Picasso’s Largest Painting Goes on View in France

Patrick Hertzog/Agence France-PressePicasso’s painting on a curtain.

The new Pompidou Center in the northeastern French city of Metz is offering a rare opportunity to view Pablo Picasso’s largest known painting, a stage curtain measuring over 34 feet by 54 feet, which he created for the avant-garde ballet “Parade” in 1917. It is the centerpiece of “1917,” a new exhibition that explores art produced during that year.

Commissioned by Serge Diaghilev and performed by his company, the Ballets Russes, “Parade” was an ambitious attempt at what was known as “total art.” Along with Picasso, who also designed the stage sets and costumes, “Parade” brought together the choreographer Leonid Massine, the poet Jean Cocteau and the composer Erik Satie. When the ballet had its premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on May 18 to an audience comprising Paris intelligentsia and soldiers, the reaction was one of shock and outrage. But the great French poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the word “sur-réalisme”–or surrealism–to describe it.

The image on the curtain shows a group of performers on a theatrical stage, some with their backs turned, apparently waiting for their show to start. A winged mare stands to the left with a suckling foal and a fairy perched on its back. While the iconography of the scene has never been fully deciphered, the fairy is generally believed to be Olga Khokhlova, the Ballets Russes dancer whom Picasso met on the set of “Parade” and soon married. A monkey that she is reaching up to is believed to be the painter’s representation of himself.

Because of its size, the curtain is seldom removed from the vaults of the Pompidou Center in Paris: it was last viewed in France in 1992 and was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1984. When the Metz branch of the Pompidou opened in 2010, there were rumors that the curtain would once again be displayed in its full splendor.

The organizers of the new show, which is up through Sept. 29, decided to broaden it by adding other art, documents, films and objects associated with 1917, some of them directly related to the World War that was then being waged in the trenches barely 100 miles north of Paris. Works by Otto Dix, George Grosz, John Nash and the photographer Margaret Hall depict the unthinkable horror of the trenches. They hang alongside war-ravaged landscapes painted by Félix Vallotton and Pierre Bonnard, both commissioned by the French government to document the destruction. Also on show are used artillery shells engraved by soldiers, war posters and an original Renault armored tank.

Other works on view reflect the upheaval of the art world at the time, including Duchamps’ ready-made urinal, the cornerstone of conceptual art, and cubist paintings by Picasso and Juan Gris. Modigliani’s “Nu au Coussin Blanc” and Chagall’s “Double Portrait With a Glass of Wine” seem equally distant from the war. The exhibition also includes paintings dated 1917 by Henri Matisse, whose son was a soldier, and several “Nymphéa,” or water lilies, by Claude Monet, who refused to leave Giverny despite its proximity to the war zone.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 4, 2012