In the classic journey of an art lover, there is always a place for Picasso. Whether you love him, dislike him, have dissected his work, or simply have fallen in love with one of his pieces, if you are reading this text, chances are you have an opinion about the man and/or his painting.

Picasso: Three Women in Spring
MoMA New York © Passion Estampes

The beginning of the 20th century was an explosion of ideas, innovations, and artistic repositioning. In the wake of the Impressionists and following the modernist Klimt, young artists expressed themselves for the first time far from the traditional academism. Alongside Braque, Picasso reinvented perspective, depth of field, and discarded the idea of a foreground opposed to the background. But where Braque analyzed methodically, sometimes coldly, Picasso, the Mediterranean, full of ardor and passion, exploded with love on the canvas, filled sketchbooks with drawings as vivid as they were instinctive, as complete as they were unfinished. Because he blended everything: his life and work, his personal history and the great history that ravaged the land of his birth, his romantic encounters, and friendships, sometimes tinged with jealousy.

Picasso is recognizable at first glance, even though his style evolved throughout his life and several highly distinctive periods punctuated his work. His stroke of the pencil, his worked spontaneity, his personal obsessions, his taste for provocation, his way of confronting the greatest in his art to be judged one day and designated the winner (he had no doubt about it), led him to express himself in a constant creative urgency and did a lot to make him enter the collective imagination... during his lifetime!

Picasso: Young Girl in Front of a Mirror
MoMA New York © Passion Estampes

Picasso: Woman with Heart-Shaped Bust
Antibes © Passion Estampes

One of the most remarkable things about Picasso was his way of being a man in his century. While Matisse lived in seclusion, between a room at the Hotel Regina in Nice and the pleasures of a few young ladies who painted his gouache papers, Picasso was everywhere! In newspapers, in the seaside resorts of the French Riviera, in the arms of Hollywood actresses, alongside Dominguin near the Plaza de Toros, near the slopes, in Grenoble, in 1968... Picasso was where the news was, because Picasso loved fame. Long before Warhol, he had understood that creating was not everything, but knowing how to sell oneself was an essential aspect of a painter's life.

Modern, that's one of the words that best defines Picasso. He was modern and remains so, 35 years after his passing. In a tango blending love, sex, and death, he led us where the real coexisted with the imaginary. He reinvented the gaze and showed us, proved to us that a painter could change our perception of reality.

Picasso: Nude Cushion with Towel
Available for sale on the website

Picasso: Lithograph 'The Taste of Happiness'
Available for sale on the website

From Pablo Picasso, a master in his century, we retain, in this nascent millennium, strong images such as those of 'Les Demoiselles' or 'Guernica,' simple art lover's pleasures like the sketches from the 50s and 60s where bodies are suggested in 5 pencil strokes, a journey of a European anchored in a culture he contributed to reshape, an image of a man who loved conquests... And if, at the turn of a canvas at the Grand Palais, you feel both the place the Spaniard occupied in the five centuries of painting that have just passed, and the flavors of years forever gone but that a photograph by Doisneau, a few lines from Hemingway, or a few seconds from a Clouseau film can revive in an instant, it's because the magic will have touched you too! The magic of Picasso... © Texts & Photos: Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES