Emmanuel Guigon: ways of seeing Picasso

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mmanuel Guigon (Besançon, 1959) took over the direction of the Museu Picasso in February 2017 and a few months later applied his way of seeing cultural management. Lean, dynamic, and an engaging conversationalist, this doctor in Contemporary Art History from the Sorbonne has changed the autopilot for rudder blows that expand the Picassian geographies. "We must put an end to the idea that this is a museum for tourists; we must also attract people from here. And that is achieved with attractive and transversal temporary exhibitions." The first decision: extend hours and open on Mondays during the summer months. Result: 2,500 more people every Monday. The Monday opening will be definitively applied between March 1 and September 30, 2018, accompanied by a pulsating exhibition rhythm.

Recently, the museum on Montcada Street has exceeded 100,000 visitors compared to 2016, with four simultaneous temporary exhibitions: "1917. Picasso in Barcelona," "The Shared Studio of Picasso, Fín, Vilató and Xavier," "Lucien Clergue: Twenty-Seven Encounters with Picasso," and "Arthur Cravan. Maintenant?".

In 1917, Barcelona was enriched thanks to Spanish neutrality in the First World War. Patrons toasted with champagne. And Picasso came here with his first wife, Olga Khokhlova. He stayed for six months, from June to November, accompanying the debut of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and enjoying the sparkling bustle. Guigon shows us the photos that immortalized the reunion of the man from Malaga with his adopted city: on Tibidabo, on Las Ramblas, overlooking Colón promenade. A bill from the Gran Hotel Balneario Oriental Miramar in Coma-ruga evokes a beach getaway on July 14 a century ago. It is 25.75 pesetas broken down into the following concepts: 5 for the transfer by tartana, 12 for that day's accommodation at the hotel, and 8.75 for extraordinary expenses.

After surveying the Barcelona canvases of that 1917 (the Colón promenade, Olga with a mantilla in her armchair and the well-known Harlequin) we confirm the "Guigonian" philosophy on what a museum should be in the 21st century: "In addition to preserving heritage, restoring and incorporating works, it must enhance its scientific function: collaborate with universities on doctoral theses and studies, strengthen the research center. Work, through self-created programs: in 2018 we will launch the Quaderns Picasso. Propose a radical dialogue with 21st-century culture regarding Picasso: about him or against him." And all this without forgetting the openness to new segments of the public: "The museum must become a local cultural actor, and not just a place to visit," insists the director.

Guigon comes from a cultured family, between France and Switzerland. In his house there was a good library and while he became fond of art, literature and poetry, his father played records by Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. He admired his first Picasso painting at only ten years old in the exhibition at the papal palace in Avignon. Three lustrums later (around 1985, already with a doctorate), he lived a year and a half in Barcelona and walked Montcada street more than once, seasoning his passion for artistic avant-gardes with the wise annotations of Rafael Santos Torroella and J. V. Foix or the immersion in the work of Torres García. More than a Picassian, Guigon confesses to being a Bretonian: "As a result of my studies on the art of assemblage and collage, the encounter with Picasso was inevitable: I wrote a history of collage in Spain and, of course, he was there," he comments.

Guigon settles thoughtfully into a wicker chair in front of the Cubist Las Meninas. Another anniversary: sixty years have passed since the fascinating Velázquez exploration displayed in 58 pieces: "Upon the death of his friend Sabartés, Picasso donated it to Barcelona for his own museum," he points out. We ask ourselves a tricky question. In our memory, John Berger's ruthless comment in The Success and Failure of Picasso about the painting: "He empties it of its own content and then is unable to find any other for his own. It remains a technical exercise. If there is any implicit fury or passion, it will be that of the artist condemned to paint without having anything to say…".

Picasso was fascinated by boxing: his pugilistic poses in some photos and the preserved fight tickets demonstrate this.

As a programmatic theory, it always sounds good, but any practical examples? 2018 will be the first 100% Guigon year at the helm of the museum. For example, an exhibition about Picasso and cooking with a multidisciplinary vocation: "The painter's relationship with gastronomy has never been addressed, a subject that runs through all his work since he composed the menu for Els Quatre Gats. Picasso ate little and worked a lot. He was interested in the kitchen as a space. He painted cubist still lifes like Le Bouilloncube, kitchen utensils, spoke of food in texts that anticipated Ionesco or Beckett, illustrated Apollinaire's Alcools, captured an erotic relationship with food, participated in tribute dinners to his friends, drew on playing cards in the brasserie Le Catalan…"

Which piece would you keep if you had to flee the museum in a panic? Guigon sketches the gesture of someone who is not surprised. "If they are not destroyed, which is beyond remedy, works of art never disappear, they always end up somewhere because they have economic value," he warns. "I would keep a formative painting, Science and Charity; that Barcelona oil painting from 1897 will be restored in Paris next year and will have a study, the sketches of the work, and the photographs published by Paris Match in the late sixties."

In another of the museum's rooms, we will encounter Arthur Cravan, that boxer poet who sought adventure in the ring and claimed to be Oscar Wilde's nephew. Cravan fought against Jack Johnson on April 23, 1916, and tasted the canvas in the sixth round. Picasso was fascinated by boxing: his pugilistic poses in some photos and the preserved fight tickets demonstrate this. Guigon curated this exhibition to tell us that boxing, with its doses of struggle, spectacle, strength, and courage, constituted for Picasso a "metaphor for creation." Seconds out! We imagine the painter in short shorts; the studio as a ring: each brushstroke, a round; each work, a fight. "May inspiration find us working," they say he said.