061612 Picasso exhibit, Toronto, ON

On June 16th, 2012 I had nothing on my schedule besides driving back to Ottawa from Niagara Falls, Ontario, where I had been entertained to no end by the strange pairing of Ringo Starr opening for Nik Wallenda.  I had been looking for an opportunity to visit the Picasso exhibit that was touring through Toronto that summer and this was it, so I stopped in.

The Picasso Museum in Paris was closed down for renovations so it made sense to send the collection out on the road and Toronto was the only Canadian stop.  This Picasso guy was just so brilliant, quirky, creative and whimsical it’s impossible not to be attracted to his work.  No wonder he was one of the very few examples of an artist who was already highly-regarded (and very wealthy) early in his career.

And there’s so much work to be appreciated!  I looked it up and it’s said that Picasso created around 50,000 works of art in his lifetime, including over a thousand sculptures, twice as many ceramics, almost two thousand paintings; drawings, prints, rugs, photographs…As my old friend’s art dealer father once said to me of the great Picasso, “The man was absolutely sh*tting art!”  

I’ve been lucky enough to see quite a few of his pieces in my sparse romps through the world’s museums and galleries (and at two separate exhibits at the National Gallery in Ottawa) but I’ve never been to the Paris Museum so I was happy to see a lot of pieces that I only knew from books.  It’s rare to see so many Picasso works collected together and I had a great time lingering over a good many of them, especially the ones at the beginning of the exhibit.  

As engaging as it all was, eventually I found myself strolling by paintings after only the most fleeting glance.  It’s inevitable in any art gallery: the first few pieces get a good five minutes each, then one’s attention span is reduced to two or three minutes per masterpiece.  Soon only the more exceptional works can inspire a full-stop, lesser works are taken in en masse and on the move.  Pieces that, if viewed as a stand-alone work of art in a private collection could be gaped upon for hours, are suddenly given very short shrift when they are unfortunate enough to be placed in the latter third (or so) of an exhibit dedicated to a sole artist.

Of course for the last few pieces your brain tends to remind you that you might never see these things again and so you go back to the same long stares of appreciation that the first few pieces received.  

Or is it just me?

Anyway, it was a very worthwhile stop and it rounded out a nice little twenty-four hour entertainment trifecta that involved the greatest musical group, visual artist, and daredevil family dynasties of the 20th century.