Palais Princier tours: Pablo Picasso and antiquity

At the time, art academies advocated the imitation of classicism as a coherent style, encouraging students to conform to what they saw as a model of formal clarity, visual harmony and compositional balance. The aim was to convey a taste for the rigor and ideological purity considered to be the prerogative of Greek and Roman civilizations.

A vision of classical antiquity, as widespread as it was distorted and highly idealized, was the basis on which the foundations of modern Western culture were laid. When, in 1917, as the First World War ravaged Europe, Picasso visited the archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as the ancient cities of Naples and Rome, he was confronted with aspects of the art of Greco-Roman antiquity that his academic training had largely overlooked: colorful murals, shattered sculptures, eroded surfaces and buried buildings appeared in these once mighty cities, which he now saw abandoned. The spectacle of these ruins calls into question the regularity and presumed impermeability of classical art, leading Picasso to reconsider this heritage in terms of rupture rather than integrity.

This exhibition suggests that Picasso's privileged encounter with the remains of the Greco-Roman past in Italian archaeological sites enabled him to approach classical antiquity through notions of erasure, resilience and recovery in the face of environmental, social and political change. Following his travels in Italy, Picasso frequently referred to the art of ancient Greece and Rome, both by adopting classically inspired styles and by depicting mythological scenes, isolated limbs evoking Greco-Roman statuary or eroded, sedimented surfaces, like ancient wall frescoes. In this way, Picasso presented the iconographic heritage of classicism as a collection of fragmented images demanding not only to be rediscovered and deciphered, but also revisited and reinvented.

Organized in Monaco's Palais Princier, alongside recently restored 16th-century frescoes, the exhibition focuses on a selection from the collection of the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA), as well as a painting from the Nahmad Collection. "Pablo Picasso et l'Antiquité" provides a stage for Picasso's thoughts on the survival, legibility and malleability of ancient artifacts, beyond the jolts of history and the degradation of objects. The exhibition explores the themes of ruin and decline, but also those of resilience and renewal. It thus resonates with the way in which Picasso, from the immediate aftermath of his Italian voyage to his Mediterranean residences in the 1940s and 1950s, approached the legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity through a variety of media. Thus, "Pablo Picasso et l'Antiquité" highlights the radical ways in which the artist rethought the legacy of the classical world through subject, style and materials, rejecting the dogmatism and idealized vision of the academic tradition.

"Picasso et l'Antiquité" is an exhibition organized by the Fundación Almine y Bernard RuizPicasso, curated by Francesca Ferrari and designed by Cécile Degos. It is part of the international collaboration "Célébration Picasso 1973-2023" marking the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso's death.

© Photo : Hugard & Vanoverschelde