On the evening of Sunday, October 1, Sophie Calle welcomed her guests in the courtyard of the Hôtel Salé in Paris in her pajamas and robe. What could be more logical for the opening of her exhibition at the Musée Picasso, after all, since that's where she's moved in for three months? Instead of a long speech, she tried her hand at magic, where one of the tricks was to eclipse Picasso and substitute her own image: The facetious artist found her way of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist's death by literally making him disappear from the temple dedicated to him. "The Picassos are almost all in the basement," she said, not without humor, while she, for her part, has taken over the building's four main floors.
It was Laurent Le Bon, the museum's former director, who in the meantime became president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, who had proposed this carte blanche back in 2019. It was an invitation with a counterpoint feel, as exhibition curator Cécile Godefroy pointed out, made at a time when many of the museum's works were on loan. "A Toi de Faire, Ma Mignonne" ("Over to You, Sweetie") concludes the 50 or so exhibitions and events in Europe and the United States during this commemorative year.
The artist didn't immediately accept the invitation to this giant's house, unsure of how to tackle the challenge. Then, in 2020, during the lockdown, she was invited to visit the deserted museum. There, the artist discovered the works, all protected by brown paper, and something clicked: "In these locked-down paintings, I found a lead, a direction. It was in line with my themes: Disappearance, absence, stolen paintings that can no longer be seen, blinds, curtains that have to be lifted to see what's behind them."
"Picalso," a contraction of their two names, is the title given to the entire first floor, where Picasso is present everywhere in a ghostly way, with photographs of covered works, all in luminous auras, packed works (such as the sculpture of the goat, which is a visitor favorite), or epistolary exchanges with the thief of a Picasso canvas, while he was still in prison. As always, Calle works and creates through rituals, investigations and the gathering of witness accounts to unearth hidden histories and subterranean links and take viewers on a journey between reality and fiction.
Thumbing its nose at us is her Guernica. Starting with an anecdote about the 1937 work's strong impression on American artists, from Gorky to De Kooning, who are thought to have said that no one could match it, except perhaps by teaming up together, Calle has taken up the idea in her own way, creating a composition of nearly 200 pieces from her personal collection – from Annette Messager to Alex Majoli, from Erro to Maurizio Cattelan – to match the work's monumental dimensions.
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