Sophie Calle, famous for her storytelling artworks and performances, carries her belongings to Picasso Museum for her new show. Her new show titled A toi de faire, ma mignone (It is up to You My Darling), opens with Calle’s very first ink drawing; it’s an apt connection: after her father framed it, her mother proudly began saying that there was a Picasso in the family. Opposite it hangs another Calle work, a reconstruction of a 1928 Picasso painting, Head, that was stolen from the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago in 1994 and was estimated to be worth $500,000 at the time. Calle created her Head based on the memories of people who had actually seen it.
The following rooms feature photographs that Calle took of about 20 Picasso masterpieces wrapped in brown paper, awaiting to be shipped out of the museum. Among them are the 1937 painting Portrait de Marie-Thérèse and the 1950 sculpture La Chèvre. When asked about her selection, Calle said she simply shot what was within reach. Calle displays correspondence with the man who was arrested for stealing five masterpieces from the Musée d’Art moderne de Paris in 2010, including Picasso’s Le Pigeon aux petits pois (1911). In the letter, the culprit admits to not being a Picasso fan. For Calle, their interaction is simply a dead end. The letter features in the show, partially redacted for reasons that aren’t totally obvious to the viewer. (The Musée Picasso told ARTnews that the redacted portions didn’t discuss Picasso.)
The Marais-based institution had first reached out to Calle, one of France’s most famous artists, known for conceptual projects that involve following and photographing strangers or friends and then writing extensively about it, about a possible collaboration in 2018. Calle, however, did not see what she might be able to offer the museum at the time. “I am not a Picasso expert. I had nothing to bring to the table, it seemed,” she told ARTnews over the summer as preparations for the exhibition were nearing their final stages.
Calle’s Guernica
But one of Calle’s most impressive contributions to the exhibition is her own version of Guernica. This wall installation was inspired by an anecdote reported in Mary Gabriel’s 2017 book Ninth Street Women in which Arshile Gorky tried to convince a dozen artists to revisit Picasso’s masterpiece. The invited artists were supposed to regroup after a good night’s sleep, but the second meeting never happened. Calle did not go as far as to invite her peers—“I am not sure anyone would have answered my proposition,” she said—but their presence is still felt in the work. Her Guernica has the exact same dimensions as Picasso’s (nearly 11.5 feet by 25.5 feet) but consists of 200 works from her personal collection by artists like Christian Boltanski, Tatiana Trouvé, Miquel Barceló, Damien Hirst, and Cindy Sherman.
