About Picasso the foreigner

We receive a response from Annie Cohen-Solal, curator of the Picasso the Strangerexhibition in Milan (Palazzo Reale, September 20, 2024 to February 2, 2025), to Federico Giannini’s review, and at the same time also a text from a young writer, Ginevra Ventura, who intends to respond to our director on the issue of Picasso’s identity. Pleased with the opportunity to open a debate on a highly topical issue, we publish both texts with, at the bottom, a brief reply from the editor. Happy reading!

Dear Federico Giannini,

I would like to respond to your long and, by the way, well-documented article in the paper you created. I was impressed that you read the entire catalog very carefully, and I am very grateful for the references to essays by international colleges and intellectuals. In particular, I want to highlight your attention to the issue of the equivocation on the Demoiselles d’Avignon (Jean-Hubert Martin’s essay on the lies of French museums), Dipesh Charabarty’s thesis (and the idea of the city of Paris as the real protagonist of Picasso’s trajectory), on Emily Braun’s idea (talking about the acrobats “as non-citizens”) or even on Peter Sahlins’ analysis (about Picasso’s “formative years on the borders of Catalonia”). This highlights his interest in so many perspectives(subaltern studies, institution history, social history, geography, anthropology), which renew the traditional (thus formal) approach on the work of a mythical artist like Picasso. It seemed to me that this treatment could signal a very interesting position on the exhibition and open the way for an original, rich discussion adapted to the contemporary Italian political situation.

Why might readers feel disoriented once the reading is over? It seems to me, however, that you preferred to leave readers a bit perplexed by detaching these issues of the exhibition’s layout and designating it as “an exhibition that almost completely omits any formal analysis.” Precisely, and this is precisely the challenge of this exhibition: it is, like the catalog, an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to capture, with artworks and historical documents together, in context, the interactions between an artist and his era. So it seems to me that there is something a bit contradictory in your argument and I would be very interested in discussing it with you.

In the meantime, I received from a young writer, Ginevra Ventura, a small text about the exhibition that also reacted to your article and I wanted to propose that she publish it along with mine: what do you think? In my opinion, this would be a good way to reopen the debate on Picasso in the contemporary Italian context.

Thank you again for your interest,

Annie Cohen-Solal

Reflections on the article Picasso was also a migrant. What the Milan exhibition looks like

There is an acute study of Picasso’s history and artistic production in the article in question, but this attention sometimes seems betrayed by the little care given to the analysis of the exhibition, which tends to lack critical lucidity. In fact, although there are literary and essayistic references of rare precision, there is a scarcity of timely references to the exhibition curatorship-from the choice, for example, to start the tour in the dark and end it in a light environment to the initial sound stimuli, disorienting and provocative.

Departing from the conclusion adduced by the journalist, I would like to point out that he argues that the Palazzo Reale exhibition aims to separate the figure of Picasso from the question of identity. This would be due, according to Giannini, to the fluidity in which the artist is immersed throughout his life: eternal stranger, stateless, metamorphosis of himself. Picasso, in fact, is portrayed here not along the canonical lines of the father of cubism and the painter of the blue or pink period; rather, it is his multifaceted face that is foregrounded. Multiple masks, multiple shades, color Picasso’s identity, an identity that finds no final resolution because it is structurally metamorphic. The point that in my opinion remains obscure in the article commented on here, but instead constitutes the key to the “Picasso problem,” is the following: to speak of a changing and always foreign identity is not at all to deny identity. On the contrary, Picasso the Stranger shines a new light on the concept of identity, freeing it from stringent sociopolitical categories, and does so through the concrete testimony of the author’s life.

The installation invites the viewer to step into the shoes of the stranger through very precise curatorial contrivances (audio recordings in a foreign language, identifying documents on the walls, political denunciations, alternating light and dark environments, artifacts of all artistic kinds) and in doing so suggests a different, as well as richer and more complex, idea of identity, which goes from predetermined and substantial to performative, that is, in becoming. Out of the rooms of the Milanese museum comes the cry not of the great Picasso of Les demoiselles d’Avignon, but the cry of a man shaping his own self accident after accident, journey after journey.

Reflection on the subject’s practice of shaping itself also leads to a notion coined by the same scholar, Francesco Remotti, which the journalist misleadingly quotes. The latter takes up the notion of “mythologizing” identity to explain the picture the exhibition brings out of Picasso. On closer analysis, however, I would propose another notion proposed by the Italian anthropologist, which is far more appropriate to the eclectic and subversive figure of the 20th-century artist. The term I am referring to is “molding,” which in First Lesson in Anthropology Remotti indicates as that process of plastic shaping that the sculptor carries out with the ductile material of his art. This is exactly what Pablo does with himself and with his own artifacts: he plays and experiments with the cosmopolitan spirit, without ever being arrested by the shackles of a fixed and imposed category-be it aesthetic or political. Indeed, he is never just Spanish or French or Andalusian, but neither is he just painter or sculptor or set designer. Picasso models - and does not mythologize - his own identity as well as his artistic products. In keeping with one of the last roles he held, that of master potter, he makes his own life a plastic work. In conclusion, it could be said that the eternal stranger gives life to forms in art and in life gives form to his own identity.

Finally, as the eternal stranger, Picasso is a living body of the Queer condition, whose etymology refers precisely to “strange, foreign.” It is no coincidence that feminist philosophy, which Giannini seems to be winking at when she brands the artist with machismo, highlights well the intersectionality of the Queer question, that is, the need to consider subjects who fall into the political cage of the stranger from multiple angles, primarily that inherent in the xenophobic question. Today, in our dear and safe West of 2024, we cannot help but be provoked by the sense of foreignness that assails those who are placed on the margins of politics and civil society. The exhibition curated by Annie Cohen-Solal revives this provocation, calling us to take responsibility for our consciousness as citizens of the world, though without dwelling on Picasso’s debated machismo. The focus of the exhibition, in fact, falls not on the author’s biography-where it would then be relevant to highlight the misogynistic side-but on the possibility of issuing a challenge to us contemporaries, using as a catalyst the works of an artist who, more than many others, bore upon himself the wounds, at once dramatic and laughing, of foreignness.

And so Picasso the Stranger ultimately moves from being a simple exhibition about a revolutionary artist to a revolutionary manifesto of an interdisciplinary proposal, one that hurls a lance against prevailing xenophobia and disrupts sociopolitical impositions in favor of a plastic, performative and challenging identity. That identity finds its body in Pablo Picasso, an artist with whom we are still driven to confront.

Geneva Ventura

Response by Federico Giannini

I am glad that my review raised a discussion. In response to Annie Cohen-Solal, whom I thank most sincerely for her appreciation of my writing, I do not find it contradictory to have remarked (I admit, with a small hint of disappointment, as an art journalist who tends to be a formalist) that the exhibition deliberately leaves out the analysis of the works and, conversely, to have praised the aims of the project: I believe, trivializing, that even in an artist’s formal choices lurk his experience, the context in which he worked, the experiences he accumulated. In response, on the other hand, to Ginevra Ventura, I am grateful that she wanted to share with our audience her idea on the theme of Picasso’s identity, and I do not intend to discuss it (I think I have already said in the review what I had to say). I will only allow myself a couple of clarifications. In talking about Picasso’s machismo, there was no winking: it was simply a reprise of a thought of Searle’s, which is also widely shared. Finally, where I speak of the risk of mythmaking, no misleading hint: of course I do not mean to say that Picasso tended toward mythmaking himself, much less that a mythmaking picture emerges from the exhibition (far from it). I meant the inverse, namely, that the lavish effort in trying to give an identity to Picasso, whatever adjective one wants to attach to this noun and whatever idea Picasso had of himself, whether fluid or defined, risks in my opinion to shift the discourse from the purely historical and art-historical sphere to the mythographic one, to the fabrication of small personal Picassos as needed. So, in other words: is it really so necessary to try to find definitions for Picasso or to project our own ideas onto his figure? This I think is the question. Thank you both for the food for thought.

Federico Giannini

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