Cover ‘Massacre in Korea’ (1951) by Picasso, which will be shown at M+ (Image: courtesy of Succession Picasso, Grand Palais Rmn, Musée national Picasso-Paris and Mathieu Rabeau)
‘Massacre in Korea’ (1951) by Picasso, which will be shown at M+ (Image: courtesy of Succession Picasso, Grand Palais Rmn, Musée national Picasso-Paris and Mathieu Rabeau)
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M+’s major Picasso exhibition this month puts 60 works of the father of Cubism in dialogue with Asian artists
“There’s a natural challenge for a museum that is dedicated to one artist who has now been dead for half a century, in spite of his worldwide fame, to [answer] the question of relevance,” says Doryun Chong, the artistic director and chief curator of M+.
The artist in question is Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), one of the founders of Cubism and a giant of the modern art world. This month, M+ and Musée National Picasso-Paris, with support from the French May arts festival, are jointly organising The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia—A Conversation, an exhibition that puts together more than 60 works by the Spaniard and a further 80 by around 20 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists, taken from the Hong Kong institution’s M+ Collections. Running from March 15 to July 13, the show marks the first time a museum collection in Asia has been presented alongside pieces from the Paris museum.
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Portrait of Dora Maar (1937) by Picasso (Image: courtesy of Succession Picasso, Grand Palais Rmn, Musée national Picasso-Paris and Mathieu Rabeau)
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The M+ team had Picasso on their exhibition wish list even before the Hong Kong visual culture museum opened in 2021. “A big part of the curatorial work and institutional decision on our programming is to make sure that it covers a spectrum: on one hand, there is the more academic, esoteric and not so well-known to the public [work]; on the other, we show important names that the public already know or feel more comfortable with, such as [Japanese artist Yayoi] Kusama or [Chinese American architect] IM Pei,” Chong says. “So it was really not a big leap to think of Picasso as one of those names to be shown in the first few years of the museum’s operations.”
About three years ago, M+, with an introduction by French May, approached Musée National Picasso-Paris, which houses more than 5,000 works by Picasso, including never-before-exhibited pieces from the 1930s that were directly taken from the artist’s studio after his death. The French institution “could also see from their side that the opportunity to collaborate with the brand new kind of museum would be a great opportunity to continue to build the contemporary relevance of Picasso,” says Chong.
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Above ‘Figures by the Sea’ (1931) by Picasso (Image: courtesy of Succession Picasso, Grand Palais Rmn, Musée national Picasso-Paris and Mathieu Rabeau)
‘Figures by the Sea’ (1931) by Picasso (Image: courtesy of Succession Picasso, Grand Palais Rmn, Musée national Picasso-Paris and Mathieu Rabeau)
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To that end, the exhibition doesn’t only showcase pieces which demonstrate Picasso’s signature surrealistic style, such as L’acrobate (“The Acrobat”) (1930) and Figures au Bord de la Mer (“Figures by the Seaside”) (1931); the curators believe it’s important to also present Picasso’s relevance in Asia, a topic that is rarely explored in shows of his work. Visitors to the Hong Kong show will see pieces the artist created during his time in Asia or in response to major events that took place in Asia, such as Massacre en Corée (“Massacre in Korea”) (1951), an anti-war painting which captured the brutality of the Korean War; the artist had never been to Korea but created a painting based on what he had heard about the war). This piece will be shown in Hong Kong for the first time. There will also be posters and postage stamps with the iconic Dove of Peace image, which the People’s Republic of China printed in August 1950—Picasso identified himself as communist and was hence favoured by the PRC leaders of the time.
As well as pieces with direct ties to Asia, the Hong Kong exhibition will also feature works that have never been exhibited publicly before, including small reliefs created in the 1930s that were taken directly from Picasso’s studio right after his death in 1973 which, in the words of Musée National Picasso-Paris’s president Cécile Debray, are “highly refined, experimental [and] intimate”.
‘The Acrobat’ (1930) by Picasso (Image: courtesy of Succession Picasso, Grand Palais Rmn, Musée national Picasso-Paris and Adrien Didierjean)
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What differentiates this show from existing or previous Picasso exhibitions is a narrative that puts the Spanish artist in parallel with Asian and Asian diasporic artists active from the early 20th century to the present who, as Chong puts it, “have no evident natural connection” to the Spaniard.
The show is curated based on four archetypes of artist: the genius, the outsider, the magician and the apprentice. “No modern artists of the last 100 years represented those archetypes better than Picasso: we think of Picasso as a genius; there was a certain outsider, rebellious quality to him; he conjured these images [from his imagination] as a magician; throughout his career, looked at his predecessors [for inspiration] and was indeed an apprentice of history throughout his life,” Chong says.
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Woman with a Bird (1949) by Wifredo Lam (Image: courtesy of Wifredo Lam, ADAGP, Paris, Sack, Seoul and Sotheby’s)
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Based on these characteristics, Chong and his team then choose Asian artists from the M+ Collection who demonstrate similar characteristics in their careers. Some of them have responded to or reinterpreted Picasso’s legacy directly in their art, such as Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi’s Picasso portrait (2011) and Japanese painter Keiichi Tanaami’s Pleasure of Picasso series (2020-23). Others are connected to Picasso by topics, such as gender: Picasso’s pieces that show male domination over female are juxtaposed against works by Asian artists who portray violence against more contemporary works by Asian artists that reverse that [dynamic], it really generates an interesting conversation.”
While there are currently no plans for the show to tour the rest of Asia, Debray is keen to show Picasso in other cities in China—as well as South Korea and Australia—in the future. “We travel a lot. Having the biggest public collection on the artist, we have a responsibility for the image of Picasso, and we want to invent a new way to do [our subsequent Picasso] blockbusters,” she says.
Cécile Debray (Image: courtesy of Cécile Debray)
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“We place contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic artists on equal footing as the master, so that these artists can be the lens into what we think of as masterpieces. And I hope visitors will understand, in a more complex way, what art and artists represent in our society, such as why we need geniuses and what we expect of them,” Chong says. “This exhibition isn’t just about celebrating Picasso and his legacy. It’s about asking questions about them.
“I want our audiences to come and see Picasso as they have never seen Picasso, and leave the exhibition ruminating on these bigger, abstract questions.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
