This week I’ll be writing to you from Paris (France, not Texas). Expect some terrible clichés and excessive use of French words. Like cliché.
This piece originally appeared here on New York Cartoons over 2 years ago. I thought you might enjoy it in case you didn’t catch it the first time ‘round. Bonsoir!
~ J.
May 7, 2024
Musée Picasso, Paris
A loud pop could be heard from the rooftops surrounding the balcony café.
My prefrontal cortex had given up and decided to explode. I stared into the middle distance as I chewed away on a lukewarm quiche Lorraine, pondering Picasso.
It was Tuesday. I’d eked out precisely half an afternoon —a halfternoon, if you don’t mind— to slink away from my book deadline and do something interesting. The sun was finally out, so I took a very sweaty jog along the Seine and back through the Tuileries, followed by a visit to the Musée Picasso; My first time. Don’t ask me why it took me so long.
“I'm not really that interested in the fidelity of appearances. I'd rather draw my idea of a bird than what a bird actually looks like.”
I know, right? The balls on this guy! This quote doesn’t belong to Picasso, though: it was the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, the indispensable Bill Watterson, in his exploration of process on his most recent book project.
I bring it up because it echoed throughout my cavernous skull every time I ascended another staircase. A puzzle piece clicked into place in each room, and now I can’t see anything the same way again.
I have Christoph Niemann’s famous ‘Abstract-O-Meter’ pinned above my drawing board in my studio, but it never really clicked until now. If you’ll afford me one last exasperated analogy— it’s like someone just handed me glasses with a new prescription. (Ok that’s probably not the last one. Sorry.)
Needless to say, you’re going to see some weird shit from me in these coming months, dear reader.
Let’s take a beat.
Pablo Picasso. The man, the myth, the inventor of Cubism. A pioneer in Surrealism, and arguably the most renowned, the most viewed, the most studied, as well as the most controversial artist of the 20th century. He has several museums dedicated to his work. The one in Paris is excellent. It is located in the Hôtel Salé in the Marais district.
My favourite thing about him was his constant ability to reinvent himself;
To experiment and explore new ways of representing reality throughout his art. As the museum puts it: Paintings, sculptures, ceramics, drawings, and prints from all his various periods testify to the breadth of these explorations.
I spent three hours dragging my jaw along the tiles, each room presenting the next stage of the evolution of the artist. It’s all very carefully curated to unravel as you ascend the building to the attic.
Everything I’d come to understand about building a lens through which to interpret the things I see through words, lines, shapes, even sound— it all kind of started to take shape. This is something basic that I’ve known all along; it just all finally became something very clear as the hours passed. It took gazing into dozens of Picassos to get there, but I got there: It’s a nice feeling, but also overwhelming. (and I didn’t even drop acid!)
It wasn’t just Picasso on display. There were works by Renoir and by Picabia, and other artists. There were paintings, sculptures, mixed media pieces, scribblings, sketches, poems— a smorgasbord of tangible, wildly inventive art across creative lifetimes.
One of my favourite rooms resembled a real-world Noted post: a small, darkened room hidden to the side, with Picasso’s mad scrawlings, poetry, and notes on various surfaces. Some of the work looked like it was falling out of him. Other pages looked like they were being extracted with all the grace of a gallstone.
