Long dismissed as one of Picasso’s “muses,” Gilot has in recent decades been reappraised as an artist in her own right. She had energetically worked alongside Picasso, however, and even maintained a contract with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the same dealer who represented him at various points.

“In the course of her long life, Françoise Gilot has consistently been true to herself, even as she has repeatedly invented herself,” Markus Müller writes in his 2022 book, Picasso: Women of His Life. a Tribute. “She had to wait until her one-hundredth year to see a work of hers—an affectionate portrait of her daughter, Paloma, dating from 1965—break the magical one-million euro barrier at auction; but in an age in which people are more interested in price than in value, this can undoubtedly be read as a kind of material consecration of her life’s work.”

That work, titled Paloma à la Guitare, shows the young woman with a feathered hat seated cross-legged in a chair. With its cool colors and a background split into intersecting, abstract geometric planes, the work is emblematic for Gilot, whose work drew on Picasso’s modernist style while offering her own take on it.

The painting sold in 2021 for $1.3 million at a Sotheby’s London auction devoted to women artists, generating a record for Gilot.

Gilot achieved an unusual status among his lovers: Of the four relationships discussed in her 1964 memoir, Gilot was the only one who left on her own terms. Picasso ended the other relationships—with Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and Olga Khokhlova—often acrimoniously, after having, in Gilot’s recollection, pitted the women against one another.

Writing that Picasso had a “Bluebeard complex,” Gilot says, in her memoir, “he preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. From time to time they would provide a humorous or dramatic or sometimes tragic side to things, and that was all grist to his mill.”

In another famous remark, Gilot would write that Picasso treated women like “goddesses and doormats.”

But Gilot’s time with Picasso was different. In her memoir, titled Life with Picasso and written with Carlton Lake, she describes pushing back against the demands that she be a passive partner while also occasionally falling prey to his manipulations. She left him in 1953—and went on to outlive him by 50 years.

The Bluebeard remark was one that Gilot seemed particularly proud of. “Don’t forget that I was Bluebeard’s seventh wife,” she would later say. (Gilot and Picasso never officially married, as he stayed legally married to Khokhlova until her death 1955, though they had separated some 20 years prior.)

Françoise Gilot was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, in 1921 to a middle-class family. Her father, who ran a perfume factory, did not think art was an appropriate career for Gilot, whom he wanted to study law. Her grandmother, however, nurtured her as a painter.

Gilot met Picasso, who was 40 years her senior, at a restaurant in Paris in 1943. He had been with Maar at the time, but he invited her to his studio anyway. Gilot knew their liaison would prove a “catastrophe,” as she once stated, but she pursued his overture, and a relationship ensued.

When he later insisted she live with him to push their relationship forward, she felt unsure, then ultimately did so. Her moving in with him caused a rift with her family. In her memoir, Gilot recounts that her father only began to make amends with him after she and Picasso severed ties.

Life with Picasso does not offer a rosy view of their relationship, but it does not represent it as entirely loveless either. Gilot recounts one instance in which Picasso threatened to throw her off a bridge during an argument and even pressed her toward the edge of one. She invited him to live up to his promise, but he did not end up doing so. And yet, she also recalls Picasso as a passionate artist and, at times, a caring father to their two children, Claude and Paloma.

In their home in the south of France, Gilot set up her own studio, working on paintings depicting herself and her children. These works draw equally on the rich hues of Henri Matisse and the fractured geometries of Georges Braque, and seem to offer more sentimental, less violent views of subjects that recurred regularly throughout Picasso’s art.

One 1952 self-portrait, painted the year she received her first solo show, at Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris, features the artist seated confidently, with one leg folded beneath the other. As she casts her arms around one knee, she seems assured. This is in sharp contrast to some of Picasso’s portrayals of Gilot, in which her expression is typically wiped of any psychology.

After leaving Picasso the next year, Gilot wed the painter Luc Simon in 1955. Their marriage dissolved six years later.

Gilot started writing Life with Picasso with the journalist Carlton Lake in 1961. By the next year, she had set aside two days a week to speak with Lake about her years with Picasso, and then edit his copy as needed.

Upon its release, Life with Picasso became a bestseller—and the subject of controversy. The New York Times praised the book as a better-than-average memoir with “importance,” noting that Gilot had still been sure to assess Picasso’s “genius” with respect. John Richardson, who would later become Picasso’s biographer, would go on to feud publicly with Lake over the book. Critics in France were more divided, with one French art journal writing, “Françoise Gilot has betrayed Picasso.” Douglas Cooper, who collected Picasso’s work, reportedly burned copies of the book during a party.

During a visit to La Jolla, California, Gilot met the virologist Jonas Salk, and in 1970, they began a relationship. They later married and remained together until his death in 1995. “It was love because I admired his commitment to the human race, his humanity, and he was a fine man,” Gilot later recalled. “But I can’t say I felt passionately about him. With Pablo it was different.”

The rest of her career saw her continuing to make art, publishing her poetry, and even gaining some acclaim in New York, where she set up a studio toward the end of the ’70s.

The ghost of Picasso has continued to follow just about any mention of Gilot. In 2012 Richardson organized a show about Picasso and Gilot’s relationship that featured a number of her works placed alongside his.

“That the French have made Ms. Gilot an officer of the Legion of Honor is perhaps not so much a testament to her work as a visual artist as it is a recognition that her dedication to insisting on her side of the story, and her right to tell it—in art, books, lectures and exhibitions like this one—is, ultimately, a feminist enterprise,” wrote Maika Pollack in a review for the Observer.

In 2019, Life with Picasso was reprinted. “Gilot’s memoir shines, now, as a proto-feminist classic, the tale of a young woman who found herself in the thrall of a dazzling master and ended up breaking free,” wrote Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker.

Speaking to the New York Times in 2022, Gilot, who had recently turned 100, said, “I see life as a labyrinth. You don’t fight it. You go where it takes you. You go the other way.”

The show, co-organized by Gadsby and Brooklyn Museum senior curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, features more than 100 works. Alongside many Picassos, there are contemporary works by Cecily Brown, Judy Chicago, Renee Cox, Käthe Kollwitz, Dindga McCannon, Ana Mendieta, Marilyn Minter, Joan Semmel, and Faith Ringgold.

“The Pablo-ms begin before you even enter the first gallery,” wrote Alex Greenberger in ARTnews. “Above the show’s loud, red signage on the museum’s ground floor, there’s a 26-foot-long painting by Cecily Brown, Triumph of the Vanities II (2018), featuring an orgy of brushy forms set against a fiery background. The painting looks back to the bacchanalia of Rococo painting and the intensity of Eugène Delacroix’s hues. It has little to say about Picasso, an artist whom Brown has spoken of admiringly.”

New York Times critic Jason Farago was even more scathing in his review of the show. “The ambitions here are at GIF level, though perhaps that is the point,” he wrote.

Adlan Jackson’s review for Hell Gate put a finer point on it. Its headline was “Don’t Go to ‘It’s Pablo-matic.’”

In response to the reviews, Small posted a photo of her with Morris and Gadsby on her Instagram story with the caption “that feeling when it’s Pablo-Matic gets (male) art critics’ knickers in a twist.” Morris reposted the image to her Instagram stories, adding, “A @nytimes critic got very emotional about our show,” along with a GIF of the words “sorry not sorry.”

The museum’s director of digital communications, Brooke Baldeschwiler, posted an Instagram story featuring a video about the exhibition starring Gadsby with the caption “Come @ us haters.”

The collaboration with Gadsby came out of the 2018 hit Netflix special Nanette, which included heavy criticism of Picasso and his influence. Picasso “just put a kaleidoscope filter” on his penis when he helped start the Cubist movement, Gadsby claimed.

“It’s Pablo-matic” is one of many exhibitions being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death. On the podcast This Week in Art, produced by the Art Newspaper, Small called the 50th anniversary invitation from the Musée Picasso the “perfect opportunity to partner” with Gadsby.

Morris told This Week in Art that the show was conceived around the themes of power in the art market and feminist art history, especially in the years since Picasso died.

After the publication of the negative reviews, the museum also sent out an email blast from Morris and Small, explaining why they mounted the show.

Perhaps no artist enjoys as much global name recognition as Pablo Picasso. In the fifty years since his death in 1973, culture—and art history—have undergone sweeping changes. The way we look at Picasso has changed, too. Let’s talk about how. The past fifty years have encompassed, among many other social movements, the rise of feminism. And so, to mark this anniversary, we are exploring questions about his legacy by displaying Picasso’s art alongside works by a range of women artists.

We think it’s time to add another layer to our understanding of this towering figure of modernism. Museums are, after all, a place where the past and present meet. As curators, we believe our exhibitions should encourage and hold space for nuanced dialogues, even if they are uncomfortable.

And what better way to wade into these waters than with a bit of humor? Comedy is such a powerful tool for sparking conversation and revealing unexpected ideas. That is why we have collaborated with comedian (and, yes, famously outspoken Picasso critic) Hannah Gadsby on this exhibition. With their pointed wit and background in art history, they challenge us to look again. And look differently.

Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, wrote an op-ed for the Art Newspaper in which she further explained the show’s genesis. Noting that the point of the exhibition was not to cancel Picasso, she seemed to allude to reviews that extensively quoted—and critiqued—words from Gadsby present throughout the show.

“To those who question whether Gadsby’s voice belongs in this exhibit, I would simply ask: Whose interests are threatened by including it? Or, who benefits from excluding it?” Pasternak wrote.

Farago declined to comment to ARTnews.

The shift owes something to feminists like Linda Nochlin, who, in a well-known 1971 ARTnews essay, asked if Picasso would have been called a genius if he were born a girl. But most people don’t know Nochlin. They know Hannah Gadsby, a comedian who took up Picasso in their 2018 Netflix special Nanette, going so far as to say he “just put a kaleidoscope filter” on his penis when he helped think up Cubism, a movement that prized a multiplicity of perspectives.

Gadsby is even more unsparing than that in the audio guide for their new Brooklyn Museum show, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which opens to the public on Friday.

Gadsby notes that Picasso was a “monumentally misogynistic and abusive domestic authoritarian dictator,” and that he “takes up too much space.” To further underscore the point, perhaps in homage to Hughes, Gadsby lends Picasso the nickname “PP.” You can do the work figuring out that very unsubtle pun.

“Picasso is not my muse of choice,” Gadsby later says of organizing the show. “I regret this.” They should.

Organized with Brooklyn Museum curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, “It’s Pablo-matic” aspires toward a new kind of Picasso scholarship that better accounts for his misogyny, his bad behavior, and his colonialist impulses. Gadsby and the curators intend to accomplish this by weaving in more recent works by pillars of feminist art, a noble gesture meant to “unearth and champion voices and perspectives that are missing from our collective understanding of ourselves,” per Gadsby.

The show’s problem—Pablo-m, if you will—is not its revisionary mindset, which justly sets it apart from all the other celebratory Picasso shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. That is the appropriate lens for discussing much of Picasso’s oeuvre in 2023. It is, instead, the show’s disregard for art history, the discipline that Gadsby studied, practiced, and abandoned after becoming frustrated with its patriarchal roots.

The Pablo-ms begin before you even enter the first gallery. Above the show’s loud red signage on the museum’s ground floor, there’s a 26-foot-long painting by Cecily Brown, Triumph of the Vanities II (2018), featuring an orgy of brushy forms set against a fiery background. The painting looks back to the bacchanalia of Rococo painting and the intensity of Eugène Delacroix’s hues. It has little to say about Picasso, an artist whom Brown has spoken of admiringly.

Inside the show, there’s Jo Baker’s Birthday (1995), a Faith Ringgold print featuring a reclining Josephine Baker beside a bowl of ripe peaches. This is a direct allusion to paintings by Henri Matisse like Odalisque couchée aux magnolias (1923), not to Picasso. (A better Ringgold selection would’ve been her 1991 quilt Picasso’s Studio, which takes on the artist more directly.) Likewise, there’s Nina Chanel Abney’s Forbidden Fruit (2009), in which a group of picnickers are seated around and atop watermelons. It’s a composition that specifically recalls Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63), not any particular Picasso painting.

There’s no question that Ringgold and Abney are highlighting the limits of modernism—they replace white figures with Black ones, whom they suture into European images. But this exhibition is not about the modernist canon as a whole, which is itself an extension of a male-dominated Western art history that spans centuries. It’s specifically about one man, per the show’s title: Picasso, whom “It’s Pablo-matic” flatly offers as the only modernist worth critiquing. He isn’t.

Ironically, one of the few Picasso-focused works comes courtesy of Gadsby themselves. It’s a ca. 1995 copy of Picasso’s Large Bather with a Book (1937), depicting a blocky, boulder-like figure crumpled over an open volume. Gadsby painted their reproduction on the wall of their parents’ basement. Looking back on it, they now call it “shitty.”

“Picasso once said it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” Gadsby writes in the wall text. “Well, I don’t want to call myself a genius … But it did only take me four years to be as funny as Raphael.”

“Funny” is debatable, but comedy is used as a curatorial device throughout the show. Gadsby’s quotes, which are printed above more serious art historical musings, are larded with the language of Twitter. “Weird flex,” reads one appended to a Picasso print of a nude woman caressing a sculpture of a naked, chiseled man. “Don’t you hate it when you look like you belong in a Dickens novel but end up in a mosh pit at Burning Man? #MeToo,” reads another that goes with a print showing a minotaur barging into a crowded, darkened space.

Most of the works in this show are by Picasso, strangely enough. This in itself constitutes an issue—you can’t re-center art history if you’re still centering Picasso.

But if the curators must, they have at least brought some impressive works to the US for the exhibition. There are several paintings on loan from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, some of which are enlisted in savvy ways.

One of them, Corrida: la mort de la femme torero (Bullfighting: Death of the Female Bullfighter), from 1933, shows a woman tumbling across two colliding bulls. Upon impact, her breasts spill out, lending the scene an unseemly erotic quality that courses through so many of the Picasso works in this show. It’s all the more disturbing to learn that this female toreador was based on Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was romantically involved with Picasso at the time. I agree with the curators’ assessment that this painting emblematizes Picasso’s brutal tendencies. I only wish it wasn’t paired with this quote from Gadsby: “If PETA can’t cancel Picasso … no one can.”

It’s key that the show repeatedly references Gilot and Walter, as well as other women from Picasso’s love life, like the artist Dora Maar and the dancer Olga Khokhlova. These women were previously written off as Picasso’s “muses,” and “It’s Pablo-matic” suggests that historians still have trouble talking about them. While the show is frank about the negative aspects of these women’s relationships with the artist, they are always discussed within the context of Picasso, who continues to exert a strong gravitational pull.

I detected a disingenuous sentiment amid it all. Gilot and Maar both produced art of note. Where was that in this show? It would’ve been instructive to see their work placed on equal footing with Picasso’s. Or, for that matter, pretty much any female modernists. The only ones who make the cut are Kathe Köllwitz and Maria Martins, both of whom are represented by unremarkable examples of their remarkable oeuvres.

These women didn’t make it into history books for a long time, and that’s the subtext of Kaleta Doolin’s Improved Janson: A Woman on Every Page #2 (2017), a piece included in this show. The work takes the form of a famed art history textbook that has, in every one of its pages, a vaginal oval cut out of it. An image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was sliced by Doolin during the work’s making, its lower left-hand corner now lopped off.

Doolin’s work is about removal: she leaves parts of Janson’s book absent to make clear that women artists, for so many centuries, were kept out of the picture. This was a painful, violent elision, and Doolin makes steps toward rectifying the carnage by acknowledging all that contributed to it. If only Gadsby had done the same.

Why does this show contort art history so? There are numerous Picasso works here that portray threesomes, rapes, and bestiality. The wall text doesn’t hide the sources of these images: Ovid’s poetry, Greek mythology. When Picasso represented a minotaur kneeling over a nude, sleeping woman who can’t consent, he was glorifying sexual assault, using classical art as a limp justification. He was hardly the first male artist to do that, however: Bernini, Titian, Correggio, Poussin, and many more did it too. Yet this exhibition directs its aim only at Picasso.

Many of the women in this exhibition are responding to centuries of misogyny, not just Picasso’s. Betty Tompkins has a grand, grisaille painting showing an erect penis entering a vagina in close-up—an image that recalls a certain Gustave Courbet work—while Joan Semmel takes a lighter approach, with a painting of a post-coital couple shown from the woman’s point of view. Ghada Amer is showing a terrific embroidered work in which pools of red thread reveal pairs of splayed-open women’s legs, and Rachel Kneebone has a porcelain piece that looks like a fountain of limbs. There’s no specific reference point in these works, because the male gaze is omnipotent. It wasn’t found only in Picasso’s studio.

The final gallery, the sole one without any Picasso works in it, brings “It’s Pablo-matic” into even squishier territory. There are some great works here—Dara Birnbaum’s classic video skewering Wonder Woman, an Ana Mendieta photograph of an abstracted female form sculpted into the ground, Dindga McCannon’s painting of a multihued revolutionary with real bullets fixed to the canvas—but they have almost nothing in common, beside the fact that they are all owned by the Brooklyn Museum.

The supplement to this exhibition, available on the Bloomberg Connects app, includes an interview with one artist in this gallery, Harmony Hammond. Asked about her feelings on Picasso, she says, “Truth be told, I don’t think about Picasso and his work.”

It would’ve been nice to have more artists who were thinking about Picasso, or whose work, at least, has something to do with him. But this seems like too much to ask from the curators, especially Gadsby, who greets that line of thinking with a big, fat raspberry. “Humans are not doing great,” they say on the audio guide. “We are unsettled. I blame Picasso. That’s a little joke. Or is it? I don’t know.”

That painting, Le Moulin de la Galette (1900), currently figures in a small exhibition about Picasso’s early years in Paris at the Guggenheim Museum, the New York institution that also owns the piece. The Guggenheim announced the finding of a canine in its press materials for the show, which opened last Friday and runs through mid-August.

According to CNN, conservators with the Guggenheim, working with experts at the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., made the discovery using X-ray fluorescence. The dog can now be seen clearly, thanks to those scans. It may be a Cavalier King Charles spaniel that wears a red ribbon around its neck.

Julie Barten, senior paintings conservator at the Guggenheim, told CNN, “it was interesting to me that he hastily painted over this dog, which would have been a rather compelling aspect of the composition.”

Why did Picasso remove the dog? Barten said it could be because the ribbon proved too “enticing,” distracting the eye from the blurred dancers who move across the background.

Some background for Picassophiles: Le Moulin de la Galette depicts a popular dance hall in Paris, to which Picasso had moved that same year. He paid close attention to the electric lights—a modern element in a rapidly changing Parisian landscape—and to the intermixing of people of different classes in the space.

The painting was sold for 250 francs by dealer Berthe Weill the year it was made. The Guggenheim faced a restitution claim concerning the work in 2007, with the heirs of its former owner claiming that the painting was sold under duress; the museum subsequently settled with the heirs two years later.

Le Moulin de la Galette is one of 10 works by the artist in “Young Picasso in Paris,” part of a worldwide celebration of the artist this year that marks the 50th anniversary of his death.

The show, titled “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” is set to feature nearly 100 works, many of them done by women artists. Its description promises a new look at “the artist’s complicated legacy through a critical, contemporary, and feminist lens, even as it acknowledges his work’s transformative power and lasting influence.”

On the artist list are some artists who’ve explicitly responded in the past to Picasso’s art such as Mickalene Thomas, who told the New York Times last week that she had interacted with his work as “a way to dismantle the modernist ‘boys club’ and also the artistic colonialism, derived from contact with Africa, that inspired or discovered Cubism.” Also included is the German artist Kathe Köllwitz, who even bought Picasso’s art while he was still alive.

But the short description for the show included some names whose work may not seem to have anything to do with Picasso, including Ana Mendieta, the late Cuban-born artist better known for feminist performances than dialoguing with modernist artists.

These works will be presented alongside an audio tour from Gadsby, who worked on the show with Catherine Morris, Lisa Small, and Talia Shiroma, all of whom are on the staff of the Brooklyn Museum.

“Highlighting Gadsby’s voice alongside those of many of the included artists, the exhibition reckons with complex questions around misogyny, creativity, the art-historical canon, and ‘genius,'” the show’s description says.

Gadsby gained wide attention in 2018 for taking up Picasso in the Netflix special Nanette, in which they labeled him a “passionate, tormented, genius, man-ballsack.” They praised him as a formal innovator and lambasted him as a misogynist, and went on to say that a failed attempt to take the male-dominated field of art history as their chosen discipline resulted in a realization: “I understand this world and my place in it. I don’t have one.”

“It’s Pablo-matic” is one of dozens of shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death in 1973. Many of the other exhibitions being staged are far more laudatory.

Some have continued to voice dissatisfaction with perspectives on Picasso’s legacy, with the Guardian even running an article last week asking if we should cancel him.

In that article, Morris, a co-curator of the Brooklyn Museum show, said, “Hannah Gadsby says there’s a lot that’s easy to hate about Picasso—but if the goal was to cancel Picasso, we wouldn’t be doing this show and Hannah wouldn’t be participating. However, I would say, as a curator of feminist art, that you can only look at Picasso today through a lens of feminist critique.”

On Twitter, some mocked the Brooklyn Museum show. Critic Dean Kissick tweeted, “Commemorating the anniversaries of our greatest artists’ deaths by having comedians that don’t tell jokes curate museum shows about how much of an asshole they were is, I guess, quite funny.”

After the operation, much of Guernica lay in ruins. Estimates of civilian casualties have never been firmly established, varying from less than 200 to more than 1,000 out of a total population of 7,000. But while the carnage would be far surpassed in future air campaigns against cities such as Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, and Dresden, Guernica holds a special place in the annals of infamy, thanks largely to the efforts of one person: Pablo Picasso.

Picasso cemented the event in memory with his masterpiece Guernica (1937), a cri de coeur that’s become an icon of antiwar sentiment. Painted almost entirely in grisaille, and measuring 11 by 25.6 feet, Guernica sets its mise-en-scène in a manger where animals and people, including a mother and child, are seen in a frenzy of anguish.

Guernica ranks as Picasso’s second-most important painting after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), with which it shares the same epic impact, though with a greater sense of gravity. But beyond matters of tone, the difference between the two paintings was that Les Demoiselles was painted by an artist known mainly by an intimate circle, while Guernica was painted by an artist who’d achieved international stardom.

Read Part 1: 1890s to 1920s here.

The estate, located not far from Cannes on the French Riviera, was one of many expansive properties owned by Picasso that attested to the fame and fortune he’d accrued over a legendary 70-year career. But another salient feature of Picasso’s life took form in the woman who stood by his bedside that day: his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, who was 45 years his junior. The age differential was typical of Picasso’s relationships with the scores of women he’d bedded, taken as mistresses, fathered children with, and been prone to emotionally abusing.

Today Picasso’s reputation as a womanizer and sexual predator has clouded his legacy as the colossus of 20th-century art, the explosive figure who birthed modernism and created the template for the artist as a superstar whose brilliance excuses all manner of sins. That attitude hasn’t aged well, and neither has the misogyny that percolates throughout Picasso’s work. In this respect, he was hardly alone among the men of his generation, but his views on women were coarse even for the standards of the day. “There are only two types of women,” he once said, “goddesses and doormats.” His thoughts on matrimony were just as unenlightened, and even violent in tone: “Every time I change wives, I should burn the last one. . . . You kill the woman, and you wipe out the past she represents.” Still, the women in Picasso’s life played a huge role in his art, as muses and as subjects who both fascinated and terrified him.

To borrow a phrase that film critic Pauline Kael bestowed on the British actor Bob Hoskins, Picasso was “a testicle on legs,” a man whose appetites were as prodigious as his artistic production. And therein lies the rub: To celebrate Picasso, you must separate the artist from his art, a tall order given how canceled he’d be if he were still with us. Yet his achievements are so overwhelming that to ignore them or his life would amount to willful blindness.

Read Part 2: 1920s to 1970s here.

The Headlines

PICASSO MANIA. It’s the half-centenary of Pablo Picasso’s death, and that means many are reassessing the artist’s life and work. The New York Times sat down with 10 artists, including George Condo, Mickalene Thomas, Derrick Adams, and Rachel Harrison , the last of whom had this to say: “The interpretation of his work has leaned too heavily on biography. That’s boring.” Hot take! But if you’re in want of more biographical interpretation, there’s a new book by art historian Annie Cohen-Solal that focuses on Picasso’s tormented relationship to France, the country that he long called home and the state whose police surveilled him. Alex Greenberger reviewed it for ARTnews, writing that Cohen-Solal “treats Picasso kindlier” than many contemporary detractors, but that “it is tough to disparage any of her findings.” As for the art itself, the Guardian has a survey of the “fiesta of exhibitions” taking place right now.

SHE’S BACK. Some 142 years after it was first painted, James McNeill Whistler’s famed picture of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), is coming back to Philadelphia, the city where it was exhibited for the first time. Later this year, the painting will figure in a Whistler show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it will be on loan from Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, the Art Newspaper reports. The loose focus of the show is Whistler’s time in Philadelphia and his deep connection to his mother, Anna Mathilda. Despite the fact that the painting is so famous, “there is a strong unknowingness about her, as if she was withholding some information from us,” according to Jennifer Thompson, the show’s curator.

The Digest

MIMA, a contemporary art museum in Molenbeek, Belgium, was initially going to host a boxing match between around 20 members of the Brussels police department. Then, amid what the institution described as “tensions on social media,” the event was called off. [Politico]

A new profile of collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund reveals that she has sold another Roy Lichtenstein painting for a cause. The funds from this one went to an organization focused on reproductive freedom in Michigan. [W]

A “sure-to-be-controversial” installation by Reynier Leyva Novo at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, takes the form of box truck that has been transformed into a usable sauna. It has a disturbing reference point: the container that held nearly 50 dead and dying migrants that was found last year in San Antonio. [Texas Monthly]

A 1,800-year-old Venus statuette was discovered in a garbage dump in France. It’s not the first time one has been found—they turn up often in excavations—but rarely ever are they so well-preserved. [Artnet News]

Rafael López Aliaga, the far-right mayor of Lima, has shuttered a museum in the city called the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion amid a dispute over how it presented the violence of 1980–2000. [The Guardian]

The Kicker

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. The New Yorker is known for the modish, slinky, and generally apolitical illustrations that appear on its cover. Next week’s issue, however, will be something entirely different: a courtroom sketch featuring Donald Trump during a hearing related to his indictment. The person behind this cover, Jane Rosenberg, was one of the three approved sketch artists in the courtroom that day. “I have been doing this job for some forty-three years, but this was my most stressful assignment yet,” she said. The cover is a milestone within New Yorker history, as it’s the first time a courtroom sketch has ever been featured on the front page of the magazine. [The New Yorker]

Picasso, who had been born more than 20 years earlier in Málaga, Spain, had aroused the suspicion of authorities because he had associated with Pierre Mañach, a dealer whom the French police had determined was an anarchist. “Please investigate the aforementioned Picasso and find out his current beliefs,” the police chief wrote in one fateful missive.

Even though Picasso would sever ties with Mañach four years later, believing that the Spanish dealer was exploiting him, the police did not let up. They would continue to amass a file about Picasso’s activities, and their findings would continue to hinder the artist, who was repeatedly tarred as a métèque, a foreigner, in the country he called home for much of his career. The police investigation would continue to haunt him, as it did in 1940, when he was denied naturalization on the basis that he was a “suspect from the national point of view.” By the end of the ’50s, Picasso had given up on becoming a Frenchman altogether, embracing his status as an étranger.

It can be hard to recall a time when France hated Picasso, who now has museums dedicated to his art and life in Paris, Antibes, Vallauris, and elsewhere. The Paris institution is one of the many that’s now toasting him to mark the 50th anniversary of his death in 1973. And so it is with surprise that many American readers will now greet Annie Cohen-Solal’s Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900–1973, which has at long last arrived stateside, via an English translation by Sam Taylor, two years after its release in France.

The book, along with a related 2021 exhibition based on Cohen-Solal’s research conducted in police archives and elsewhere, got a good amount of attention in France, and this sturdy, unconventional biography of Picasso ought to attract similar recognition here in the US, where we get too much literature about the artist every year, too little of it of any real substance. This book, however, is different. The research presented within is not new—word of Picasso’s surveillance by the French police first emerged 20 years ago—but Cohen-Solal’s take on it is fresh.

It is fashionable these days to knock Picasso down a peg, as the comedian Hannah Gadsby did when she labeled him a “passionate, tormented, genius, man-ballsack” in her 2018 special Nanette. She is now at work on a Brooklyn Museum show, also tied to the commemoration of Picasso’s death, that will take up “the interconnected issues of misogyny, masculinity, creativity, and ‘genius’” in his oeuvre. This is the kind of mode many in the US expect for Picasso studies in 2023.

Cohen-Solal’s book treats Picasso kindlier than Gadsby, repeatedly using that last word, “genius,” to describe him more favorably and billing him more than once as “one of the greatest artists of the [20th] century.” Some will disagree with Cohen-Solal’s acclaim for Picasso—an artist who is hardly in need of more of it, anyway. But when Cohen-Solal deals with the evidence at hand, it is tough to disparage any of her findings.

The book’s first section, focused on Picasso’s life in squalor at the turn of the 20th century, is its strongest. It follows Picasso’s time in Paris’s Montmartre district in extreme poverty, a situation that led the French police to view him as though he existed “at the very bottom of the social ladder,” as Cohen-Solal writes.

“Once the police had drawn up a file on someone,” she continues, “their official categorization would generally remain.” This is exactly what happened with Picasso.

Much of Picasso the Foreigner isn’t really about art, and Cohen-Solal brushes through wide swaths of Picasso lore simply by name-checking people, artworks, and places. (Relatively green Picasso fans should instead pull John Richardson’s multipart biography off the shelf.) Periodically, however, Cohen-Solal manages to evoke fascinating insights about Picasso’s art, as she does when addressing Family of Saltimbanques (1905), in which a group of performers forlornly looks around a desert landscape. She identifies the harlequin in the diamond-patterned suit as Picasso himself, and explains that his stony gaze emblematizes his feelings as a financially imperiled expat in France.

“They are posed there, strangers to one another, in a world where all communication is frozen,” Cohen-Solal writes, noting that the painting could be said to represent “those cracks in society” experienced by the marginalized. Ironically, the painting is one of many acclaimed ones by Picasso that now resides abroad, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and it might not have ultimately gotten there if it hadn’t headed to auction in a closely watched sale at Paris’s Drouot auction house in 1914.

By the time of the 1914 sale, the preeminent dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had boosted Picasso’s fame as one of Paris’s most important artists, and the painting was bought at Drouot by Munich’s Thannhauser Galleries for a not inconsiderable sum. The press had a field day, with one journalist reporting that “huge prices were paid for vile, grotesque paintings by undesirable foreigners” and bemoaning that a German had won the painting. Extrapolate only a little further, and it wouldn’t be hard to hear a note of antisemitism in that latter sentiment, given that members of the Thannhauser family were among the many German Jews who had their belongings and wealth taken from them following the Nazis’ rise to power.

By this point, Picasso had elected himself leader of the avant-garde—and had already faced pushback in France for painting Cubist pictures in which still lifes fracture into intersecting planes, as though they were being seen from several perspectives at once.

Cohen-Solal explains that Picasso and Georges Braque, who was born in Normandy, were proclaimed “charlatans” by many in France. (The Spaniard Juan Gris does show up periodically in this book, but Cohen-Solal downplays his impact on the Cubist movement.) Adding fuel to the fire were the fact that it was non-nationals—Russian and American collectors, mainly—who bought their Cubist art.

“The collusion between a German art dealer [Kahnweiler], a Spanish artist, and collectors from Russia, Germany, and North America made cubism an avant-garde movement that ‘good Frenchmen’ could point to as being run by forgers and charlatans, creating a ‘danger’ to the integrity of the nation,” Cohen-Solal writes. “It was a battle of good and evil, tradition versus the new, the France of honest men against an invasion of dangerous foreigners.”

That last sentence perfectly describes the back half of the book, in which Picasso is repeatedly disenfranchised in the interwar period. Throughout, Cohen-Solal sprinkles in descriptions of her time sifting through reams of archival materials. Her anguish as she does so, and her embarrassment with the way her nation treated foreigners like Picasso, is only thinly veiled.

As she researches the impact that anti-immigrant laws had on Picasso during the ’20s, she recounts reopening his police file and feeling shocked at the sheer amount of times he was summoned to the police station. But she never presents him as a victim.

“So many appointments given, so many fingerprints taken, so many mugshots of him looking like an ex-con—and yet he seems to have submitted to these visits without protest,” she writes. “How did Picasso put up with these encounters with the police?

“Internationally renowned but stigmatized within his country of residence, he found himself in a paradoxical situation,” she continues. “In the world of French galleries and critics, he was idolized, while among official institutions he remained invisible, and in the eyes of French law and order he was considered with suspicion. Thanks to his political analysis, and then to his construction of an autonomous domain where he could live as master of all he surveyed, he was able to control the situation and finally to turn it to his advantage.”

Here, she’s referring to France’s post–World War II about face, which saw Picasso suddenly embraced by the same Parisian institutions that had once shunned him. Suddenly, in 1947, Picasso became the first living artist to hang his work in the Louvre—he placed his art beside works by Zurbáran, Delacroix, and others—and in 1955, more than 100,000 people visited the Musée des Arts Décoratifs to see a show toasting his 75th birthday.

Yet prejudice is exportable, and sure enough, while all this was happening, the FBI caught wind of all that French authorities had amassed on Picasso and launched its own investigation. As part of an effort to stamp out Communism in the US, Picasso was deemed a “a threat to the national security of the United States” by none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself.

According to Cohen-Solal, the situation worsened to a point when, in 1957, Alfred H. Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art decided not to invite Picasso to the US at all for an exhibition of his work, fearing embarrassment if the artist were to be sent away. (The museum had by then amassed a significant Picasso collection that includes his acclaimed 1907 canvas Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and was for a while even the steward of his 1939 painting Guernica before it could be sent to Spain at the end of the Franco regime.) The FBI somehow obtained an internal note by Barr saying as much and put it in the agency’s archives. Picasso never received a US visa to see a MoMA survey that same year. Instead, he remained in France, where he would die 16 years later, having never formally become a citizen of that country.

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Smith’s first visit to Paris, where he had the chance to explore Picasso’s personal archive of some 200,000 objects, for the show’s planning happened just before the pandemic, at the invitation of the museum’s then president Laurent Le Bon (now the president of the Centre Pompidou). When Cécile Debray took over the reins, she decided to inject contemporary art into her predecessor’s project.

“A museum, especially a monographic one, should not be petrified but connected with its time—open to debate, criticism,” Debray told ARTnews during a walkthrough of the exhibition. “Our mission is to keep Picasso’s legacy alive and see it into the 21st century.”

Among the dozen modern and contemporary artists now included is Mickalene Thomas, who has embroidered rhinestones over a reproduction of Picasso’s 1945 Pitch and Skeleton, an abstracted still life in deep gray tones that recalls “the extreme violence of the context within which the work was created, in 1945, was perpetuated through the repression of the various minorities evoked,” according to a wall text. Thomas’s striking Resist #8 (2022), which tackles the subject of police violence and systemic racism in America, hangs next to its source material in a room devoted to the representation of war.

Among the source images that Thomas juxtaposes are photographs from civil rights demonstrations from the 1950 and ’60s and recent ones from the Black Lives Matter protests, which “intermingle with an evocation of Sarah Baartman, exhibited in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century as the “Hottentot Venus”, and with a representations of the singer Lizzo, in the center, celebrated for her militant anti-racist positions and against fatphobia,” according to Debray’s catalogue essay. In pairing Picasso’s work with contemporary artists like Thomas, shows just how extensive Picasso’s influence on art is to be sure, but it also highlights how that influence can be critiqued, cracked open, and refashioned into something entirely its own.

A section called “Biomorphism” draws a parallel between artistic creation and biological reproduction and includes a confrontation between Picasso’s art and Louise Bourgeois’s Cumul I. “She is the only woman artist who can compete with Picasso when it comes to featuring sexuality,” Debray added.

Working with the museum’s conservator Joanne Snrech, Smith paid close attention to the lighting and perspective for the collection rehang. An all-pink room, filled with studies for Picasso’s iconic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, features two trapezes of light that seem to have been cut out from the wall, evoking the simplification of forms Picasso was experimenting beginning in 1907.

From this room, you can glimpse a view of what else this visit to a new Musée Picasso has to offer—it’s breathtaking. The real tour de force by Smith was painting all 24 rooms of the three-floor museum in color—floral wallpaper, deep navy blues, the aforementioned pink—for the very first time. “I was pretty scary,” Smith admitted in an interview.

Added Debray, “This new contrast with the museum’s all white ceilings makes you want to look up,” which in turn should prompt better appreciation for chandeliers by Diego Giacometti (Alberto’s brother) that have hung there since the museum opened in 1985.

Before turning to fashion, Paul Smith dreamed of becoming a racing cyclist, so it’s no wonder that this rehang is introduced with Picasso’s Bull’s Head, a 1942 readymade fashioned from the seat and handlebars of a bicycle that faces a wall covered with equivalent pieces from day-to-day life. Smith’s intervention relies on three principles: the power of repeated patterns, the power of monochromes, and the power of Picasso’s motifs themselves. (Smith’s own sketches for the rehang are reserved for the catalogue; it is a Picasso show, not a Paul Smith show, after all.)

The second gallery celebrates 13-year-old Picasso, the age at which he began editing his own satirical magazines, which became a lifelong obsession. A scribbled over May 1951 issue of Vogue issue inspired Smith to create a backdrop made from covers of the iconic fashion publication. Similarly, for a section on Picasso’s collages and assemblages, Smith created his own collage from flowery vintage wallpapers sourced from the US, while the second-to-last room is plastered with posters from Picasso shows, which Smith wanted to appear as if they had been quickly glued onto the wall, complete with wrinkles and puckers. “Picasso would put together sculptures from everyday objects—pattern on pattern, on pattern, on pattern is something I do a lot in my work,” he said.

That attention to texture and relief continues throughout the display: a room dedicated to bullfighting (Picasso attended and painted corridas throughout his life) is painted a red as shiny as fresh blood, while the room for Blue Period works is entirely blue and one for his series of variations on Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) is bathed in green. Elsewhere, Smith has borrowed motifs directly from Picasso’s works, like a blue-and-yellow-diamond-checkered wall from Paul as Harlequin (1924) or stripes inspired taken from the background of a portrait of Dora Maar, from his 1930s series “Femmes assises.”

The Spanish master’s legendary Breton shirt is the focus of another gallery. Beginning in 1997, Congolese artist Chéri Samba started painting Picasso in this exact attire as a critique; his Quand il n’y avait plus rien d’autre que… L’Afrique restait une pensée (When there was nothing left…Africa remained a thought) is on view here. “These paintings in which I depict myself with Picasso are a way of paying tribute to all the supposedly anonymous African artists who made our traditional masks and who inspired Cubism,” Samba says in an interview included in the catalogue. “It is a way of saying that there are artists all over the world, and the West, which did not regard our masks as art, is hypocritical. I denounce this hypocrisy.”

The most impressive of these contemporary additions to the museum’s rehang is Retablo, an eight-panel installation by Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca showing a road that disappears into a mass of geometrical forms, a nod to Picasso’s Cubist period. (Nearby hangs a landscape by Paul Cezanne that Picasso once owned, a way to “play with various times and viewpoints,” Debray said.)

In Kuitca’s interview for the catalogue, the artist says, “I wanted to immerse the viewer in the work, a common aim for painters but to be precise I wanted to push this desire to its materiality to a physically concrete degree. You must stand in front of it, you are the fourth wall of the theatre. I eventually understood that the work is painting inside and a sculpture outside.”

Smith designed a collection based on the work of artist Anni Albers in 2018, and during this year’s Paris Fashion Week, several designers debuted collections nodding to the art world, like Paco Rabanne’s dresses with reproductions of paintings by Salvador Dalí. Might a Picasso collection be in the offing for Paul Smith? “I am not a fan of one artist in particular,” the designer said. “Staying relevant in fashion is difficult—you take from movies, graphic designs, music. Working on this exhibit has made me realize that a lot of what I do is about reassessing, never being satisfied. You’ve got to think laterally all the time.”