Picasso and Paper

This exhibition is presented by

Special Exhibition
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Sunday, December 8, 2024–Sunday, March 23, 2025

Location: Special Exhibition Hall (003) and Special Exhibition Gallery (004)
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Hall and Gallery

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About The Exhibition

Pablo Picasso’s prolonged engagement with paper is the subject of the groundbreaking exhibition Picasso and Paper, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris.

Showcasing nearly 300 works spanning the artist’s career, the exhibition highlights Picasso’s relentless exploration of paper. His appreciation of and experimentation with the material is revealed in the works ranging from collages of cut-and-pasted papers to sculptures from pieces of torn and burnt paper, manipulated photographs, drawings in virtually all available media, and prints in an array of techniques. The exhibition’s highlights include Femmes à leur toilette (1937–38), an extraordinarily large collage (9 13/16 x 14 1/2 feet) of cut-and-pasted papers, which will be exhibited for the first time in the United States; outstanding Cubist papiers collés; artist’s sketchbooks, including studies for his best known paintings, including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; constructed paper guitars from the Cubist and Surrealist periods; and an array of works related to major paintings and sculptural projects.

The exhibition presents these works on paper chronologically alongside a limited number of closely related paintings and sculptures. For example, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s La Vie (1903), from Picasso’s Blue Period, will be featured with preparatory drawings and other works on paper exploring corresponding themes. In the Cubist section, Picasso’s bronze Head of a Woman (Fernande) (1909) (Musée Picasso, Paris) will be surrounded by a large group of associated drawings. Seen together, these groupings highlight the connections that Picasso saw between media and the integral role that paper played throughout his artistic practice.

Picasso and Paper is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Royal Academy of Arts. It features essays by distinguished Picasso scholars and leading authorities in various aspects of technical art history, including William H. Robinson, formerly of the Cleveland Museum of Art; Ann Dumas of the Royal Academy of Arts; Emilia Philippot of the Musée national Picasso-Paris; and Claustre Rafart Planas of the Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Specific aspects of Picasso’s engagement with paper are addressed by Christopher Lloyd, an expert on Picasso’s drawings; Stephen Coppel, curator of prints and drawings at the British Museum; Violette Andres, photography curator at the Musée national Picasso-Paris; Johan Popelard, Head of the Conservation and Collections Department at the Musée national Picasso-Paris; and Emmanuelle Hincelin, a paper conservator with scientific expertise in the types of paper Picasso used at key moments in his career.

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Picasso and Paper

Text by Violette Andres, Stephen Coppel, Ann Dumas, Emmanuelle Hincelin, Christopher Lloyd, Emilia Philippot, Johan Popelard, Claustre Rafart Planas, William H. Robinson. How Picasso’s genius seized the potential of paper throughout his career Picasso’s artistic output is astonishing in its ambition and variety. Picasso and Paper examines a particular aspect of his legendary capacity for invention: his imaginative and original use of paper. He used it as a support for autonomous works, including etchings, prints and drawings, as well as for his papier-collé experiments of the 1910s and his revolutionary three-dimensional “constructions,” made of cardboard, paper and string. Sometimes his use of paper was simply determined by circumstance: in occupied Paris, where art supplies were in short supply, he ripped up paper tablecloths to make works of art. And of course, his works on paper comprise the preparatory stages of some of his very greatest paintings. With reproductions of nearly 400 works of art and a series of insightful new texts byleading authorities on the artist, this sumptuous study reveals the myriad ways in which Picasso explored the potential of paper at different stages of his career. Picasso and Paper is published for an exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Cleveland Museum of Art in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris. The legendary life and career of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) spanned nearly the entire 20th century and ushered in some of its most significant artistic revolutions.

Picasso and the Mysteries of Life: La Vie

By William H. Robinson Few artistic moments are as instantly recognizable as Pablo Picasso's Blue Period, and from it the painting, La Vie (Life) has emerged as the culminating masterpiece. This book not only examines La Vie's history and physical structure in unprecedented detail but also uses the painting as the touchstone for exploring a broad array of issues vital to modernist culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. New contextual analysis is provided for understanding the paintings enigmatic subject, along with its relationship to the art of Picasso and his contemporaries. 164 pages Published 2012

A Life with Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943

by John Richardson The spectacular fourth and final volume of Picasso's life is set in Paris, Normandy, the south of France, Royan, and Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and at the beginning of World War II.Drawing on original and exhaustive research from interviews and never-before-seen material in the Picasso family archives, this book opens with a visit by the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï to Picasso’s chateau in Normandy, Boisgeloup, where he would take his iconic photographs of the celebrated plaster busts of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso’s mistress and muse. Picasso was contributing to André Breton’s Minotaur magazine and he was also spending more time with the likes of Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, and the poet Paul Éluard, in Paris as well as in the south of France. It was during this time that Picasso began writing surrealist poetry and became obsessed with the image of himself as the mythic Minotaur—head of a bull, body of a man—and created his most famous etching, Minotauromachie. Richardson shows us the artist is as prolific as ever, painting Marie-Thérèse, but also painting the surrealist photographer Dora Maar who has become a muse, a collaborator and more. In April 1937, the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War inspires Picasso’s vast masterwork of the same name, which he paints in just a few weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. When the Nazis occupy Paris in 1940, Picasso chooses to remain in the city despite the threat that his art would be confiscated. In 1943, Picasso meets Françoise Gilot who would replace Dora, and as Richardson writes, “rejuvenate his psyche, reawaken his imagery and inspire a brilliant sequence of paintings.” As always, Richardson tells Picasso’s story through his work during this period, analyzing how it shows what the artist was feeling and thinking. His fascinating and accessible narrative immerses us in one of the most exciting moments in twentieth century cultural history, and brings to a close the definitive and critically acclaimed account of one of the world’s most celebrated artists. 320 pages Published 2021

Decorative Hanging Mobile | Picasso

A design that we made with special care and admiration that has reached museum stores such as the Reina Sofia in Madrid or the Picasso Museum in Malaga. His unmistakable silhouette with his back turned in that eternal striped T-shirt. On the ceiling and table elements of some of the artist's most representative works and facets. -Materials Silhouettes of polypropylene plastic cut by laser and assembled by hand. -This product is flat, easy to store flat, and takes up minimal space. -Packaging and instructions in Spanish and English. -Dimensions 20cmx30cm -Net weight 60g

Sponsors

This exhibition is organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris.

This exhibition is presented by CIBC.

Major support is provided by the Malcolm E. Kenney Curatorial Research Fund and Anne H. Weil. Generous support is provided by Martin Kline and the Carol Yellig Family Fund. Additional support is provided by Carl M. Jenks, Frank and Fran Porter, and Robert G. Simon.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Principal annual support is provided by Michael Frank and the late Pat Snyder, the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation, the John and Jeanette Walton Exhibition Fund, and Margaret and Loyal Wilson. Major annual support is provided by the late Dick Blum and Harriet Warm and the Frankino-Dodero Family Fund for Exhibitions Endowment. Generous annual support is provided by two anonymous donors, Gini and Randy Barbato, Gary and Katy Brahler, Cynthia and Dale Brogan, Dr. Ben and Julia Brouhard, Brenda and Marshall Brown, Gail and Bill Calfee, Dr. William A. Chilcote Jr. and Dr. Barbara S. Kaplan, Joseph and Susan Corsaro, Richard and Dian Disantis, the Jeffery Wallace Ellis Trust in memory of Lloyd H. Ellis Jr., Leigh and Andy Fabens, Florence Kahane Goodman, Janice Hammond and Edward Hemmelgarn, Robin Heiser, the late Marta and the late Donald M. Jack Jr., the estate of Walter and Jean Kalberer, Eva and Rudolf Linnebach, the William S. Lipscomb Fund, Bill and Joyce Litzler, the Roy Minoff Family Fund, Lu Anne and the late Carl Morrison, Jeffrey Mostade and Eric Nilson and Varun Shetty, Tim O’Brien and Breck Platner, William J. and Katherine T. O’Neill, Henry Ott-Hansen, Christine Fae Powell, Michael and Cindy Resch, William Roj and Mary Lynn Durham, Betty T. and David M. Schneider, Saundra K. Stemen, Paula and Eugene Stevens, the Womens Council of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Claudia Woods and David Osage.