PARIS, FRANCE.-Musée Picasso presents Picasso. The Love of Drawing, on view through January 9, 2006. Exhibition organised by the Musée Picasso and the Réunion des musées nationaux, in Paris, and by the Museu Picasso, in Barcelona, where it will be shown from 8 February until 8 May 2006. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the museum’s opening, the Musée Picasso is presenting a set of works taken from its own collections, with the addition of major pieces from the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, a total of over three hundred and fifty drawings, water colours, gouaches, pastels and collages by the twentieth century’s greatest graphic artist. The exhibition gives visitors an opportunity to see masterpieces they may have seen in earlier exhibitions as well as sheets never shown before and so appreciate once more Picasso’s astounding virtuosity in drawing.

Picasso’s mother claims that her son’s first words were “piz, piz”, as he called for a pencil, lápiz in Spanish. His childhood passion for drawing continued throughout his long life because he drew constantly, jotting down his feelings and inventions as if he were keeping a diary: “Obviously you never know what you are going to draw… but when you start, a story or an idea appears and there it is. Then the story grows, as on stage or in life… and the drawing turns into other drawings and becomes a real novel. It is highly entertaining, believe me. At least I have great fun inventing things and I spend hours while I am drawing, imagining and thinking about what my characters are doing. In the end, it is a way of telling stories.” (Roberto Otero, Loin d’Espagne, rencontres et conversations avec Picasso, Barcelona, Dopesa, 1975. French translation by Christiane de Montclos).

When we look at the museum’s drawings, some thousand five hundred items from which a fascinating but difficult choice had to be made, it is clear that although still lifes, animals, stage sets and costumes were not overlooked, the human figure was the artists main ‘theme’. Visitors see a chronological procession of faces and bodies of all kinds making up a strange comédie humaine in which the pathetic rubs shoulders with the burlesque, sensuality with death. From academic nudes to the withered female flesh of his last years, via the metamorphoses of the thirties, drawing, even more than painting, is the arena for Picasso’s love of the body and the transformations he subjected it to. By stripping the human form naked, he gave its specific features a universal quality. Where Paul Valéry (Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin, Paris, Gallimard, 1983) saw painting “invaded by a world without people”, Picasso answered with an obsession with humankind and spun a subtle, indestructible tie between him and us.