in the name of pablo picasso

8/10/2019 In the Name of Pablo Picasso

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PABLO PICASSO PORTRAITS

Bouquinerie de L'Institut

12, rue de Seine 75006 Paris

and

Galerie de la Bouquinerie

3 bis, rue des beaux-arts 75006 Paris

Exhibition October 17 to December 15, 2014

Published at Hyperallergic as

In the Name of Pablo Picasso

http://hyperallergic.com/160518/in-the-name-of-pablo-picasso/

"Jacqueline de profil" (1959) installation shot


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"Trois tetes de faune" (1937) 27x21cm unsigned

The long work on the Muse national Picasso is finally over and it has majestically

reopened at the Htel Sal, bringing with it a new wave of Pablo Picasso admiration (in

which I share). I have hungered for some pure Picasso over the past five years and triedto ignore the surreal scandal (the dismissal of the museums president, Anne Baldassari,

by the French government) and the crisis that swirled about him (the tumult of yet

another impassioned mle over possession of the artists legacy). Accordingly, today I

frankly feel the same way about the newly finished museum as I used to feel about the


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old one: a powerful admiration for the blend of sophistication and provocation that is

Picassos restless imagination. And an appreciation for an artist who took risks to find

new forms of articulation by deciding to unlearn what he had so well learned. Suitably,

the museums unrivalled self-collection of Picassos work reopened on the anniversary of

his birth (October 25, 1881) in this grand greatly expanded space, the results of a huge

renovation that ran years overdue amid recriminations and allegations of

mismanagement. It is at last finished.

Interestingly enough, Picasso claimed that to finish something - like a painting - is to kill

it, to rid the painter and the picture of its soul. But doesnt the artists signature mean just

that: a finished work of art? Usually it not only signifies and identifies the creator of the

work, (eliminating issues such as the individuality of the artist versus the artistsworkshop) but also makes a sign that the artist is satisfied with the picture and no longer

considers it a work in progress. Of course, how, when and where artists add their

signatures to a work of art is a matter of personal preference, and rarely stays the same

throughout the entire career. But they usually do sign them, somewhere, somehow.

The two-gallery exhibition PABLO PICASSO PORTRAITS de facto challenges this

notion by presenting an interesting counter-example: a group of Picasso paintings and

drawings never before seen by the public because they were never signed (a prickly

cluster-fuck situation for the art market). Yet they have all been totally signified as

original and authentic by Christian Zervos in his Cahiers d'Art archive book, known by

many simply as the Zervos . It remains the most trusted reference to the works of Picasso,

prepared by Cahiers dart founder Christian Zervos in direct collaboration with Picasso.

The Zervos was published between 1932 and 1978 and contains 16,000 images in thirty-

three volumes.

During his life, Picasso was certainly a prolific art maker; know later in life for very

visibly signing and dating his work on the front. The man who said, Art is the lie that

enables us to realize the truth apparently had much to lie about, starting with his first art


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exhibit at the age of thirteen. He then went on to radically change art with a river of

cubist and surrealist work that flowed until his death at the age of ninety-one, now valued

up to $124 million per painting, when signed. Proliferation be damned.

So does the artists signature make for artistic merit and truth? Is that how the artistic

truth of painting survived the so-called death of the author a fatality proclaimed by

Roland Barthes in 1968 and 1971 and by Michel Foucault in 1969? Is it the signature that

marks the creator as truthful lie, as the guarantor of creative meaning? Is it, contradicting

Picasso, what allows painting its legitimacy, its soul and its power to live?

Of course, the notion of the death of painting could almost be equaled to that of the

death of the signature in art. This death of painting meme has been a memorable sayingof the artistic avant-gardes since the 1920s, when artists like Malevich in 1920

proclaimed that painting has lived its life, and that the painter is nothing but a prejudice

of the past (Malevich 1997, p. 895). This general downer notion was reiterated again by

certain avant-garde artists, such as proponents of ready-mades, conceptual art, arte

povera, fluxus art actions, land art, and later within the domains of performance,

installations, multimedia and digital genres. According to Foucault, the art author is not

the source of signification that marks the existence of an artwork (in other words, the

author does not precede the work). The signed mark of the author establishes a certain

functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses. In short,

the signature impedes the free circulation of art: its free manipulation, its free

composition, decomposition, and re-composition. The authors signature is therefore an

ideological form that conceptually eliminates the panic of proliferation.

So, perhaps the current issue raised around Picassos prolific signature (and lack thereof)

in these two shows quietly suggests something worth thinking about: our current state of

non-anarchistic nostalgia for the days of uncontested aesthetic empire where, at one

point, Picasso could claim to be essential to determining the canon of contemporary art.

Except post-media aesthetics have somewhat undermined the very notion of his canon

based on signature - or at least made the logic of signed canonization more opaque. The


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paradox is that Picassos paintings and drawings were aesthetically important as canon

precisely when he adopted a position antagonistic to society and arts normal sphere of

reception. The key phrases used to define Picassos art as distinguished and important are

resistance and refusal of servitude . Even his portraits, as we see here, were signs of a

transformation coupled to social comment.

This inherent creative negativity in Picassos best artwork originally consisted in a

dissatisfied, subversive and progressive-reformism, by which they contributed to social

emancipation. The opposite of this negative function for art is a swank affirmative

douchbagery that turn art into an instrument of social dominance. That is time and again a

bit sensed at Htel Sal.

Happily the unsigned problematic of the Picasso paintings here, held so long from public

view, places his art back into the position of problematic aesthetic phenomenon, where

personal foibles of emotional human nature fuck with the art world fuzz; those that

surround art with bling-bling attitude - and patrol its frontiers. The works lack of a

closing signature blurs their function as articles of trade. And that kind of noisy

transcendence is something that cannot effortlessly become an aesthetic commodity.


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in the name of pablo picasso

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