Born in 1881 in Malaga, Pablo Picasso was a child of the 19^th century. The appearance of his first works at the turn of the 1890s coincided significantly with the birth of modern comics in America.

"Picasso and the Comic Strip" is the first exhibition to focus on the connections between the artist's work and this form of graphic expression. Throughout the exhibition circuit, the exploration of his liking for and avid reading of comics sheds light on a little-known side of his visual culture: one largely imbued with contemporary popular sources. It also shows how Picasso appropriated in turn the codes of the "ninth art" in various works by using sequences of images rather than isolated compositions, employing the principle of the phylactery (a graphic device in the form of speech bubbles or banners expressing what the characters say) or dividing the page into boxes. Finally, it focuses on the Picasso phenomenon in strip cartoons, highlighting the parallel presence of the man and his work in comics during the 20^th century and up to the present day. As a genuine comic strip character, he featured in the worlds of Gotlib, Clément Oubrerie, Reiser and Art Spiegelman among others. His works were also taken up or cited by a variety of authors including Hergé, Edgar P. Jacobs and Milo Manara, often with admiration and sometimes with humour or irreverence, creating a kind of imaginary Picasso museum.

The exhibition explores the rich and diverse history of these exchanges and cross-fertilisations. In addition to the ground-floor rooms, a circuit of previously unpublished large-scale works by comic strip artists is laid out in the museum basement, with a particular focus on the young contemporary scene.

Some of Picasso's drawings from around 1900 bear witness to the artist's contact with the world of comics. In 1894, at the age of thirteen, he himself produced small illustrated magazines with a mixture of texts and images. The drawings he made in Barcelona, like those of his early days in Paris, often introduced a narrative thread by featuring speech bubbles or a construction of images in sequences. In these drawings, the artist captured the voice of a beggar and invented a world full of talking animals. In 1903, in an engraving divided into seven boxes with comments, Picasso imagined the farcical apotheosis of his friend, the poet Max Jacob. In 1904, he used several captioned images to relate a train journey from Barcelona to Paris with his friend Junyer-Vidal. These experiments, though seemingly schoolboyish, played a part in the artist's subversion of academic traditions at the turn of the century.

In her 1933 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, who began to write and collect at an early stage of her life, gives a rare account of Picasso's true passion for American comics. In this book, we learn that, while in Paris, the artist devoured The Katzenjammer Kids, which featured two boisterous children living on an imaginary island called Bongo. Picasso cultivated this passion: in August 1906, he had the adventures of Little Jimmy sent to him in Gósol, a little Catalan village where he spent the entire summer. The first American comic strips were by then appearing in the newspapers every week, transporting readers to the fairytale realm of Little Nemo or the gag-filled world of Krazy Kat. In France, Les Pieds Nickelés appeared in the magazine L'Épatant in 1908; the artist's personal library contains several copies. At the beginning of the 20^th century, the newspaper, a recurring motif in Picasso's work, was also a vehicle for a popular, childlike culture that fed the young artist's imagination.

Songe et mensonge de Franco (Franco's dream and lie), a series of engravings produced by Picasso in 1937, depicts the monstrous figure of the dictator, who had recently seized power in the artist's native Spain. The two-page, eighteen-box structure juxtaposes Franco's menacing clownishness and the iconography of the disasters of war, in the line of Goya's dark and critical etchings. The comic strip is used here to communicate on a political struggle, like the anti-Franco vignettes that appeared at the same time in L'Humanité or Reiser's caricatures on the covers of Charlie Hebdo in the 1970s.  Many are the comic strip artists who have been inspired by Picasso's late 1930s works, which were taken up and subverted by Art Spiegelman in Ace Hole Midget Detective (1974) and by Edgar P. Jacobs, who incorporated fragments of Picasso's Guernica (1937) into a post-apocalyptic landscape in The Time Trap (1960-1961).

In Le Mystère Picasso, 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot's camera captured Picasso at work in a fascinating view of the birth and development of forms. In a series of photographs for Paris Match in 1966, Hergé staged himself drawing Tintin on a sheet of glass, using an approach comparable to that of Clouzot's film. The television programme Tac au tac, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, filmed two teams of draughtsmen competing on an imposed theme; Gotlib produced an extravagant parody, where he imagined Picasso’s participation in the show. In these various images of the draughtsman at work, the gestures resonate with each other, revealing a common territory beyond the established hierarchies where Picasso dialogues with Hergé, Reiser and Guido Crepax.

From La Vie imagée de Pablo Picasso of 1951, with a text by Benjamin Péret and André Breton, to albums by Nick Bertozzi (2007), Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie (2012-2014) and Daniel Torres (2018), by way of Maurice Henry's drawings from the 1940s and 1950s and the works of Philippe Geluck, Pablo Picasso became a recurring figure in comics all over the world in a few decades – one so familiar that a mere striped jersey was enough to conjure him up. Documented or fantastic, theoretical or absurd, humorous or moving, and sometimes all at once, these comic strips bear witness to the powerful hold of Picasso's legend on contemporary imagination, and to the many facets of a figure who is constantly being reinvented.