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Si le regard porté par Pablo Picasso sur certaines typologies d’œuvres que l’on rassemble au début du xxe siècle sous le terme d’« arts primitifs » a déjà pu faire l’objet de nombreux commentaires, il n’en est pas de même pour l’art asilaire, soit les œuvres et artefacts produits dans le contexte d’hôpitaux psychiatriques, entre le début des années 1900 et le lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

For Picasso, the 1920s and 1930s are a period of intensified work on the subject of the painter and his model. The implication of the mirror in this intimate relationship changes the idiomatics of the studio. Being for Lacan an object of scopic contemplation of the self, the mirror becomes a crucial intermediary in the construction of one’s identity. Picasso uses, in fact, the reflective properties of the object to constitute the figure of the painter in the studio, while denying the possibility of its transformative reflection to his female model. While the act of creation becomes for the painter an act of identification, his model remains caught somewhere between a melancholic reverie and a vision of the duality of her being.

Malgré l’abondante littérature autour de Pablo Picasso, les mosaïques que l’artiste réalise entre 1956 et 1958 restent un pan méconnu de son œuvre. Aucun de ses biographes ou commentateurs ne mentionnent ces pièces ou le nom du collaborateur Hjalmar Boyesen (1920-1978). Le présent essai met en lumière pour la première fois cette histoire, qui nous en apprend un peu plus sur l’appétit créatif de l’artiste espagnol et nous questionne sur les raisons ayant permis un tel oubli.

In 1957-1958 Pablo Picasso realized the largest and highest-profile work of his whole career: a mural commissioned for the newly built headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, a painting that came to be known as "La Chute d’Icare". Given its monumental scale, the final composition was the result of a labored conception and execution that took place behind closed doors at the artist’s residence in Cannes, villa “La Californie”. This essay aims to reevaluate La Chute d’Icare, which was heavily criticized at the time for its seemingly careless stylistic features, by focusing on the relationship with its brutalist architectural setting, seen as a productive dialogue rather than a failed integration. Analyzing how this commission unfolded through previously unpublished archival materials, this essay also sheds new light on Picasso’s creative process and his approach towards working on commission. The numerous extant preparatory drawings, some of which are taken into consideration, allow us to follow the evolution of the iconography from the indoor space of the artist’s atelier, the point of departure, to the outdoor setting of the beach visible in the finished mural. Testing key issues such as the dialogue between painting and sculpture and the form to be taken by mural painting in the post–World War II era, the UNESCO commission presented Picasso with unexpected challenges.