A Collage Before Collage

Taking as a starting point the particular features of Picasso's Man Leaning against a Wall (1899), this small exhibition explores the new visuality that characterised the fin de siècle (when drawing and photography coexisted in popular magazines), the large-scale serial production of images flooding everyday life, and the new modes of collecting that were becoming known.

Pablo Picasso invented the artistic technique of collage in the spring of 1912. However, in March 1899, when he was still living in Barcelona, he had pasted a mechanically reproduced image, the portrait of an actress, on his drawing entitled Man Leaning against a Wall . We now know that this papier collé was the trading card of a box of matches, as such printed matter (phototypes) were very popular at the time.

The exhibition examines the reasons that led the young artist to paste this printed image beside one of his drawings. Along these lines, the show evokes Picasso's interest in the world of serial reproduction (the illustrated press, posters, advertisements). It also reproduces the artist's visual environment (trading cards, newspapers, caricatures, postcards, photographs, films) and reveals the taste for cutting and pasting that was widespread in other recreations of urban society at the turn of the century.