Supported by unprecedented research and the presentation of works by major Arab artists never presented in Europe, the exhibition Picasso and the Arab Avant-Gardes highlights the fruitful dialogue between the Spanish master and the modern Arabs.
In March 2022, the 60-year anniversary of the Evian agreements will put the Algerian question back in the foreground. In December 1961, Picasso made a portrait of Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian separatist imprisoned and tortured, defended by Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir. Born from this precise fact, Picasso and the Arab avant-gardes endeavoured to present Picasso’s much broader relationship with Arab artists from the 1940s to the 1980s through the precise face-to-face paintings, graphic and ceramic works by Picasso from the Musée national Picasso-Paris and key works by Arab artists from private collections in the Middle East.
Certainly Picasso, who travelled little, never went to the Arab world. His works, however, acted as a catalyst for artists who sought to bring out national art backed by the latest achievements of international modern art.
In 1938, the Manifesto Vive l'Art Dégénéré signed by the Egyptian surrealists of the Group Art and Liberty reproduced in Guernica header. Picasso is still at the centre of the Baghdad Group Manifesto of 1951.
During the second half of the 20th century, the history of Arab countries was marked by many upheavals on the political and aesthetic scene, relayed by artists. Like the Picasso of Guernica in 1937 or the Massacres in Korea in 1954, they respond to current events and tragedies by their committed painting by claiming the moral example of the Spanish master.
Described by Apollinaire as early as 1905 as «rhythmically Arabic», but above all engaged in the communist galaxy, Picasso represented for the Arab avant-gardes the promise of a universal art without geographical (east/west), temporal (past/present) or stylistic hierarchy (naive art/learned art).
Beyond the formal dialogue reflected in the construction of faces and spaces by facets, it is through the prism of common interests for the primary arts, the pacifism and anticolonialism that the exhibition will question an attraction presented by many of the fathers of Iraqi, Lebanese, Syrian, Algerian or Egyptian modernity such as Jawad Selim, Aref El Rayess, Idham Ismaïl, Mohammed Khadda, Samir Rafi. The exhibition will also examine the intimate relationship of Picasso, born in Malaga to the arts of Islam.
This exhibition event about never cleared redraws a history of mirror art in which the Arab avant-gardes regain the place due to them. Initiated by the Institut du monde arabe-Tourcoing, in collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris, the exhibition will find its continuation in the walls of the IMA (Paris) in 2024.
Police station
Mario Choueiry, Project Manager at IMA (Paris)
Françoise Cohen, Director of IMA-Tourcoing
Exhibition organized in collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris
In partnership with the Institut du monde arabe-Paris