The Picasso exhibition takes over Pullman Yards from Van Gogh

The 200 selected works cover Picasso’s entire life and frame the various styles he explored over the years, including surrealism, expressionism and cubism.

Jacob Cohl, vice president of experience / exhibition for S2BN Entertainment, noted that in 1971 Picasso had created his own projection art exhibition with his works. “I think he would be curious about what we do,” he said. “He was very open-minded.”

This is also a way for people to see Picasso’s work without having to travel to New York City, Barcelona or Paris.

“It’s a kind of retrospective of all his work,” said Annabelle Mauger, exhibition director. She worked with her creative partner Julien Baron, French architect Rudy Ricciotti and curator and art historian Androula Michael. Picasso, who made an estimated 60,000 works of art in his lifetime, painted until his death in 1973 at the age of 91.

The Pablo Ruiz Picasso Foundation, Picasso’s property, chose Mauger, who has 20 years of experience, to create “Imagine Picasso.” “I think this exhibition would have pleased my grandfather very much because, above all, he was a man of freedom.” said Olivier Widmaier Picasso, grandson of Pablo Picasso, in promotional material provided by the exhibition.

“We have to respect the color of the paintings, the movement of the paintings,” Mauger said.

The first room shows small pictures of 200 Picasso paintings displayed in depth in the third room. The second room is a multimedia look at Picasso’s life. Panels depicting his life along the sides of the room, while down the middle are several transparent screens with black-and-white still images and video of Picasso himself with selected quotes.

“He was considered a genius and it was important to show that,” Mauger said. “He went through many developments.”

The third room, which covers about 10,000 square meters, features the large Picasso immersive show. It runs in a loop over 33 minutes with no narrative, only a musical overlay of French composers and original songs. The extension includes several shapes, so Picasso paintings are displayed at different angles on 90 separate panels. Pictures are seen on the walls, model shapes and floor. This encourages participants to stroll around the room instead of standing in one place.

“You’re almost in brush strokes,” Mauger said.

For her, the experience gives an overall sense of who Picasso was an artist.

“Regardless of your age, regardless of your culture, regardless of your language,” Mauger said, “you can understand everything because what you feel is the most important thing.” In a way, it’s more of an emotional, visual celebration and less about specific details of Picasso’s life or explanations behind particular works of art.

By comparison, the Van Gogh experience included a much larger and more detailed, but also more conventional museum exhibition of his colorful and tumultuous life, as well as a virtual reality experience that placed the participants inside the “Starry Night” painting. Van Gogh’s immersive experience also took some of the static elements from his paintings and animated them.

Mauger said they chose not to do so with the Picasso experience. “You do not want to see birds fly or people move because we think a painting is a stopped movement,” she said. “If you put animation on it, you change the painting. We are not allowed to do that.”

Cohl, who is based in Miami, said he is well aware that the outgoing Van Gogh experience casts a long shadow on this new one. “Hopefully people will take a chance on yet another art experience like this,” he said.

John Zaller, executive producer of Exhibition Hub, which oversaw the Van Gogh Experience, said his company sold as many as 425,000 tickets over eight months for the experience’s North American debut. “We typically run these for three to six months,” he said. “But the response was so overwhelmingly positive that it made sense to stay longer.”

He is seeking a new location for a new Van Gogh encampment in Atlanta later this year and hopes to eventually land a permanent space like the Illuminarium. The Exhibition Hub has also held immersive exhibitions in other cities for Monet and the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.

Todd Cronan, an associate professor of art history at Emory University, said Van Gogh’s work is far more popular today than Picasso’s.

“Van Gogh’s life is more related to his art,” said Cronan, who recently wrote an essay for the catalogs of Van Gogh’s art exhibits in Santa Barbara, California and Columbus, Ohio. “His paintings reflected his life. It’s not wrong to think he put himself at risk in making art. I do not think that was what Picasso was about. He was about how we jointly distort the world and less about his own feelings. ”

Cronan, who has seen the Exhibition Hubs Van Gogh Experience in Seattle, said he still prefers exhibits with the actual paintings.

“What we love about Picasso and Van Gogh is the handmade quality,” he said. “The brushstrokes and especially with Van Gogh, how he applied paint. The screen version does not do it justice. Instead, it’s that techno explosion. It’s all about the new immersive technology.”

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IF YOU GO

“Imagine Picasso”

10.00-18.00 Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 10.00-21.00 Friday-Sunday. Through June 19 $ 31.50; $ 22 for ages 5-12. Pullman Yards, 225 Rogers Street NE, Atlanta. imaginepicassoexhibit.com.