Frankly, you wouldn’t have thought of… African masks Fang, the antiquity of the minotaurs, the circus acrobats, Goya, yes, of course, but the comic strip in the influences of the master ? No, frankly, we had not thought of that ! Though : Picasso had he not imagined, from 1903, the adventures glorious of his friend, the poet Max Jacob in the form of a board of seven squares ? Better : his first work as a politically engaged, started just before Guernica in January 1937, the Dream and Lie of Franco, was it not, clearly, a comic strip in eighteen boxes, as if the artist wanted to handle the sense of burlesque (the old tyrant, is portrayed as a sort of big sea anemone, the mustache) and the efficiency narrative of this popular medium in order to better hit the public ?
Crazy ” Spirou “. Picasso and the db : a connection to be successful, therefore, and a history of wildly romantic. It starts at the very beginning of the Twentieth century, when the writer and art collector Gertrude Stein introduced him to the best of the american comic, the Katzenjammer Kids to Little Jimmy. Picasso loved so much, it is said, of the adventures of this last that he was send to Gosol, the catalan village where he lived in August 1906. The story continues with how the Malagan – we discovered crazy Spirou and nickel plated Feet ! – has not ceased to absorb in his art, the codes of the BD. Up to become a real character for the boards of the other, especially in Gotlib, Clément Oubrerie, or in Art Spiegelman (Pulitzer Prize with Maus and who is a witness in this out-of-series outstanding). In Milo Manara also, the master of erotica Italian, who was devoted to Picasso a story called blue Period (of which we give drawings) and says, excited : “When I see a woman of Picasso cry, I cry too ! “It should be said that with its marinière, her big eyes fascinating, her features carved by the mediterranean sun, immediately recognizable, its formulas and shock his appetite for the minotaur, he does everything to become, the hero of the COMIC ! In an echo of his readings of youth ?
Event. It is therefore a sacred history that you offer these 100 pages, richly illustrated, full of works iconic of the master and the other almost unknown, upstream of the exhibition which will open at the Picasso museum on the 24th of march and promises to be a major event. Its president, Laurent Le Bon, who was the curator of the exhibition “Hergé” at the Centre Pompidou, not sulks not its fun : “We found in his library numbers of the 1930’s to The Swankiest – the journal that published The nickel plated Feet – or more copies of the New Yorker. Picasso looks at both the side of the Louvre and the Medrano circus, he reads Mallarmé and the comic strip. “Through this out-of-series designed with the commissioners of the exhibition, The Point invites you to a unique journey and shimmering in the visual culture of an artist who drew his inspiration wherever he appeared, dynamitant hierarchies to better subvert all norms, all forms. The mark of geniuses§
” Picasso and the comic book “, available from newsagents for eight weeks and on the shop lepoint.fr (100 p. 9,90 €). “Picasso and the comic strip,” the exhibition, at the Musée national Picasso, Paris, until January 3, 2021.
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Art Spiegelman : “My first encounter with Picasso’s” Gertrude Stein, the American initiated a Picasso in the cartoon Laurent Le Bon : “Picasso, influenced by the COMIC ! “When Picasso was at war with a comic book