[Visited 7 January 2024]
While Sophie Calle is often called a photographer, I’m interested in her because of her unabashed reliance on text — her bold assumption that we will read these lengthy narratives in a gallery environment. I tend to opt to experience her in full via her beautifully formatted books. But of course it’s not just the narratives. The narrative merely reflects the lived construct that she places herself in — crazy, obsessive, unethical, self-indulgent, self-revelatory constructs that both fascinate and kind of irk me — which I’m sure is her intention. So when I realised I could catch the very end of her take over of the Musée Picasso Paris, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his death, I was there.
Pablo Picasso, Portrait de Marie-Thérèse,
6 janvier 1937, huile sur toile, 100 × 81 cm, MP159 2022
Digital print, 141 × 141 cm
© Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris 2023, Collection of the artist
I’m still confused as to what the exhibition is called as there are a number of sections within sections — motives within motives. I think the overall exhibition, including her significant retrospective is called À toi de faire, ma mignonne which translates as “It’s your turn, sweetie” – ouch!.
Within this curatorial construct there is a suite of works called Picalso that takes up the ground floor. Here Calle displaces, or veils the maestro, her work about his work taking his space. (She has pity for the people coming to see his work and places three portraits in a small side room.*) A nice repatriation or redress, a redefinition of “master” and “genius”. Yet Calle’s approach is respectful and most of all satisfyingly conceptual and textual — the conceits so considered and revealing.
There’s an overriding theme connecting Calle’s and Picasso’s work of sight and not seeing, appearance and disappearance, presence and absence. Picasso talks of the painting that lies under the painting — Calle takes this literally covering his paintings but revealing them nonetheless.
In two rooms Calle shows large photographs of key works of Picasso roughly wrapped in brown paper. It looks like I wrapped them — and I am very bad present wrapper. (Recently as I was wrapping Christmas presents I realised I wrap presents like a dog would, trying to fold paper, stick the tape with ill-equipped snout and paws.) Poking out from the edge of each brown paper bundle we see a glimpse of the paintings title, enough to make it out. This is not meant to be a slight to Picasso — it is the reality that confronted Calle when she first made a site visit during the Covid lockdown. The precious paintings had been left on the wall but hastily wrapped for protection. She includes a number of his sculptures that end up looking like a cross between a Christo and a papier-mâché piñata.
Sophie Calle 2023
Pablo Picasso, La Chèvre, 1950
Bronze, tyvek paper
120,5 x 72 x 144 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
© Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris 2023 Photograph © Maxime Champion
Another room focuses on paintings that were missing, out on loan when she visited. She asked the guards and curators to describe them and then presents these texts on delicate semi-opaque veils that hang over the now returned images. The colours and shapes are just visible, under the descriptions and personal interpretations of the works.
She also deals with the absence of paintings due to theft. After the daring robbery of key artworks from the Paris Museum of Modern Art, including a small Picasso, Calle starts up a correspondence with the thief — the so-called Spiderman of Paris. (I find a documentary on him on French Netflix. He is rather proud of himself). She asks him why he chose these particular paintings: Still Life With Candlestick (1922) by Fernand Léger, Pastoral (1906) by Henri Matisse, Olive Tree near l’Estaque (1906) by Georges Braque, Woman with Fan (1919) by Amedeo Modigliani and Dove with Green Peas (1911) by Pablo Picasso. He does reply to her once and suggests that the Picasso wasn’t his favourite really but he just took what he liked. The paintings are still missing and an accomplice claims to have destroyed them, something the SpiderMan and many art lovers don’t believe, expecting them to turn up again one day. This work, like her Address Book project (1983) shows, her her boundary-less seeking of dialogue, and is a fitting memorial to the original artwork.
Calle approaches Picasso’s Guernica through layers of connections. She begins with a quote from the recent (and most excellent) book Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel highlighting the life and work of key women working with abstraction and abstract expressionism in New York from the 1950s onwards: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. It’s an astounding book for its detail, evocation of the era and absolutely vital foregrounding of these underestimated painters and their impact. Calle specifically cites the moment where the artist of the era come together to respond to Picasso’s Guernica, with Arshile Gorky suggesting they make a collaborative artwork (which never manifested). Calle’s response is to gather a collection of works from her home, both her own and those of other artists, and arrange them in the same scale and rough configuration, illustrating the layers of connections, aesthetics, admirations and inspirations in her work.
Opening the first floor is a story of Picasso’s related by Cocteau. He tells of a half blind man painting a castle according to the description his wife is giving him (seeing through her eyes). Picasso via Cocteau says “painting is a blind man’s job. He paints not what he sees, but how he feels about it, what he tells himself about what he has seen.”
On the ground floor, I had noticed a person with vision impairment (VIP) enjoying the textual descriptive works being read to him by a friend, and I think of how Calle’s textual process so far has been sympathetic to the practice of audio description which I’ve currently been exploring. In audio description you are not meant to add your own interpretation but simply, and systematically describe what you see. This allows the VIP the space for their interpretation. However in Calle’s works interpretation is actually part of the conceit of the work — it offers an interesting creative aspect to accessibility in this exhibition. It would be interesting to hear responses from VIPs.
Perhaps this is because Calle, like Picasso has been considering blindness in her work for many years. The first floor is mainly dedicated to her Blind series in which she worked with people from around the world who have a visual impairment asking them to describe particular things. With people who had never had visual sight she asked them to describe their image of beauty. With people who have lost their sight suddenly she ask them to describe of the last thing they saw before they went blind. The profoundly beautiful texts are are accompanied by equally profound portraits. In another series she films VIPs who have never seen the sea, and so we watch them listening to it. These are deeply moving meditations and mediations, that show Calle’s ability not to just show and tell but to listen and commune.
Concluding this section is the display of a letter from a French society for the blind asking Picasso to donate one of his paintings that depicted a blind man. The painting was be sold with the proceeds going towards a “house of closed eyes”, a refuge for VIPs. There is no evidence of Picasso’s response to this request and so Calle has responded by organising with the estate of Picasso to sell a painting and fulfil this request. There is not much fuss made of this amazing act/artwork but it confirms that despite the image of Calle that we perceive from much of her work as self-involved, she has a deeply compassionate side.
The final two floors of the exhibition are occupied by a retrospective of Calle’s work that takes various forms. Sparked by the story of Picasso’s reticence to make a will, Calle, who “has no children by choice” — a terrible media bi-line that has been written about her and which she uses to her own devices at several points in the exhibition — sets about to inventory her estate before her death. One room is full of the curious objects and artworks that are catalogued for sale after her demise.
Death, particularly of her parents is also a key theme in her works and there is a room dedicated to the complex relationships she had with her parents. Finally there is a full catalogue of both her completed works — depicted as shelf housing a series of crime novels bearing the works’ titles — and an exhaustive display of all the pieces she has thought of, begun and never finished including her reasons why. This is an astounding and exhausting account that is even more revealing of the artists oeuvre, dedication and life as art, than the works she has completed.
So extensive is the exhibition I don’t quite know where to put this work, although it is posisbly my favourite. Calle is not just willing to veil Picasso’s works, she also veils her own. In Parce-que or Because, she has felt curtains with concise texts on them. These all start with “Because” and explain the reason she decided to take a photograph. After you read the text, you lift the curtain to see the image. Here we see her visual and conceptual mind in action with the result often humorous, incisive and cutting: a photo of a grave that says Father – Mother 2018 behind a veil that says “Because revenge is a dish best served cold”.
This vitriol prompts me to circle back to beginning of the exhibition which shows Calle’s first framed work — an endearing and wonderfully fanciful sketch made when she was around six featuring cowboys and floating girls. This is playful innocence is juxtaposed by a text describing a scathing comment from her mother when she saw Calle’s work in the Museum of Modern Art in New York — “You really fooled them”.
But Calle is as much the real deal as you can get. Placing herself, for better or worse, in the centre of her work, she manages to communicate so much about the world beyond her. While she is at the centre, her work is essentially dialogic, conducting conversations with those she actually speaks with as part of her processes, and also with other artists and the broader world, in which she engages in full.
And on seeing this exhibition, the first I see in my time in Paris, I too am more than full. Can I hold any more?
* If you really want to see his work there is a a small collection shown in the basement but I suspect, in reality a lot of it is out on loan around the world. At least some of it is in the Gertrude and Picasso exhibition at the Musée de Luxembourg. (See my writing on this here)
Sophie Calle: À toi de faire, ma mignonne.
Musée national Picasso-Paris
3/10/2023-7/1/2024
https://www.museepicassoparis.fr/fr/toi-de-faire-ma-mignonne
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