Picasso in the frozen rain

Today, with only 8 hours left to see the super-hyped Picasso and the Masters exhibit before it leaves Paris for London, I trudged over to the Grand Palais and spent 90 minutes waiting in the frozen rain. Imagine the above scene, but with slush covering the ground, a snaking line of several hundred people desperately clutching their umbrellas, and a street-performer's clarinet renditions of Puccini and Grieg floating upwards from the midst of it all. Only in Paris would the closing day of a painting exhibition cause such a stir - when the doors close at 8pm this evening, the museum will have stayed open 82 hours straight in an attempt to accommodate demand. (And yes, there were actually people waiting on line in the freezing rain at 4AM on a Monday morning to pay to see a bunch of paintings.)

I thought the exhibition was fun, but not mind-boggling. Plaster casts of famous statues (Venus de Milo, the Elgin marbles) were presented alongside a young Picasso's sketches of these works. Self-portraits by master painters known to have inspired Picasso graced the richly colored exhibit hall walls alongside Picasso's own self-depictions. The coolest juxtapositions were of famous classical paintings next to Picasso's "imitations" of these works, the painter's distinctive style making for something entirely unique from the original.


Such comparisons are not always in Picasso's favor (for instance, in the case of Courbet's Jeunes femmes sur les berges de la Seine and Van Gogh's l'Arlesienne, I strongly preferred the original over Picasso's adaptation). Moving through the exhibit though, one can't help but be impressed by the versatility and undeniable talent of Picasso. Most of the other painters on display have a single, recognizable style - Picasso has about five.

At the end of the day, it's a remarkable collection of paintings for an exhibit that only takes about an hour to view. Clever, and probably worth my 8 euro student-rate plus a few hours of frozen toes.

(my favorite piece in the exhibit was Manet's Olympia, on loan from the Musée d'Orsay, exhibited alongside Picasso's Nu couché jouant avec un chat)