«But tell me, who are they,
these wanderers, these even a little
more fugitive than us […]».

Thus recite a few lines from the Fifth Duinese elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke, a cosmopolitan poet who is a spokesman for that inevitable sense of foreignness that creeps into all those who are strong enough to build and reinvent, accident after accident, their own identity. It is a theme that is universal in scope but also inherent to the life of the individual. In the interweaving of these two dimensions, fits the perspective adopted for Picasso lo straniero (Picasso the foreigner), on show at Palazzo Reale Milano until next February.

Installation view “Picasso lo straniero” © Succession Picasso by SIAE 2024, photo Vincenzo Bruno, courtesy Marsilio Arte

This Milan exhibition, organised by Marsilio Arte and based on Annie-Cohen Solal’s enlightening study, proposes a journey in search of the identity of an artist about whom everything has already been said but who nevertheless eludes all identification. The exhibition does not give the viewer what he wants – the heroic Picasso of the Demoiselles d’Avignon, for instance – but offers him what he does not expect: the labyrinth of the person’s identity. The exhibition path surprises and to the end does not reveal who Pablo is, because the only possible conclusion is that he, by his own choice, cannot be forced into a strict definition nor into a categorising identification document, always reductive if reassuring. Passports, immigration papers and denunciations fill some of the walls and accompany visitors through the vicissitudes of Picasso, the eternal Odysseus: the traveller whose name eschews all identity (oudeìs, nobody). He is, in fact, Spanish, French, a wanderer and a painter, sculptor and scene designer. The curatorship of the rooms causes disorientation, from their layout to the inclusion of audio tracks in Spanish and French with no written transposition. These elements reinforce the viewer’s sense of confusion, forcing him to feel like a stranger in his own home.

Pablo Picasso, “Plat aux trois visages”, Vallauris, 1956 Exposition © Succession Picasso by SIAE 2024, courtesy Marsilio Arte

A large reproduction of The Acrobats (1904) is the first visual clue to the main theme of the exhibition. The visitor is warned that he is coming into contact with the artefactual traces – paintings, sculptures and photographs – not of the great Picasso, a champion of art history, but of a man who had to and wanted to live in a world of “villages without a church”, as his comrade Apollinaire would have said. Denying exclusive belonging to a certain geopolitical territory (he even refuses French naturalisation), Picasso goes beyond the aut-aut between native and foreigner, affirming his own unique and uncategorisable self, with which he plays in the perennial ‘open’ condition of methec. The work Plat aux trois visages (1956), which opens the exhibition as its manifesto and closes it recursively being exhibited in the last room, perfectly renders the idea of an allegorical and playful identity, which Picasso moulds in his own art and thanks to it. His endless stylistic, iconographic and material experiments are proof of this.

Allestimento mostra “Picasso lo straniero” © Succession Picasso by SIAE 2024. Foto di Vincenzo Bruno, courtesy Marsilio Arte

It is no coincidence that the Venice Biennale, the manifesto of international contemporaneity, has also chosen Foreigners Everywhere as its title. The 2024 edition underlines the urgency of rethinking today the question of the foreigner, which intersects a variety of subjects, artists above all, labelled simply as ‘other’: queer, outsider, folk, indigenous. The exhibition at Palazzo Reale, starting from the concreteness of Picasso’s works, wants to awaken this same consciousness: to conceive of the other as an alter ego and at the same time to see oneself as someone else. Precisely by playing on the multiplicity of his faces and riding the political, identity and social turbulence from his time, Picasso managed to impose an aesthetic revolution. Being a subversive artist becomes for the mètoikos the only way to constantly reinvent himself. And if everything has indeed already been said about Picasso, all that remains is to see and be provoked by the play of identity that becomes oil on canvas, by the astonishment of the stranger that turns into flamboyant colour, by the malleability of experience that becomes decorative ceramics.

Ginevra Ventura

Info:

Picasso lo straniero (Picasso the foreigner)
20/09/2024 – 02/02/2025
Palazzo Reale
Piazza del Duomo, 12 – Milano
www.palazzorealemilano.it

Ginevra Ventura

Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.