The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Paul Smith’s Picasso moment
The British fashion designer on his ‘naughty’ new show of the Spaniard’s art
For a man whose company employs 2,000 staff and operates in 60 countries, the British fashion designer Paul Smith is surprisingly willing to reveal his vulnerable side. “Nobody cares how good you used to be,” he says, sitting in the large, bright studio on the top floor of his Covent Garden HQ. “It’s all about today and tomorrow.” One imminent project is making this sprightly 76-year-old feel particularly twitchy. Next month, Smith’s new collaboration with the Picasso Museum in Paris will be unveiled. “I’m a little bit nervous about it,” he tells me, even “slightly scared.”
By his own admission, Smith is “no expert on Picasso”. Yet, the museum has given him carte blanche to co-curate and design a vast exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The show should, Smith hopes, feel “spontaneous” and “fun”. But it could also ruffle feathers, he says, since “I imagine some academics will think it’s irreverent.”
The invitation from Paris arrived before the pandemic, when the Picasso Museum’s director, Laurent Le Bon (who now heads up the Pompidou Centre) visited Smith in London and told him: “You can do whatever you want.”
“That was the thrill,” says Smith, who collects art with his wife, Pauline, a former student at the Slade. Inside his studio, an Aladdin’s cave heaped with astonishingly various objects (from rare books to a Mr Potato Head), there are many framed artworks, including a print by David Hockney, a watercolour by Le Corbusier – which, Smith says cheerfully, is “fading by the hour” – and a sketch by Peter Blake of the artist “sitting behind me in Hyde Park, at an Eric Clapton concert”. Is there anything by Picasso? “I’ve got a poster!” laughs Smith, rushing off to find a lithograph from 1966 advertising a Parisian exhibition. “And, I think, we’ve got a little, single-line profile print.”
The first thing visitors to Smith’s show at the Picasso Museum will encounter is the artist’s Bull’s Head sculpture, wittily fashioned, in 1942, from an old bicycle saddle and handlebar discovered in a rubbish dump. This choice was “a bit obvious, really,” admits Smith, whose love of cycling is well-known; his studio also contains a peloton of carbon-fibre bikes, including a yellow Pinarello given to him by Tour de France winner Chris Froome.
After that introductory moment, there will be another room with an “obvious” link to Smith, showing pages from a May 1951 issue of Vogue that Picasso impishly embellished with antic cartoons; these will appear against special wallpaper made of vintage copies of the magazine. By contrast, a later gallery devoted to the artist’s series of variations inspired by Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863) will be, Smith tells me, “totally green”, with fake grass underfoot. “I was asked to make a show of Picasso’s artwork in a different way,” says Smith. “And that’s what I’ve done.”
Which phase of the artist’s career does Smith most admire? Unsurprisingly, given that colourful stripes are his signature, he mentions “the later period when he started using several colours on one canvas – and a lot of stripes”. Picasso’s 1932 painting, Reading, which depicts his lover, Marie-Thérèse
Walter, with a book in her lap, will grace what Smith calls a “mindblowing room” decorated with “painterly” stripes. There will be more stripes in another section inspired by Picasso’s post-war public persona, when he often appeared in a Breton shirt: here, says Smith, 80 such tops will be “hanging from the ceiling, so they’ll blow with the air conditioning”.
Is he worried that his designs may dominate the art? “That could happen,” he replies, but “I kept thinking, ‘Would Picasso think this is cool or fun? Would he think this is a bit naughty?’” And the answer, he believes, is “Yes, in every room.”
Given that part of the brief was to appeal to a younger audience, what does Smith make of contemporary calls for Picasso’s work to be “cancelled” because he treated women badly? He replies cautiously: “I’d never even thought about it. I just did my job.” That said, he laments the corrosive impact of social media, which, he believes, is making people “so vindictive”. “It seems to be a world full of moaning now, doesn’t it?” he suggests.
In truth, Picasso hasn’t been as much of a touchstone for Smith as, say, Henri Matisse, whose “brave use of colour in solid form”, as he puts it, has often inspired the designer in what he calls his “day job”. Yet, working on the Paris exhibition alerted him to how “on it and interested in new stuff” Picasso was. “He was always on the move.”
Indeed, for Smith, Picasso’s “playfulness” represents a commendable creativity that he considers “childlike as opposed to childish”. What’s the difference? “Enormous,” he replies. “Childish is just being silly. But childlike is where your mind is uncluttered with reference points and education and things that you’ve done which stop you from doing something spontaneously.”
He’s beguiled by Picasso’s bronze sculpture of a goat, the maquette for which was created in 1950 in Vallauris, in the south of France, from recycled odds and ends thrown away by the village’s potters: “A basket for the chest, a palm leaf for the spine, bottles for the teats,” Smith explains. “Amazing! I like the idea that you can look at something and see something else.”
This “lateral thinking”, he adds, reminds him of his father, who died 15 years ago. According to Smith, he was “one of those guys who would pick up a hammer and turn it into a dog or something, just to amuse his young son”. At this point, Smith shows off the lining of his suit, which reproduces several of his father’s photographs: “My dad was also an amateur photographer,” he explains.
“The great thing about [being] childlike or lateral,” Smith continues, “is that you try things in a way which you hope is different, and you don’t always follow [others].” This was, he says, the “whole point” of him being asked to design the exhibition in Paris, “as opposed to somebody… so much narrower in [their] focus”. He gestures at all the stuff piled high in his studio, from Star Wars toys to a set of walking sticks given to him by Jamie Oliver; in a corner, a Tupperware box is filled with cheaply framed photographs of recent visitors including the actors Martin Freeman and Bill Nighy – both of whom, Smith tells me, were “in yesterday”.
It was this, as he puts it, “eclectic mix of kitsch and beautiful, smooth and rough, bad and good, big and small” that Le Bon, when he visited, had “really loved”. “My world is very open,” Smith says. “I’m interested in stuff. You know, I love pop, I love tradition. I love craftsmanship, I love throwaway. And that,” he smiles, “is very childlike.”
‘Would Picasso have thought this is cool or fun?’ asks Smith. ‘Yes, in every room!’
‘Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light’ opens at the
Musée National Picasso-Paris (museepicassoparis.fr) on March 7