Although the fact that Pablo Picasso is the most famous artist of the twentieth century – some would say now the most famous artist of all time – is ample reason to have celebrated on such a large scale the fiftieth anniversary of his death on 5th April 1973, the sheer quantity of commemorative events can also be explained as an explosion of energy by museums across the world, liberated from the constraints imposed by the pandemic. The advance list of Picasso events for 2022–23 published by the Musée Picasso, Paris, listed no fewer than forty-three exhibitions (some of them iterations of a single exhibition over several venues): Picasso –El Greco in Basel,[1] Picasso / Chanel in Madrid, Picasso and Prehistory in Paris, Picasso Landscapes, currently in Mississippi, Picasso – Max Beckmann in Wuppertal, Miró – Picasso in Barcelona, and so on. In November, in his native country alone, Picasso 1906: The Great Transformation opened at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, while Picasso: The Sacred and the Profane, primarily a study of his relationship to old master paintings, continues its run at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bormenisza. 

The exhibitions fall into three main categories: those juxtaposing Picasso with one of his peers or admired predecessors, such as Picasso/ Poussin/Bacchanales in Lyon, or Goya in Picasso’s Eyes at Castres; those focusing tightly on a period in his career, such as Picasso 1969–1972: End of the Beginning at the Musée Picasso, Antibes; or those that take as their subject his life and in particular his relationships with women, such as Fernande and Françoise at the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso Münster, on Fernande Olivier and Françoise Gilot. Those that attempted a broader coverage, such as the Musée Picasso’s Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light, notable mostly for its mis-en-scène by the British fashion designer Paul Smith, fared comparatively poorly in critical terms. Probably the most anticipated exhibition – so far at least as journalists were concerned – was a promised feminist critique at the Brooklyn Museum, curated by the comedian Hannah Gadsby, but when it finally materialised, as It’s Pablo-matic, it proved a damp squib. Expectations that Picasso might be about to get his ‘Me Too’ moment were undermined by the fact that there is very little left to discover about his behaviour towards the women in his life. Nonetheless that subject remains of wide public fascination, as was clear from Picasso: The Beauty and the Beast, a series of three documentaries of disappointing superficiality broadcast by the BBC in September. It remains to be seen whether critiques of Picasso in terms of cultural appropriation – because of the use he made of African art – will gain much traction. 

The death of Picasso’s biographer John Richardson in 2019 deprived us of what would have been the fifth – and possibly final – volume of his biography.[2] This would have covered the years from the 1950s onwards, when he knew Picasso personally. Famously, Picasso told Richardson that ‘My work is like a diary. To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life’. Few remarks by a great artist have been more fundamentally – and perniciously – misunderstood. Picasso was not saying that his biography was a key that unlocked understanding of his art, simply that his work was his life – indeed, it was to an extent almost literally a diary, since from the 1920s Picasso began to date his works carefully, as a result of which it is possible to chart his life on an almost daily basis. The reductive idea that his work is simply a mirror of his life has too often become a belief that his art can be explained by a study of his sex life, to a degree that is often prurient. To some extent that is Picasso’s fault: like many artists, he disliked talking about his work but was happy to share his family life and daily routine in the studio with journalists and photographers. 

The persistent focus on Picasso’s biography makes it easy to underestimate the amount of research that remains to be done on his art. Although he is probably the best catalogued artist of the twentieth century, many of the works await close scholarly examination. The principal archive, in the Musée Picasso, which reportedly has become in the past decade less easy to access than formerly, offers quantities of material to be mined by scholars, such as photographs, bills for purchasing materials and the large collection of press cuttings he accumulated. There are still obstacles to accessing important documents, given that Picasso’s family controls access to many matters of biographical sensitivity, but that issue, which should become easier as time passes, would be helped if there were a full calendar of his correspondence, even if some of the letters cannot for the moment be released. One major gap in the understanding of Picasso is the lack of knowledge about his library. Since Picasso died without making a will, the allocation of his possessions among his children, illegitimate as well as legitimate, was a highly fraught affair, and in the understandable focus at that moment on the works of art he owned his books were simply distributed among his family or given away. It would be a very valuable contribution to scholarship if a catalogue of the books he possessed could be created. 

One disappointment about the last volume of Richardson’s biography is that it ends in 1943, when Gilot supplanted Dora Maar in Picasso’s affections, without therefore a full analysis of his life in Paris during the Second World War, a period where there are many questions to be answered, not least the sensitive subject of his political affiliations, since he did not only move in Resistance circles. His work in these years is under-researched: for example, where did he acquire the materials for his sculptures?[3] Similarly, there is much still to be discovered about the period of his close friendship with Georges Braque and the development of Cubism, which resulted in paintings and collages that are of almost inexhaustible interest but are not works for which biographical interpretations are obviously helpful. During the First World War, Picasso was unable to travel or sell works, which stayed therefore in his studio, giving him the opportunity to alter and rework them at a crucial moment in his career, when he was pondering the direction that his art would take. Much remains to be discovered about the history of these works by technical analysis in conservation studios.[4] This is a task that is only just beginning, but it offers an exciting route into a greater understanding of the way Picasso thought about his art – and in the last resort the art is the only thing that matters.

[1] Reviewed by E. Cowling in this Magazine, 164 (2022), pp.1008–11. 

[2] E. Cowling: ‘Obituary: John Richardson (1924–2019)’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 161 (2019), pp.793–94. 

[3] See, however, C.Finn: ‘Picasso and the foundry of Emile Robecchi during the Second World War’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 162 (2020), pp.420–31. 

[4] For an example of the value of such an approach to a later work, see K.Dahm, F. Casadio and J.-L. Andral: ‘Picasso’s “Faun musician”: revealing the making, contextualising the meaning’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 164 (2022), pp.246–53.