The Picasso Museum offers an exhibition dedicated to the images that inspired the Spanish artist

This exhibition, which intends to introduce the visitor “into the visual culture of Picasso”, has just opened its doors in Paris.

What are the images that nourished Picasso? How did he use them in his work? This is what is explored from Tuesday June 11 in an exhibition entitled iconophagous Picasso at the Parisian museum dedicated to the artist. The establishment is also launching a digital portal, the first step in a study center dedicated to the icon of painting, born in 1881 in Malaga (Spain), and for whom France was the chosen homeland.

Through 87 works including 55 by the artist, the exhibition “analyzes the modernity of his conception of the image by exploring the artistic and extra-artistic sources of his work and their modes of appropriation“, explains to AFP Cécile Godefroy, head of the future Picasso study center and curator with Anne Monfort-Tanguy.

“Picasso will grow through a flood of new images and works that he will see live in all Parisian museums“, even if before this surge of images already, “he defies all academicisms“, she emphasizes.

The exhibition is designed in four parts devoted to the figures of the hero and the old masters, the voyeur and the nude, the minotaur and the musketeer. It shows the diversity of sources, with very prestigious loans of paintings by Poussin, Rembrandt, David, Delacroix, Goya and Matisse.

It also shows a “pileup“which constitutes the”Picasso’s iconographic repertoire, symptomatic of a new way of thinking about the image, freed from the artistic field and historical time, precursor of the current visual mosaic on social networks“, believes the commissioner.

Furthermore, the future study center dedicated to Picasso will be inaugurated in a private mansion located near the museum.by the end of the year, probably in the fall“, according to Cécile Debray, head of the Parisian national museum. Objective: “promote exchanges between researchers” and welcome artists in residence.

Its digital portal, launched on Monday, represents “an access point to all of the museum’s collections – works, archives, photographs, documentation, library – as well as new editorial content“such as editorial notices, podcasts or interviews,” she explains.

It will allow the public to consult, during the digitization and release of rights operations, the images and descriptions of the artist’s archives which have remained unknown and inaccessible to date. Notably 19,000 photographs and, within a few years, more than 200,000 private archive pieces, from the artist’s studios and entrusted to the State by the family since 1992, which have made the Parisian museum world famous .