Exhibition Archive & Review by Artist: Guggenheim "Young Picasso in Paris"

Young Picasso in Paris

Hello there, 

I'm glad to finally post a new exhibition review, and this time it is for the exhibition you still have time to visit. 

This week I visited the Guggenheim Museum for the Young Picasso in Paris Exhibition which is on view until August 6, 2023. If you are in NYC I highly recommend visiting and seeing this small but good selection of his early work in Paris. 

The works in this exhibition were made when he relocated to Paris. Imagine when you just moved to a new place you admired and started a new life there. Although he had a friend and also purpose (the Exposition Universelle), he was still a 19 years old kid or young adult. That is when he made these works, and when I think about that as an expat artist myself, it is something more than just one of many small Picasso exhibitions. 

I and many of you I believe would appreciate the fact that the Cataran manager who didn't buy Picasso's commercial work which heavily Toulouse Lautrec "inspired" or emulated. Le Moulin de la Galette has the "impression" of Lautrec. It is interesting that Picasso is a genius person and as an artist I would say he had and didn't have his own style, and that became or he produced that character of himself as his own unique style.

But the highlight for me from this exhibition was cardboard in 1900. Although it was a first material for me as well when I wanted to make a bigger sculpture-like painting in art school, I didn't know the history of cardboard as much as other materials.  

Cardboard has been present in art history for a long time yet until I saw this exhibition I didn't think about this specific material and history of it. 

History of cardboard............................

The first commercial cardboard box was produced in England in 1817 by Sir Malcolm Thornhil and the first cardboard box manufactured in the United States was made in 1895. By 1900, wooden crates and boxes were being replaced by corrugated paper shipping cartons. The advent of flaked cereals increased the use of cardboard boxes.

In France the cardboard box has an even longer history. The Musée du Cartonnage et de l’Imprimerie (Museum of the Cardboard Box) in Valréas, France traces the history of cardboard box making in the region and notes that cardboard boxes have been used there since 1840 for transporting the Bombyx mori moth and its eggs from Japan to Europe by silk manufacturers.-SafeCutters

So in 1901 when Picasso painted on cardboard is when the cardboard boxes were in the middle of being widely spread. I'm glad to learn that one of the earliest uses of cardboard boxes was transportation from Japan to France. Bombyx Mori Moth for silk manufactures. 

But what amazed me the most was that the cardboard itself already existed in 15 century in China. It is why I admire Asia including my own country but also the neighbors and its culture and inventions. 

As always this review works as my personal archive and it covers the artwork and texts in the exhibition which you are welcome to enjoy.

---GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM's Official Introduction to the exhibition---------------------------------

"Pablo Picasso first arrived in Paris from Barcelona in autumn 1900, during the final weeks of the Universal Exhibition that included his work in the Spanish pavilion. The ville lumière, or “city of light,” captivated, and ultimately transformed, the nineteen-year-old Spaniard. Though Picasso spoke little French, he absorbed everything Paris had to offer over his initial two-month stay and during his return the following May through the end of 1901. He patronized not only the art galleries, but also the bohemian cafés, raucous nightclubs, and sensational dancehalls that permeated his hilltop neighborhood of Montmartre. These sites of social gathering and the various types of people who frequented them quickly became a primary source of inspiration.

Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death, the exhibition Young Picasso in Paris explores a critical juncture in his artistic development and highlights a defining work, Le Moulin de la Galette (ca. November 1900), which was recently the subject of a conservation analysis and treatment project. The famous dance hall—formerly a mill engaged in the production of a brown bread, or galette—had been depicted by such avant-gardists as Ramon Casas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh. In Picasso’s titillating version, a cross section of Paris society comingles under the electric lights. This painting and others demonstrate the young artist’s fascination with the unconventional aspects of modern life. Picasso’s early work presages the social disenfranchisement that he brought into sharper relief with his subsequent Blue Period (1901–04) through depictions of the exploited and vulnerable.

This intimate exhibition includes a small group of paintings and drawings that show Picasso’s exercises in character study and demonstrate his evolution during this formative period of his life. All told, his forays into Paris left a strong impression; Picasso would settle there in 1904. An emerging artist in 1900, the artist eventually surpassed his academic training to forge a singular practice reflective of his time."-Guggenheim Museum