This exhibition Pablo Picasso: Beyond Resemblance. Drawings from the collection of the Musée National Picasso-Paris selected with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires presented 74 of the artist’s drawings ranging from pieces made when he was 16 years of age to the year before his death. The selection of works by Victoria Noorthoorn and the team at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in collaboration with Emilia Philippot, a curator at the French museum, showed that drawings were a principle area for experimentation in Picasso’s work. Organized chronologically, it offered a wide but precise range of subtle, unique works that together conveyed a clear idea of the organic, inquisitive gaze of an artist who changed the history of Western art.
The pieces in this exhibition challenged both their viewers and the outside world. The drawings asked questions of humanity, exploring our animal and occasionally monstrous nature, our many different facets and our power of invention and re-invention, providing a powerful demonstration of how eloquently art can interrogate reality.
Picasso’s experimental curiosity is fully reflected in his drawings: it is here, in the intimacy of pencil, graphite, charcoal or pastel on paper across the almost twenty thousand drawings he created in his lifetime that the artist developed his ideas, artistic convictions, utopias and visions. It is in his drawings that Picasso reveals the full depth and richness of his artistic imagination.
A meeting with Picasso is a meeting with an oeuvre that was constantly challenging itself at every turn as it sought to achieve a freedom unique even on the contemporary art scene. Every drawing offers more evidence of the artist’s powers of reinvention and critical gaze. Today, Picasso continues to be an example of the real power of art when it is in the hands of an exceptional, rebellious, demanding and confrontational artist.
