Art review: 'Picasso's Kitchen'

If the summer exhibition at the Picasso Museum does little to further our understanding of the 20th-century master, maybe it doesn’t really matter. As the introductory wall text at the entrance asks unapologetically: “An exhibition on Picasso’s kitchen and cooking? Why not?”

The fact is that there are many unexpected pleasures to be discovered in ‘Picasso’s Kitchen’. Some of the selected artworks may stretch the theme somewhat—a café exterior in Royan, or Picasso’s homage to Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), whose title is about food but whose content is about sex—but most of the works show Picasso in an unusually casual mode. We are invited to view him in his private life: eating, cooking, observing and, of course, painting food-related objects and environments. Many of the artworks come from the permanent collections of the Museu Picasso and from the Musée Picasso in Paris, which collaborated on the exhibition as part of its ‘Picasso Mediterranean’ initiative.

The opening galleries take the visitor to Els Quatre Gats on Carrer de Montsió at the turn of the 20th century. A teenage Picasso found his humble beginnings as a designer of the restaurant’s menus, where the art was usually more savoury than the food, and he famously held one of his first shows on its walls. Because Picasso and his entourage never threw anything away, the viewer is treated to all sorts of scrawls from the teenage artist’s years at art school in Barcelona. The first gallery ends with a beautifully simple still life of a blue glass with an orange flower (1902-03) from the museum’s permanent collection, which shows his maturity as a colourist at age 21. Four delightfully eccentric small sculptures follow in the next gallery, with the artist experimenting with different materials as divergent as painted tin, wood, a famous bronze of an absinthe glass with a real silver spoon (1914), and his version of a multi-faceted apple, sculpted in plaster (1909).

The unexpected pleasures come from stumbling upon little-known types of artworks from the fanatically prolific Picasso. Among my favourites were a cut-out paper cuttlefish with a goofy look on its face, installed next to a slightly surreal collage of a pear and a pipe, and two life-size humanoid assemblages made from kitchen utensils and gardening tools (Head of a Woman from 1929, and his 1935 Figure). Two small still life paintings from 1908 rival those of Picasso’s idol Cézanne in the sensuous rendering of surface textures of the fruit, where Picasso has uncharacteristically hidden all evidence of his brushwork in the pursuit of realistic illusion. In a tiny and colourful Spanish kitchen scene, meticulously rendered with an apparently very fine paint brush, Picasso has turned a domestic genre painting into a love letter covered with ‘Je t’aime’ written in rainbow colours. The actual heel of a desiccated baguette, pierced by a dried flower, represents the dearth of food during the war years in his poignant Flower, from 1941.

Although Picasso never successfully threw a clay pot on a wheel, he did redefine the ceramic genre with his painted and glazed plates, which are part sculpture, part utilitarian object. Some choice pieces made during his Fifties work in Vallauris (a gift from Jacqueline Picasso and one of the treasures of the museum) fill a gallery towards the end of the exhibition, and it is a pleasure to see them complemented with photographs, for instance, of the artist sucking the last of the flesh off a fish bone, and an accompanying story of how he then slathered it with wet clay to turn it into art.

The metaphor for Picasso’s hunger for life works well in this exhibition about craving, devouring, digesting and (in at least one case) eliminating the foods that nourish us. A Picasso-related installation by food-star Ferran Adrià also appears in the ground floor gallery devoted to contemporary art.

Museu Picasso. Carrer Montcada 15-23.