Picasso and Paper

This month, Picasso and Paper opens to CMA visitors, featuring nearly 300 works that allow visitors to see the iconic Spanish artist in a new way—through the framework of his lifelong engagement and experimentation with paper. The exhibition offers a chronological overview of Pablo Picasso’s career—which spanned nearly eight decades—through the lens of his deep interest in the material. 

Picasso was incredibly prolific with traditional techniques that used paper, and he produced thousands of prints and drawings. Lesser known within his artistic practice, however, are innovative and sometimes sculptural works made from cut paper. Featured prominently in the CMA’s exhibition, these works span paper cutouts that the artist made as a young boy to his most revolutionary Cubist collages and intimate torn, or even burned, shapes created for his closest friends. Especially when seen alongside Picasso’s prints and drawings in more familiar media, these artworks offer an opportunity to see the artist at his most radical.

Picasso and Paper opens with two such unusual and perhaps surprising works: paper cutouts of a dove and a dog created by Picasso at the age of only about nine. As a young man, Picasso was encouraged by his father—himself an art instructor—to pursue skill in drawing, which he demonstrated early on. Although Picasso quickly learned to sketch from plaster casts and models, his early bird cutout clearly suggests that rethinking what art could be was a driving force for his work. The artist’s father was an avid collector and painter of doves, and so the act of representing this subject experimentally rather than traditionally formed a decisive break from his training. Rather than sketching the bird, Picasso cut its shape from a sheet of brown paper using the spare forms that would later become a hallmark of his art, leaving only the dot of an eye and the curve of a wing as details.

As Picasso developed as an artist over the following decades, he continued to think of paper three dimensionally. Around 1907, he began to conceive of Cubism, a movement that reconsidered space and perception by reducing the world around him to geometric planes, or cubes. After spending several years creating such works through drawing and painting, around 1912, Picasso and his collaborator, artist Georges Braque, were drawn to collage—a technique that involves combining various materials on paper, usually with paste or other adhesive. Works such as Violin from 1912 present objects through an assemblage of cut forms, each contributing to the overall design. Endlessly fascinated with new and varied types of paper, Picasso used traditional artist’s materials but also a square of mass-produced wallpaper and a wedge of newspaper covered with text.

Later the same year, Picasso explored the idea of sculpting with paper in works such as Guitar. No longer content to assemble the components of a musical instrument directly onto a sheet, he built a three-dimensional object from cut cardboard and paper, adding painted details and real strings. Describing such works, Picasso proclaimed his desire “to show that different materials could enter into the composition to become . . . a reality in competition with nature.” Rather than striving to depict a subject as realistically as possible, as artists had done for centuries before him, Picasso aimed to deconstruct it in physical space. 

These concerns lasted far beyond Picasso’s concentrated period of Cubist art making. In 1937, he created one of his most monumental works, Women at Their Toilette, using cut and assembled papers. Abandoning the traditional practice of drawing on paper, Picasso built an image directly from pieces of paper, carefully selecting complementary tones and cutting shapes that together form an evocative composition. The work presents the artist’s wife, ballet dancer Olga Khoklova, at left, her poised body composed from cut-wallpaper forms. While she faces an arrangement of cut-paper flowers, her arms—also silhouetted from various papers—reach behind her toward Picasso’s two other romantic partners at the time, photographer Dora Maar and artist’s model Marie-Thérèse Walter. The bodies are formed from carefully combined large and small shapes in a technique that amounts to drawing with paper.

While the large scale and complex layering of Women at Their Toilette make it easy to see this piece as the pinnacle of Picasso’s work with cut and sculpted paper, the artist continued to prolifically employ the technique throughout the following years. Living in Paris during the Second World War, Picasso created shapes—ranging from whimsical faces to somber skulls—by cutting, scratching, tearing, and burning napkins and tablecloths, materials readily available during a time marked by its limited resources. One example from 1943 depicts a bichon frisé and was meant to comfort Picasso’s partner, Maar, following the death of her cherished lapdog. Throughout the 1950s, he collaborated with a young photographer, André Villers, to create experimental photographs from paper cutouts. Villers overlaid Picasso’s shaped papers on his own negatives while they were exposed so that the resulting picture appeared in the form of the cutout. Picasso so favored these experiments that he published a series of about 30 in 1962.  

Such works are just a few of many examples on view in Picasso and Paper that reveal the artist’s revolutionary approach to what was both a basis from which he could reconsider what art could be and a driving force for new discoveries. Although his skills as a draftsman remained constant throughout his career, so too did the appeal of paper as a material. Readily and reliably available, paper could be easily manipulated with scissors or even Picasso’s own hands to reconstruct the world around him—experiments that are foregrounded for the first time throughout the galleries of the CMA’s groundbreaking exhibition.