Installation view of “Picasso Celebration: The collection in a new light,” 2023, under the direction of Paul Smith, at Musée National Picasso Paris, with Mickalene Thomas’s Resist #8 (2022) at left.
A museum, especially a monographic one, should not be petrified but connected with its time-open to debate AND criticism.
Among the dozen modern and contemporary artists now included is Mickalene Thomas, who has embroidered rhinestones over a reproduction of Picasso's 1945 Pitch and Skeleton, an abstracted still life in deep gray tones that recalls "the extreme violence of the context within which the work was created, in 1945, was perpetuated through the repression of the various minorities evoked," according to a wall text.
Thomas's striking Resist #8 (2022), which tackles the subject of police violence and systemic racism in America, hangs next to its source material in a room devoted to the representation of war.
