the fingers of one hand,” said Dareau, the M+ exhibition’s co-curator.

How did the Picasso Museum decide what to lend to the M+ show? Dareau noted that the works selected enabled “an interesting and coherent dialogue” with the M+ collections, and allowed “a visitor to the exhibition who knows nothing about Picasso to get a sense of the different periods and styles in his career.” There are loans from the Blue Period, the Cubist period, and from Picasso’s Surrealist period, in a variety of media: painting, sculpture, drawing, prints and ceramics.

The largest Picasso loan from Paris — and the work that ends the M+ exhibition — is “Massacre in Korea,” completed in January 1951. The work, which Dareau said was the only painting by Picasso of an Asian subject, shows gun-wielding men in armor taking aim at a group of naked women and children. It was inspired by past art-historical masterpieces: Goya’s “The Third of May 1808 in Madrid” (1814), and Manet’s “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian” (a series painted between 1867 and 1869).