MONTPELLIER.- From 15 June to 23 September 2018, the Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole is presenting the Picasso – Donner à voir exhibition, in association with ‘Picasso-Méditerranée’, an international cultural event launched by the Musée National Picasso-Paris.

Montpellier – a Mediterranean metropolis located halfway between Catalonia and Provence – is involved in this programme.

The Musée Fabre is presenting a major exhibition encompassing the artist’s entire career and offering an overview of the creation of a prodigious oeuvre with a particular focus in the selection and presentation of the works.

The exhibition is structured around his pivotal years, experimentation and departures from previous work, reflecting the continuous movement of his metamorphoses. The works are being presented in an open-plan exhibition format that lends itself well to formal comparisons between periods.

Fourteen key dates
While the idea of change governs all of Picasso’s artistic creation, we can nevertheless identify certain paroxysmal moments. The exhibition’s perspective is rooted in fourteen key dates that highlight formal and technical departures from Picasso’s oeuvre; yet it is also deliberately distanced from the artist’s biography. It covers 900 m2 and is designed with no physical separation between the different sections, meaning the works can be compared, contrasted and viewed from different perspectives. Each section brings together a variety of different works completed over a short time period: one or several seasons, a single year. The selected works thus reflect the artist’s ability to explore several formal hypotheses at the same time, sometimes even within the same work.

A ‘self-destructive’ artist
The open-plan format challenges the idea of ‘evolution’ in Picasso’s work and deconstructs any overly linear interpretation of his oeuvre. None of his departures are ever definitive.

The physical changes in Picasso’s work reflect a series of round trips within his own career path. While several recent exhibitions have helped highlight the external points of reference used or ‘cannibalised’ by the artist (Picasso and the Masters, Picasso and Folk Art and Traditions), Picasso – Donner à voir demonstrates how Picasso drew inspiration from his own work.

77 years of creation and over 120 works from the largest international collections
The exhibition explores the period from 1895 to 1972: 77 years of artistic creation! In addition to masterpieces of painting, sculpture, etching and drawing, records, sketchbooks and preparatory drawings have been included that reveal these moments of intense experimentation and bring us closer to the creative process.

Musée Fabre is displaying over 120 pieces within the exhibition, including a remarkable set of works loaned by the Musée National Picasso-Paris, representing ‘all the breakthroughs, all the key pieces that Picasso kept to himself in order that he could continue living with them and seeking out what it was that his painting or sculpture had achieved at a given point – something that he would perhaps only understand much later, in the light of other works or in a different era’. (Pierre Daix). These are joined by works on loan from other prestigious museums in France and elsewhere, including Picasso Museum Barcelona; Musée Picasso, Antibes; Kunsthaus Zurich; Museum Berggruen, Berlin; Metropolitan Museum, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris; Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Médiathèque Emile Zola de Montpellier; plus many more private and international collections.