Conceived by Yves Le Fur - director of the heritage and collections department of the Quai Branly museum - Jacques Chirac, and specialist in primitive arts -, the exhibition offers a resolutely new light on Picasso's work, not by seeking evidence of inspiration, as has sometimes been the case in the past, but relying on the artist's creative environment, then comparing his works to those of the first art creators.

Thus, in an immersive way, a first contextualization retraces, in the manner of a chronological survey, all the stages through which Picasso maintained relations with non-Western arts, well beyond the period of creation of the Demoiselles d'Avignon. in 1906 - 1907, but also, as his collection shows, throughout his life. Documents, letters, objects, photographs outline in a rigorous chronology what the artist has been able to admire, the circles of dealers and collectors he has worked with, the exhibitions visited and those for which he has lent his own collection of works. non-Western.

Like a clinch, the exhibition then brings together the extraordinary richness of Picasso's works with those, no less rich, of non-Western artists. This second approach, which occupies most of the exhibition spatially, is based more on an anthropology of art than on the observation of aesthetic relationships. It presents in three parts - Archetypes, Metamorphoses and That - the universes to which Pablo Picasso responded with plastic responses converging with those of the artists of first art.

“My purest emotions, I experienced them in a large forest in Spain, where, at sixteen, I retired to paint. My greatest artistic emotions, I felt them when suddenly appeared to me the sublime beauty of the sculptures executed by the anonymous artists of Africa. These works of a religious, passionate and rigorously logical, are what the human imagination has produced the most powerful and the most beautiful. I hasten to add that however, I hate exoticism. " Picasso / Apollinaire, Correspondences, Paris, Gallimard, 1992.

Pratical information

PRIMITIVE PICASSO
Exhibition from March 28 to July 23, 2017
Garden Gallery
#PicassoPrimitive

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog:
400 illustrations, 352 pages, € 49,90
Co-edition of the Quai Branly museum - Jacques Chirac / Flammarion

Duration:
Closed on Monday (except short school holidays, all areas combined)
Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday: 11:00 a.m. - 19:00 p.m.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday: 11 a.m. - 00 p.m.

access:
Metro: Alma-Marceau or Iéna (line 9), École Militaire (line 8) or Bir-Hakeim (line 6)
RER: Pont de l'Alma or Champ de Mars-Eiffel Tower (line C)
Bus: 42 (Eiffel Tower stop); 63, 80, 92 (Bosquet-Rapp judgment); 72 (Museum of Modern Art stop -
Palace of Tokyo)
Vélib ': quai Branly, 3 avenue Bosquet
Autolib ': 24 avenue d'Iéna, 1 avenue Marceau
Parking: 25 quai Branly

Ticketing :
Full price: € 10,00 - reduced price: € 7,00
Combined ticket (exhibition + collections):
Full price: € 11,00 - reduced price: € 9,00
Free for under 18s and European Union students up to 25

To know more : www.quaibranly.fr