The later erotic drawings of Pablo Picasso reach the public through the painting of Pierre Moignard. The artist, born in Algeria, discovered these works during the exhibition The Last Picasso at the Centre Pompidou in 1989, and he transposed them into paintings, bringing all the inventiveness and formal power of these works into our present. The painting of Pierre Moignard, throughout the 1980s, developed against dominating artistic trends, in a context where figurative painting was of little interest to critics and artists. Regularly incoporating figures into his iconography borrowed from the history of Western art, from Francisco de Goya to Edward Hopper, moving on to Édouard Manet, the artist, starting in 2013, decided to dedicate himself to the works of his Spanish colleague. The Musée National Picasso-Paris has gathered, in an exhibition, the works of Pierre Moignard, offering a platform to his rigorous work dedicated to the influence of the Cubist artist on contemporary creations. “These drawings by Picasso have remained with me for a long time. They have become a sort of obsession, and I was able to give form to this obsession thirty years later… I wanted a form of radicalism in symphony with our times which reconnects to the tragic,” writes Moignard. And this obsession, on display, will be an authentic discovery for the public.
