Celebrating Picasso

Wednesday March 15 was a cool day again with a high of 11C.  Mix of sun and cloud but no rain.  Good walking weather.  It is Day 10 of the sanitation workers' strike.  Garbage is piling up in a number of the arrondissements and there is no end in sight.  Wednesday was also a day of action with demonstrations and public transport disruptions.  I read that Spain has reached a deal with labour unions to save its pension system by raising social security costs for higher wage earners.  French unions would like this solution, but Macron has refused to raise taxes, saying it would make the country's economy less competitive.  Hmmm....

After some meandering (the best thing to do in Paris),  we headed to the Picasso Museum to see two exhibits.  We got there just before 2:30 p.m. and were told that due to the strike, one of the three floors of one of the exhibits was closed and that a decision was being made momentarily as to whether the Faith Ringgold exhibit would open.  We waited five minutes, and luckily they opened the Faith Ringgold: Black is Beautiful exhibit.

Poster for exhibit

A video at the entrance

"Art is my voice"

Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930 during the time of the Harlem Renaissance (1920-35).  She began painting her American People series in 1963.  In 1966, she took part in the group exhibition The Art of the American Negro at the Harlem Cultural Council.  In 1967, she produced three large murals prompted by the clashes of the summer of 1967.  She started work on the Black Light series.  In November 1968, Ringgold organized a demonstration in front of the Whitney Museum with about 40 other parties, denouncing the absence of works by African-Americans in an exhibit featuring artists from the 1930s.  In 1970, the exhibit The People's Flag Show which she helped organized was shut down and the organisers arrested for desecration of the national flag.

In 1971, Ringgold and her daughter demonstrated with others in front of MOMA in solidarity with the prisoners at Attica, asking for the resignation of Nelson Rockefeller.  She created a poster, United States of Attica. In 1980, she and her mother begin work on a new project, Echoes of Harlem.  This was her first quilt painting and their last collaboration as her mother died the following year.

In 1990, she had a residency in La Napoule, France and did preparatory work for a new body of work, The French Collection.  In 1996, she started a new body of work called The American Collection.  In 2022, the first retrospective of her work was held at the New Museum in New York.  She is 92 today.

The Faith Ringgold exhibit is part of its new program at the Picasso Museum dedicated to the contemporary reception of Picasso's work.  It was a good match.  She first visited Paris in 1961 with her daughters and mother where they discovered the Louvre.  In 1967, her major painting Die was inspired, in part, by Picasso's Guernica.  She also had an imaginary dialogue with Picasso in one of her quilts in her 1991 French Collection.

Early Works #25: Self-Portrait, 1965

 It's just about being Black in America.  There was no way you could avoid what was going on at that time: you had to take some kind of position about it.  There was no way you were going to ignore it, because everything was either Black or white, and very strongly so.  (Faith Ringgold on the 60s)

Early Works #17: Black Man, 1964

Early Works#15: They Speak No Evil, 1962

Black Light Series #11: US America Black, 1969

Black Light Series #4: Mommy and Daddy, 1969

Black Light Series #9: The American Spectrum, 1969

American People Series #19: U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power.  Ringgold placed 100 white, mixed-race and Black faces in a white grid.  
The diagonal formed by the smaller black letters spells "Black Power."

From the Peoples Flag Show, Nov.  9, 1970, Judson Memorial Church

United States of Attica, 1972-- poster commemorating the tragic outcome of the Attica prison uprising.  On September 13, 1971, 33 prisoners and 10 staff were killed.  

American People Series #6: Mr. Charlie

American People Series #10. Study Now, 1964.  This portrait is of Charlayne Hunter-Gault, on of the very first black American students, who entered the University of Georgia in 1961.

Faith Ringgold was inspired by Guernica, then on display at MOMA in New York.  Die depicts a violent brawl bordering on civil war.

American People Series #20: Die, 1967. 

During a trip to Europe in 1971, Ringgold discovered some 15th century Tibetan and Nepalese cloth paintings, known as 'tanka' at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  

Coming to Jones Road Part 2: Martin Luther King Jr. Tanka #3: I Have a Dream, 2010

Coming to Jones Road Part 2: Harriet Tubman Tanka #1: Escape to Freedom, 2010

The cloth paintings inspired her first textile series of 19 paintings, Slave Rape, in 1972.  The decorative borders were designed by her couturier mother, Willi Posey, which led to their ongoing collaboration.  The artist portrayed herself and her two daughters against a landscape background in the first three tanka.

Slave Rape #2, Run You Might Get Away, 1972

In Picasso's Studio: The French Collection, Part I, #7, 1991, the heroine Willia Marie Simone (a made up character) poses in Pablo Picasso's studio.  Figures from his 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and African masks hung on the walls urge the young girl to embrace her calling as an artist, the guarantee of her freedom.

Picasso's Studio

Le Café des Artistes: The French Collection Part II, #11.  Here Willia Marie Simone runs a café
in Place Saint-German-des-Prés, a meeting place for the Paris art scene.  
French and African American artists are portrayed in the painting.

In The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles, Ringgold imagines a scene in Arles paying homage to Vincent Van Gogh in a field of sunflowers.  She brings together a group of African-American women artists and civil rights activists.

The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles: The French Collection, Part I, #4, 1991  

The Flag is Bleeding #2: The American Collection #6, 1997.  Ringgold takes up the theme of the bleeding flag 20 years after the one featuring in the American People series.

Tar Beach is the first piece in the Woman on a Bridge series.  It tells the story of an eight-year old girl, Cassie, who is taken to the roof of her Harlem building one evening in the summer of 1939 by her family to escape the suffocating heat of the apartment.  The artist depicts the bright dreams of the little girl who flies over the George Washington Bridge.

Tar Beach #2, 1990, edition 1/24

Excerpt from the story on the quilt

It was a fabulous exhibit.  It really brought the scope of Ringgold's work during the past 60 years to light.  She was a ground-breaking artist who took her art in directions that she wanted to follow, not the trends of the day.  Her pieces continue to be very meaningful today.  The link to Picasso and her French series made a good fit with the Picasso Museum.  We are very glad that we got to see it this trip.

The second exhibit we saw was entitled: Picasso Celebration: the Collection in a New Light!  Sir Paul Smith (b. 1946), a British fashion designer, was invited to lead the artistic direction of an exhibit on the occasion of the 50 years since Pablo Picasso died.  The exhibition is curated around masterpieces from the collection and invites the public to view Picasso's work through a contemporary lens.  The Museum wants to attract a new audience and showcase Picasso's relevance in today's world.  A number of international contemporary artists have pieces shown in the exhibit that have links to Picasso's work.

Paul Smith's fashion company was founded in 1970 and his clothes are now in 70 countries.  Alain has a number of his pieces.  He has a signature striped pattern that often features in his clothing.  He is very creative and his stores are filled with art.  He always has a great combination of patterns and colour in his clothes. We got the excellent audio guide which had short interviews with Paul Smith, where he discussed his ideas for the colours, decor, and design for each room.

Another poster for the exhibit

Tête de taureau, Spring 1942  - one of Picasso's best-known examples of a repurposed object (he found the bicycle saddle and handlebars in a municipal dump)

A  cycling enthusiast from his teenage years, Paul Smith took inspiration from Picasso's work
 to create an amusing, updated version.

Alain and I near the start of the exhibit

The next room was entitled Pink Ladies, Autour des Desmoiselles D'Avignon.  Paul Smith had a room painted in a dark pink colour.  In the autumn of 1906, Picasso concentrated almost exclusively on the female body.  He developed a new approach to representation inspired by Iberian art.  He usually shows his figures in a fixed, frontal pose, restricting his palette to pinks and ochres.   His major work of this period was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) which hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Nu assis (étude pour Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1906-07

Self-portrait, 1906

Femme aux main jointes (étude pour Les Demoiselles d'Avignon), 1907

The next room was entitled Cubism.  In the autumn of 1906, Picasso began to take his art in an entirely new direction.  This change was influenced by Paul Cézanne's instruction to "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, everything put in perspective" as well as Iberian art and Roman sculpture, and the arts of Africa and Oceania.   Picasso, in collaboration with French painter Georges Braque developed the new style of Cubism, which was at its height from 1907-14. 

Georges Braque (1882-1963), Nature morte à la bouteille, Automme 1910.  During their development of cubism, it was often difficult to know whether it was Picasso or Braque
who was the painter of a specific work.

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Château-Noir, 1905

Tête d'homme (1910-11)

The next room was called Assemblages and Collages. Throughout his career, the use of objects and everyday items was a key part of Picasso's art.  His approach bled the line between painting, drawing and sculpture.  He also used decorative motifs from wallpaper and clothing.   Paul Smith chose to decorate this room with different coloured wallpapers.

La Liseuse, January 29, 1953

The next picture was the first collage in the history of art.  Picasso used actual rope as the frame.  The letters JOU represent a newspaper (journal). There is an incorporated piece of oil cloth printed with a cane chair pattern, a pipe, glass, lemon, oyster and other café items.

Nature morte à la chaise cannée (Still life with Chair Caning), Spring 1912

Portrait d'Olga dans un fauteuil, Spring 1918 - painted the year he married Olga Khokhlova,
a dancer at the Ballets Russes.  The canvas shows through the background in a way
that recalls the aesthetic of a collage.

The wall coverings 

The next room was called Blue Melancholy.  Paul Smith had the walls were painted a deep blue and there were heavy grey window coverings in the room.   In the autumn of 1901, a few months after the death of his friend Carlos Casagemas, Picasso developed a new style of painting, using a palette entirely in shades of blue.  This gave his works an atmosphere of nocturnal melancholy and also coincided with his habit of working at night with only an oil lamp for light.

Portrait d'homme, 1902-3

Self-portrait, 1901

Le Fou, Paris, 1905

Paul Smith chose his signature stripes for the carpet leading to the galleries on the 2nd floor

The next room was entitled Biomorphism, a term used by art critics in the 1930s to describe  the works of Picasso, Jean Arp and Joan Miró, where there are organic forms that seem to harmonise with nature.

Tête de femme, 1931-32

Femme au fauteuil rouge, January 27, 1932

There was then a room with work from WWII entitled In Times of War.  In 1937, Picasso painted Guernica in response toe the Spanish Civil War.  Now seen as a universal symbol of political protest against barbarism, the painting inspired American artist Mickalene Thomas to create a series on the campaign for African-American civil rights and the Back Lives Matter movement.

Picasso did not depict conflict literally during WWII, but it remained in his work in the form of portraits.  He showed human bodies distorted in every conceivable way.  His still lifes with subjects combining objects with animal corpses and human skulls are also powerful allegories of the horrors of war.

Femme Assise, March 5, 1945

L'Homme au Mouton, March 1943.  Made under the Nazi occupation.  In the midst of war and without means to fight the forces of destruction, the naked shepherd remains standing,
embodying a message of hope and resistance.

Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971), Resist #8 (Pitcher and Skeleton), 2022  
Thomas tackles police violence and systemic racism.

Considered a "degenerate artist" by the Nazi regime, Picasso nevertheless remained active in Paris during the German occupation from 1940-45.  The animal remains in the picture serve as a reminder of the muted presence of death during the war years.

Pichet et squelette, February 1945

There was a room painted in high gloss red paint which had a number of Picasso's bullfight picture.  Picasso had attended bullfights in Málaga from early childhood.  He would continue to go to bullfights throughout his life, first in Spain and then in southern France.  His fascination for the corrida inspired his art, and was for him, the ultimate expression of the struggle between humans and animals and the principles of life and death.

Illustrations for the reissue of an 18th century bullfighting manual, La Tauromaquia, 1959

The next room was called Bestiaire (Bestiary).  Throughout his artworks, Picasso gave pride of place to representations of animals.  His animals were tinged with a new lightness at the end of the war.  Goats and sheep were treated with humour.  Owls are depicted as strange and sometimes mischievous creatures. Picasso had taken an owl, which he called Ubu, into his home in 1946.

Owls

Goats

Paul Smith had the playful goats in the front of the room on green photographer's paper hung down a wall.  He wanted the focus on them.

La Chèvre, created in Vallauris in 1950, belongs to a series of sculptural assemblages made from recovered objects.  In the original plaster version on the left, one can recognise the wicker basket
forming the belly, a palm tree stem as the spine, and old milk jugs as the udders.

The next room had a number of Picasso's ceramic plates.  He had experimented with ceramics earlier in his career but it was after he settled in Vallauris (a town known for its pottery for centuries) in 1947, that he began to work intensively with ceramics.  Paul Smith decorated the room with white plates to symbolize Picasso's prolific production of 1000s of pieces of ceramic work.

Picasso plates dated from 1947-1949

The next room was called Striped and had a number of paintings with stripes.  In the 1930s, Picasso played with the motif of stripes in his paintings, drawings and engravings.  "In the Femmes assises au fauteuil series, the different stripes and bands allow for a somewhat joyful and dynamic interplay of colours".  Paul Smith decorated the room with stripes, which form the signature of his brand.

Portrait of Dora Mara, 1937 (on left) and Femme assise au chapeau, May 27, 1939

Alain in the Paul Smith striped room contemplating the Picassos

Portrait of Marie-Thérèse, January 6, 1937

We wondered if Paul Smith drew the rabbit on the glass between galleries.

The last room on the 2nd floor was entitled All the World's a Stage. Picasso's interest in the theatre dates back to his childhood in Spain.  During his early periods in Paris, he frequented the circus and became interested in marginal figures such as clowns and acrobats.  He and his then wife Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova liked fancy-dress parties, while their young son Paul is shown dressed as Harlequin or Pierrot. Paul Smith decorated the room in a Harlequin design, using the colours from one of Picasso's paintings.

Paul en Pierrot, February 28, 1925

Paul en Arlequin, 2024

Arlequin et Pierrot, 1918

Portrait d'adolescent en Pierrot, December 27, 1922

We really enjoyed both exhibits and were at the Museum for almost 2 1/2 hours.  We wish we had been able to see the third floor of the Celebrating Picasso exhibit, but we were getting a bit tired.

The Ringgold- Picasso connection was a revelation and the Paul Smith collaboration with the Museum led to some interesting displays and groupings of Picasso works mixed in with a few contemporary artists.  The audio interviews with Paul Smith describing his choice for the room colour, decoration and the mood he wanted to create were a great add-on to the exhibit.

We then walked to the nearby Jack Gomme shop, one of our favourites.  A bag I wanted is at one of their other stores, where I will go tomorrow.  The sales associate turned out to be a Raptors fan! 

Window at Jack Gomme

Great colours in their light weight bags

We stopped at Anaïm, a wonderful Korean clothes store that has been in the Marais area for 20 years.

Finally, a quick stop at Merci, where the little red car is still parked in the courtyard- this time with a cartoon character as that seems to be the theme in the store.  Nothing really interested us there.

We checked out two of our other favourite stores, Khadi & Co and da Novembre.  The former was just being restocked and the sales associate said to come back next week.  Da Novembre, where Alain got a beautiful scarf last year, was also in a bit of a transition from Winter to Spring.  We had a nice chat with the designer who has her studio in the store.

As we were heading back to the apartment, we passed "The Coffee".  We went in but they were just closing and had stopped serving coffee.

Alain at "the coffee"- a Japanese coffee shop

We hoofed it back across the Seine and went for dinner at Bekseju Village, a Korean restaurant on Boulevard Saint Marcel in the 13th, just a five minute walk from our apartment in the 5th.  My cousin had taken us there last year.  There was a long line of National Police vans parked just down the street. May have been back-up for security for the demonstration.

Quiet when we arrived at 8:00 p.m.  More people arrived after we did.

We had a lovely zucchini galette

And fried chicken

It was a nice change of menu.  When we left, the Police vans were gone.  We headed back to our quiet street (only the garbage was out).   Another great day in Paris, with a lot of culture and walking.