October 28, 2003	Tuesday	Ramazan 1, 1424

PARIS: Pablo Picasso may well have been one of the artistic giants of the 20th century, but he was also one of the century’s mightiest hoarders of minutia. “Why should I throw away what’s been good enough to fall into my hands?” he once said.

At his death in 1973, hundreds of cardboard boxes crammed with old papers and thousands of letters tied in batches with bits of string — not to mention more than 20,000 art works collected over a lifetime — were handed over to the museums and archives made guardians of the Picasso legacy.

The Spanish painter died at a grand old age of 92, having had longer than most to collect keepsakes, a habit recorded both in photographs of the mess lying about on the floors of his many studios and in testimony left by his contemporaries.

Thus the Picasso museum in Paris has more than 15,000 of his photographs, some 2,000 postcards, 900-odd birthday cards from 1961 when he turned 80, hundreds of visiting cards, 130 tailors’ bills, tickets to bullfights, shopping-lists, priceless doodles, etc.

These, along with circus tickets, newspaper clippings chronicling the great events of the century and letters and notes from some of the biggest names in art, literature and music of the time are on show at a just-opened exhibit at the Picasso Museum, entitled “We Are What We Keep”, which runs until Jan 19.

Why exactly Picasso amassed and held onto the memorabilia is a question left hanging however even by the museum’s curator, Laurence Madeline.

Fully aware of his place in the sun in the history of contemporary art, aware too of the material worth of his every scribble or line, Picasso was also indelibly marked by the artistic and intellectual movements of his time as well as by political events in his native Spain — the Civil War — and in Europe during the two world wars.

“Thirty years after his death,” Madeline says in the catalogue, “What Picasso kept during his lifetime, or more pertinently, what he took care not to throw away, tells us who Picasso was.”

Along with his private papers, passports, love troth with dancer Olga Khokhlova and bank statements are his French Communist Party membership cards from the 1940s and 1950s documenting his life, while newspaper clippings show European history in the making.

Likewise, Picasso kept legions of letters from cultural figures across Europe, from correspondence dating from 1919 through the 1920s with the head of the Russian ballet Serge de Diaghilev to messages sent during the same period by Erik Satie. “Princess de Polignac will be free on Saturday afternoon,” wrote Satie. “Can you come with us?”

In a 1961 letter, Igor Stravinsky, who also met Picasso in the 1920s, wrote to tell him that the Hamburg Opera wanted to enlist his help with new decors.

There are notes, letters and post-cards to private Parisian addresses and Riviera hotels from painters such as Georges Braque, Salvador Dali, Juan Gris, Rene Magritte, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro and Henri (aka le Douanier) Rousseau.

Some broach questions regarding art, others are just a quick “hello” or touch on problems of the daily grind. “I think of you sometimes with all my unkindness,” wrote Marie Laurencin. “I don’t like you but you are a great painter for centuries to come.”

Among messages sent by novelists, poets and playwrights are those mailed by Antonin Artaud, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard and Jacques Prevert, as well as 101 letters penned by Gertrude Stein.

“It is not enough to know an artist’s works,” Picasso once told painter Brassai. “You must also know when he created them, why, how and in what circumstances.

“No doubt there will one day be a science, which will perhaps be called ‘human science’, that will try to delve more deeply into mankind through man the creator ... I often think about this science, and I want to leave as complete a documentation for posterity as I can.” —AFP