Review: Imagine Picasso allows visitors to see a master from all angles
The mammoth multi-plane exhibit finds fresh ways to show the master’s staggering range of style
Imagine Picasso’s bold multi-dimensional take on the revolutionary Still Life With Chair Caning. Photo by Jean Sebastien Baciu
Imagine Picasso runs to January 2022 at the Vancouver Convention Centre East.
PABLO PICASSO MADE a breathtaking 50,000 works in his lifetime, roving between styles in an output of such breadth and brilliance that it is impossible for a single museum exhibit to contain him. “Painting is stronger than I am,” he once said. “It can make me do whatever it wants.”
That has, in turn, helped make Picasso one of the world’s most ubiquitous artists, his masterpieces now adorning everything from coffee mugs to T-shirts and mousepads. His works even sit on the walls of a Las Vegas casino hotel—the Bellagio, where a painting was recently auctioned for $40.5 million, $10 million over the presale estimate.
Picasso’s art has been referenced in The Simpsons episodes, Jay-Z songs, and Toy Story movies (remember Mr. Potato Head reorganizing his face into a Cubist nightmare?).
All of this is to say, it’s easy to think we know Picasso inside-out. But Imagine Picasso’s immersive, perspective-skewing new installation at the Vancouver Convention Centre East is here to remind us that we really don’t. Through juxtapositions, high-def magnification, and the sheer variety of pieces that—let’s face it—you could never see in real life in one place, it prods even those fully versed in Picasso to see him in new ways.
And so it is that, with the works projected and fragmented on this scale, you may notice previously undetected depths of sadness in the eyes of The Boy With the Pipe. Instead of simply appreciating the splintered Cubist planes of one of his most famous paintings, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, you might be struck by the faces’ resemblances to African masks. The symbolic Minotaur—rendered alternately in the style of classicism, in utter abstraction, and in caricature—looms and shifts meaning like never before.
Photo by Jean Sebastien Baciu
Tandem Expositions, Paquin Entertainment, and Encore Productions—the same team behind the popular Imagine Van Gogh exhibition that just closed—know how to give a clear-eyed view of an artist. As at the previous show, there is a preview salon full of information panels that walk you through Picasso’s career—and, like the next room exploding with eight-storey-high projections, the text doesn’t oversimplify that journey as a straight line from the Blue Period through to the Rose Period and then Cubism. Picasso was famous in his own lifetime, and he loved to play with and subvert expectations; he put it best, saying, “I mix it up a lot, I shift a lot. When you see me, I’ve already changed, I’m already somewhere else. I am never in one place and that’s why I don’t have one style.”
A salon-style wall helpfully familiarizes you with the titles and eras of the 200-plus images on display in the main hall. In a real museum setting, they have never been shown together. And, it’s safe to say, never will be; Guernica alone commands its own, entire room at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía.
The projection installation, fittingly, has a fully separate-feeling approach than the one for Imagine Van Gogh. Still, the shows complement each other: Picasso studied the work of the Dutch Post-Impressionist. (One of the Spanish master’s most captivating paintings here—1901’s Seated Harlequin—derives not just from Van Gogh’s café scenes, but those of Dégas and Manet; the flowery wallpaper is even a direct reference to that of Van Gogh's La Berceuse.) The difference in this show is the way the images play out, in fragments and closeups, across not just the towering walls, but the angled planes of mammoth origami-like sculptures, which play on the mini paper versions Picasso once crafted for his children. (His love of children is another revelation here, the entire, looping show opening with his paintings of them set to kids singing on the soundtrack. Children will enjoy this exhibit.)
In the show, you need to walk and move around the space to explore every corner. In one sequence that’s an ode to Picasso’s famous gestural sketch Don Quixote, you’re enveloped in black and white. At others, surrealist faces with off-kilter eyes, stylized noses, and gnashing teeth greet you at each turn—including the spectacular Weeping Woman, all shattering anguish, tears, and clutching hands. His equally stunning, more classical portraiture sometimes glides slowly across surfaces, a woman’s gently rendered hand reaching out, a pair of eyes staring at you. At other times, the effects go bold and abstract: a field of red and yellow painted dots, set against a green field, covers every surface in a playful celebration of Picasso’s colour expertise and brushwork.
Photo by Jean Sebastien Baciu
The revelation in Imagine Picasso is the unassumingly named Still Life With Chair Caning, from 1912. As it’s presented here on the multidimensional surfaces, the woven cross-hatching of the chair “caning” covers the floor and walls—the bold representation emphasizing how revolutionary and contemporary-feeling this mashup of Cubism, collage, and classicism, and “high” and “low” art objects (oil cloth, newspaper, and rope), really was.
The soundtrack underscores every artistic impulse, whether it’s classical 20th-century music or more jazz-flavoured riffs. Like that music, the exhibition, too, follows the seismic shifts of history and Picasso’s reactions to them, whether it’s the empathy he felt for the down-and-out-in Montmartre, the despondency he suffered over Franco’s war in Spain, or the surge of exuberance and freedom he experienced, late in his career, as a world-famous septuagenarian on the sunny southern coast of France.
To Picasso’s credit, there is still a lot to discover about his art—mysteries continue to circle around the meaning of the Minotaurs, the crooked features on those surreal faces, and the symbolism amid the chaos of Guernica. That makes it fun to puzzle your way through his startlingly diverse body of work. Remember, as you walk past shattered and lopsided facial features, or the hollow gazes of the Blue Period, there can be no “wrong” way to read this vast array. Picasso always invited his viewers' own interpretation: as he put it, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth”.
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