Zoé Marty, 31, put it bluntly: She was "fed up with seeing Picasso exhibitions," an artist whose work is intrinsically linked to his personal life and his hold over his female companions. For all that, the curator of Saint-Etienne's Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art said she didn't believe in boycotts in this year of celebration of the most celebrated creator in the 21st century. "Stopping Picasso exhibitions forever is illusory and undesirable, but stopping a little, yes," she said.
In 2022, Marty collaborated on an exhibition confronting Picasso with one of his masters, Nicolas Poussin, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. The exercise, conducted with the institution's director, Sylvie Ramond, could have turned into a standoff between two irreconcilable generations. Not so. "I enjoyed listening to her love of Picasso and confronting myself with it," said Marty. "It teaches you to temper certain reactions."
The Spanish artist has been getting a grilling everywhere: in Sophie Chauveau's 2020 book Picasso, le Minotaure ("Picasso, the Minotaur"), in the multi-award-winning podcast Vénus s'épilait-elle la chatte? ("Did Venus used to wax her pussy?"), right down to this expeditious tirade by Australian humorist Hannah Gadsby: "I hate Picasso." "Picasso is not Harvey Weinstein!" said Cécile Debray, who, since 2021, has headed the Musée Picasso in Paris. "The fact that we want to take more account of life story is all very well, but we have to do it properly, without the sieve of anachronistic readings, by relativizing the part of the culture of a man born at the end of the 19th century in southern Spain, which is not that of a feminist from the American West Coast."
To this end, she invited researchers and students to take part in an 11-session closed-door seminar, of which eight were broadcast this summer on France Culture, a prologue to the creation of a research center around the artist. "There's a real middle way to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater," Debray said.
The Ecole du Louvre, where the teaching approach favors the suject rather than the biography, has been working on this for three years. "Students want to put today's words to biblical or mythological scenes, to remind us that Susanna and the Elders is a scene of voyeurism, and that The Abduction of Europa is a scene of rape," said its director, Claire Barbillon, reminding us that "art history is, like history, in search of truth." But, she added, "we're not going to ignore artists who have engaged in criminal conduct. My line is that nothing should be expunged, neither the artists nor their acts."
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