Quiche Lorraine on Pablo's Patio

An unforgettable halfternoon of wonder at the Picasso Museum in Paris.

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.

Musée Picasso is located in the Hôtel Salé in the Marais district and features three main floors where visitors can explore Picasso's works and related exhibitions. The building itself, an impressive example of 17th-century architecture, also includes a basement level used for additional exhibition space and bodies for those who ‘literally died’.

My favorite 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!)

As @Linescapes.Drawing puts it very eloquently… (Source)

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.

📖 The Poetry Nook

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.

🐑 Man with Lamb

There’s a wooden attic space dedicated to Picasso’s 1943 piece, ‘Man with a Lamb’. He designed it while he was living in Nazi-occupied Paris and insisted that he intended no symbolism or message. It’s hard not to find one though. Lamb looks fucking uncomfortable.

I prefer the rough sketch to the finished sculpture. Glad he captured the testicles. Well done, Pablo.

At one point I was leering at the above exploratory sketch when I couldn’t help but overhear a couple having a hushed, deeply intellectual exchange:

I had to check if it wasn’t Karl Pilkington

At this point, I thought it might be best to leave the room and let the poor man in green have a little conniption under the pitched roof. I slunk into the next room to find a woman on her phone before of one of Henri Matisse's masterpieces from Picasso's personal collection, 'Nature morte aux oranges’. I assumed she was just looking for her camera app to take a photo, but when I got closer I saw she was doing the Wordle.

(Maybe that day’s word was ‘Henri’.)

Once you get to the room of portraits of his muse and lover, Dora Maar, it’s game over. You can just sit there looking at all these variations for hours, finding new things in each one from wherever you’re standing.

An old woman was sitting on the bench when I walked in. An old man eventually waddled in and joined her. They both just sat there and looked in absolute silence before, after about five minutes, the old man let out a spontaneous laugh. Couldn’t tell you why. Nothing happened.

So, here I was. Meditating on Matisse with a mouthful of quiche.

Eventually, the security guard came over and said something to me in French. I thought he was asking if I was ok, but it turns out he just wanted to borrow a chair. As he walked away, he held up his watch and said “Closing soon!”

I threw my scraps in the bin and did one last lap of the floors, this time with sketchbook in hand. I quickly took a scribble of a mask, and a couple of sculptures before descending to the gift shop, where an unexpected gift awaited.

As the doors closed, I snatched up a couple of overpriced sketchbooks and a tin of Faber Castell watercolour pencils and took my place in line. I looked ahead to the cashier’s window and let out my own spontaneous laugh.

The kid behind the counter looked like fucking Salvador Dali, except the only thing melting was my brain. I couldn’t stop grinning at him. He didn’t seem amused at my guffaws.

I sketched him in the courtyard as the doors closed behind me.

I had to photoshop this photo because the photo I took on site was blurry because a French man was yelling at me to move off the sidewalk.