More than 50 years after his death, the 20th century’s most celebrated, prolific and daring artist continues to enchant and enrage us. This month, one of the most ambitious Picasso exhibitions in recent years opens at M+ Hong Kong’s new mega gallery. Picasso for Asia – A Conversation features more than 60 works, most on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris – including some that have never travelled before – alongside work by Asian and Asian diaspora artists born between the 1860s and the 1990s. You might think there would be nothing left to say about Picasso. What sets this show apart is its breadth and rigour in revealing new complexities in the work of an artist who often makes western galleries and museums merely anxious.
The aim of the “conversation” format with Asian artists,, says co-curator Doryun Chong, is to show “how artists relate to and critique one another across time and cultures”. But it is never easy to compete for attention with Picasso, who often outdoes the others on show in skill and nuance. Picasso’s sophisticated cubist works, including Woman’s Head (1909) on loan from Museo Sofia in Madrid, are hung alongside Gunpowder Drawing No 8-A5, a 1988 piece by Cai Guo-Qiang for which the Fujian artist literally blew up the canvas.
Many more major pieces span his long life: the loving, stripped-down oil portrait of his father, painted in 1895 when Picasso was 16. Most affecting are three from the artist’s final years: Couple (1970-71), The Old Man (1970) and The Matador (1970) – all painted with such urgency and scale he seems to be trying to outrun death. The show ends with a delightful installation that allows us to paint along with an elderly Picasso on digital screens as he draws flowers and animals with brief brushstrokes in films running on huge screens.
The star of this show reveals itself at the end. In Massacre in Korea, a painting the quick-handed Picasso started and finished in a single day in January 1951, an armoured, masked firing squad takes aim at a group of naked women and children. All Picasso’s attention is on the victims’ faces and how each responds in startlingly different ways: anguished, serene, bewildered, detached. Like Guernica, this is far from propaganda; here, at least, Picasso treats women subjected to violence as complex, sympathetic and deeply human.
Picasso, then 69, painted his only work on an Asian theme from his home in France – a scene from a proxy war between superpowers that had broken out seven months earlier, when the armies of Soviet-backed North Korea invaded the US-backed South Korea. By then, Picasso was a socialist, anti-war and anti-Fascist.
Contrast that Picasso with the man reflected in a room elsewhere, in which the curators deal with Picasso’s misogyny and sometimes violent treatment of the women with whom he was involved. Here, Picasso’s portraits of Maris-Thérèse Walter, Dora Marr, Nusch Eluard and what is likely a sculptural portrait of Françoise Gilot are positioned opposite a film by British-Asian artist Nalini Malani, about a woman murdered by her lover who comes back to life to clean up the bloody mess.
“We know now about his violent temper and so we say it clearly,” says Chong. But Chong adds that Picasso is less divisive in Hong Kong, where audiences are “not as familiar” with his work. (Chong says he tested the room’s format with young women on the gallery’s staff.)
Making the point and moving on is one way to deal with Picasso’s misogyny – albeit briefly. But at least Chong and co-curator Francois Dareau credit us with the agency to absorb Picasso’s contradictions.
Unlike other recent, well-publicised Picasso exhibitions, most recently It’s Pablo-matic, an embarrassingly overwrought and overbearing 2023 show at the Brooklyn Museum curated by the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, with a title that one critic wrote was “so silly I can’t even type it”.
Picasso’s misogyny is indisputable, and this show will likely enrage some people. But in a febrile debate, it’s encouraging to find a cool-headed curatorial approach to the artist’s faults and contradictions, and curators with the confidence to trust an audience to think critically – for themselves.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia – A Conversation is at M+, Hong Kong until July 13; mplus.org.hk/en