Picasso 1932

On the 15th of June 1932, Pablo Picasso makes the news: Tériade publishes an interview with the artist in the French newspaper l’Intransigeant, when the retrospective of his work was set to open at the Georges Petit gallery. As the critic introduces the artist by announcing "You will discover the expression of some of his ideas which are not only those of a painter, but also those of a man.", Picasso releases one of his most famous statements: "The art we make is a way of holding our newspaper."

Both statements refer to the human and biographic dimension of Picasso’s work which will, indeed, become increasingly significant that year (1932). The artist, now face to face with thirty years of his own work, integrates the necessity to document his work day by day, by dating his paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings. A procedure that leads to his capacity to keep a record of the most essential until the most modest traces of his exceptional life.

The first event dedicated to the work of an artist of the 1st of January until the 31nd of December, the Picasso 1932 exhibition thus reports a complete year of the life of the Spanish painter through the chronological presentation of his work and archives. The exhibition is organized in partnership with Tate Modern in London and attempts to grasp this existence which mixes, touches and attracts the big and small events and the main and secondary personalities.

It presents the essential masterpieces of the artist’s career like The Dream and is also a tribute to the opulence that the painter rich, praised and famous enjoys, together with the paradoxical strength of his work which plays with his past by inventing new and “oppressive” forms.

The exhibition is organized in partnership with Tate Modern in London.