M+’s major Picasso exhibition puts 60 works of the father of Cubism in dialogue with Asian artists
There’s a natural challenge for a museum that is dedicated to one artist who has now been dead for half a century, in spite of his worldwide fame, to [answer] the question of relevance,” says Doryun Chong, the artistic director and chief curator of M+.
The artist in question is Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), one of the founders of Cubism and a giant of the modern art world. This month, M+ and Musée National Picasso-Paris, with support from the French May arts festival, are jointly organising The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia—A Conversation, an exhibition that puts together more than 60 works by the Spaniard and a further 80 by around 20 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists, taken from the Hong Kong institution’s M+ Collections. Running from March 15 to July 13, the show marks the first time a museum collection in Asia has been presented alongside pieces from the Paris museum.
Portrait of Dora Maar (1937) by Picasso (Image: courtesy of Succession Picasso, Grand Palais Rmn, Musée national Picasso-Paris and Mathieu Rabeau)
The M+ team had Picasso on their exhibition wish list even before the Hong Kong visual culture museum opened in 2021. “A big part of the curatorial work and institutional decision on our programming is to make sure that it covers a spectrum: on one hand, there is the more academic, esoteric and not so well-known to the public [work]; on the other, we show important names that the public already know or feel more comfortable with, such as [Japanese artist Yayoi] Kusama or [Chinese American architect] IM Pei,” Chong says. “So it was really not a big leap to think of Picasso as one of those names to be shown in the first few years of the museum’s operations.”
Large Still Life with Pedestal Table (1931) by Picasso (Image: courtesy of Succession Picasso, Grand Palais Rmn, Musée national Picasso-Paris and Adrien Diderjean)
About three years ago, M+, with an introduction by French May, approached Musée National Picasso-Paris, which houses more than 5,000 works by Picasso, including never-before-exhibited pieces from the 1930s that were directly taken from the artist’s studio after his death. The French institution “could also see from their side that the opportunity to collaborate with the brand new kind of museum would be a great opportunity to continue to build the contemporary relevance of Picasso,” says Chong.
More than sixty masterpieces by Picasso will be on loan from Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP), which holds the largest and most significant repository of Picasso’s works in the world. They will be placed in conversation with around 130 pieces from the M+ Collections by thirty Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the early twentieth century to the present.
The exhibition is on until July 13, 2025.
