The Echo of Picasso

Organised within the framework of the international celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and curated by Eric Troncy, The Echo of Picasso relates Picasso’s oeuvre to that of contemporary artists who, in one way or another, have made or are making its echo resound.

From the outset, Picasso’s work has ‘reverberated’ in the ears of several generations of artists, both during his lifetime and after his death, for all sorts of reasons. Every period has found new resonances in keeping with the ideas proposed by its artists. Those borne along by the logic of the twentieth-century avant-gardes have brought about stylistic developments inspired by those set in motion by Picasso, or have simply explored the possibilities offered by the representational strategies of Cubism with the clear ambition of confronting the fruits of Picasso’s exploration and creativity in order to eventually surpass them.

A number of these works from different periods carry the imprint of Picasso’s innovative techniques freed from stylistic constraints. These range from welded iron to painted bronze, and from collage to the use of everyday materials as supports or constitutive elements of an artwork. They also encompass ceramics, a technique which Picasso was one of the first to inscribe in the artistic language of the second half of the twentieth century.

‘For artists living at the same time as Picasso, it must have been a nightmare trying to keep up with a guy like him. Today we have the freedom of distance.’ (George Condo, 2006).

Today, with the hypothetical end of the avant-gardes, and all the more now that figurative painting seems to have provisionally retrieved its credentials, Picasso’s extraordinary formal inventiveness, formidable stylistic freedom, scant interest in convention and compulsive creativity loom large over contemporary artists. He is probably the only artist so frequently cited, interpreted, evoked, reprised, commented and celebrated in the works of his contemporary and later peers.

‘No matter what, sooner or later there is an inevitable Picasso epiphany in every artist’s life.’ (Marina Faust, 2023).