Before the two became friends, Picasso had long been an inspiration for Giacometti, demonstrated by the several sketches and notebooks displayed in the Musée Picasso’s new exhibition ‘Picasso-Giacometti’. And while the pupil never quite became the master, this is arguably due to his moving ontoother things, gaining recognition on account of his bronze statues rather than his paintings.
Through sculptures, paintings and drawings, the exhibition explores the relationship between Giacometti and Picasso. From the pair’s many representations of love and violence to the common influence of distant cultures found in their respective works. The points of comparison between the two artists weren’t always entirely convincing but when it works, it works well; two works of art coming together in a great aesthetic explosion: the statuette of Giacometti, 'Man (Apollo)', a branch/ totem pole figure with broad shoulders, arouses the same curiosity as Picasso's 'Figure' while the juxtaposition between the sculptor’s ‘La femme qui marche I’ and Picasso’s ‘Grand nu au fauteuil rouge’ has an astonishing effect.
As such, the exhibition allows us to rediscover these works, to see the otherness in their aesthetic rather than their self-referential independence. The deformed bodies presented by Picasso and Giacometti – sometimes undulating, sometimes rigid – melt and twist into one another in a spectacle of shapes which bleeds into our imagination – leaving the museum, the outside world temporarily feels like a Giacometti-Picasso collaboration.
TRANSLATION: LEONIE CATER