PICASSO--IN WITH THE OLD : The New Picasso Museum Is Finally Open in Paris--And It’s Une Joie to See Officialdom Get Something Right

Americans are probably going to like the new Picasso Museum. It seems to suit a cherished notion that Paris ought to be like Paris. We think that when we come back here, things should be where we left them last time, whether that was during the Liberation in World War II, the student riots of the ‘60s or just any old lovely spring. Gene Kelly should be dancing a clog in front of the Eiffel Tower and Marlon Brando should be talking dirty in an empty apartment.

Thus, if you think the French were upset when onion soup at dawn in Les Halles was displaced by the exoskeletal charms of the Pompidou Center, you should hear Yanks grouse about what it did to their memories of Hemingway. If you think the French fussed over sticking a glass pyramid in the court of the Louvre, you should hear the steam escaping from francophilic Americans who did their junior year at the Sorbonne or had their honeymoon in a small hotel near St. Germain des Pres.

Not only are these upstart structures different, they are (snort) modern. It’s not what we expect form Paris. We expect old.

Thus, Americans are sure to like the Musee Picasso because it is housed in a 17th-Century villa in the Marais District at sank (that’s cinq , buddy) Rue de Thorigny. The place is barnacled with history and delicious anecdotes. It was built by Pierre Aubert de Fontenay in 1656. He was an arriviste collector of the salt tax, which caused the elegant Baroque structure to be nicknamed the Hotel Sale--”Salt House.” De Fontenay waxed rich but not noble, so his wife developed an interest in a penniless marquis so she could have it both ways. Sounds like Stendhal, but it was in fact Balzac who was later associated with the Hotel Sale. In one of several of its functional incarnations, the place was a boys school, which Balzac attended.

The place is encrusted in history but not in anything else. In some 10 years of lurching, stalling renovation, architect Roland Simounet has seen to it that the place has been made sparkling clean. That’s the way Americans like Paris. Old--and clean.

But not stuffy. Americans expect Paris to have a certain subtle audacity. That part is taken care of by the subject of the museum itself.

There isn’t anything particularly daring about putting Pablo Picasso’s art in an old building. The artist himself preferred to see his work in traditional settings and lived in historic villas and chateaux during his long expatriate career in France, where he died in 1973. The delight in such a combination is its aptness. In a world where officialdom screws up oftener than not, it’s a joy to see it get something right.

Americans will probably like the Musee Picasso because the artist from Malaga remains everybody’s favorite brilliant bad boy. Despite some minor competition from Mozart and Mick Jagger, Picasso is emperor of les enfants terribles by dint of genius, longevity and seemingly endless sexual and artistic potency. Here is a rebel even an octogenarian can love--or love to hate. It is not clear whether Picasso is more cherished by those who still denounce him as a charlatan or those constantly rejuvenated by his savage talent.

In either case he really doesn’t make sense in anything but a historical setting, like the Hotel Sale, because his art was a rebellion that refashioned history.

Think of the caricature profiles of the art and philosophy of various centuries--the 17th is about Energy; the 18th, Reason, and the 19th, Passion. That leaves our century preoccupied with the Irrational. (For nearly a decade after his death there was little interest in Picasso. It seems significant that his revival comes at a time when people are once again concerned about apocalyptic madness.)

The Hotel Sale provides the contrast that makes it clear that Picasso’s larger quest was to stamp past history with the subconscious insights of this epoch. A Blue Period self-portrait of 1901 evokes the self-consuming qualities of Romanticism, from El Greco to the Post-Impressionists. By the ‘70s, when Picasso played the role of the fool to his own Lear, he employed the actual style of psychotic art. In between came unnerving insights into the emotional miasmas he found in his wives and mistresses--Olga Khoklova melting into madness in “Large Nude in a Red Armchair,” Dora Maar emitting an animal shriek in a searing image that would become part of the “Guernica.”

Yet Picasso by no means limited himself to exploring the destructive aspects of the unconscious. By mining its sheerly inventive side, he concocted Cubism and its endless formal permutations, from collage to his still-underrated relief sculpture. His planar illusionistic metal, “The Chair” of 1961, makes Minimalism look pretty arid.

Probably no artist ever lived who combined Picasso’s emotional range with the capacity to find the right way to express it. His gift for playfulness shows up in a room full of ceramics, the original version of his famous ape with a toy car for a head, and the affectionately loony 1950 “Small Girl Jumping Rope.”

When Picasso waxes classical, as in the 1923 “Pipes of Pan” or an Ingres-like portrait of his son Paul, he balloons his forms slightly, reminding us that these images form the dreamy collective memories of Western culture.

Americans should like the Musee Picasso because if they don’t like the art, they can think about the artist’s turbulent life and all the “Dallas”-like drama leading up to the establishment of the museum. If images of Picasso’s abandoned mansions full of his own art and collections fail to amuse, there are tales of ferocious lawsuits by his heirs and illegitimate children, reports of his widow Jacqueline seething over delays in the museum’s opening, and promises by Minister of Culture Jack Lang that the doors would fly open any second when in fact the debut was six years late.

One last desperate option, of course, is to tour the museum. It has been transformed into an experience in itself. One enters a large courtyard where horses’ hoofs still seem to echo against a three-story tan stone facade whose calm symmetry is enlivened by a rounded pediment full of vigorous sculpture. Inside one approaches the collections by a formal double staircase, whose grand sweep has been compared to that of Charles Garnier’s design for the Paris Opera. Then comes a procession of galleries, some in traditional paneled wood, others modernized into neutral white spaces.

Although architect Simounet has largely protected the interior of the building, he has also transformed it into something inherently engaging. The place is full of unexpected little staircases. One leads past a straight-back chair Picasso used as a palette. The cognoscenti will recognize stiff brushes in cans as a curatorial joke about Jasper Johns.

Chronologically arranged galleries are interspersed with others devoted to Picasso’s collections of tribal art and works by contemporaries like Cezanne and Matisse. The arrangement makes one a bit giddy. One minute you are in an attic gallery full of graphics, the next you’ve been transported into a modernized barrel-vault sculpture court covered in curved glass skylights. Whoops, what’s this? Looks like a Romanesque basement full of appropriately grim Picassos from the war years, like the muffled violence of “Cat Eating Bird” of 1939.

After bumbling happily into a few more anterooms, like one devoted to the maestro and the poets, one begins to wonder if this museum is not just a touch too much fun.

In the fashion of the day, the Musee Picasso has been slightly boutiquized. It is sufficiently noticeable that one visiting London critic pronounced the installation “silly.”

That is certainly too harsh, but even if it were not, it is in this case merely redundant entertainment. Picasso does not need a curator to make him look good. He stands up to almost anything. The only other reason for such a quietly razzle-dazzle installation would be an attempt to beef up a weak collection.

Dominique Bozo, who directs the Pompidou Center and administered the organization of this museum, claims it as the finest Picasso collection of them all. It should be. The French government took some 500 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works plus around 3,000 graphics from the estate in lieu of $50 million in death taxes. The heirs allowed France first choice of what the master had clearly held back for himself.

It should be a wonder--and it is. Certainly it lacks blockbuster icons like Spain’s “Guernica,” New York’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” or London’s “Three Dancers.” There is a bit of thinness in early Blue and Rose periods, and a layer of fat in all those monumental heads of Marie-Therese Walter. However, one is repeatedly surprised by extraordinary items, from a snarling early portrait of Gustave Coquiot to the famous “Bull’s Head” made of a bicycle seat and handlebars.

But highlights pale next to the sense of muscle and sinew binding the fabric of the whole. The most cautious estimate would have to conclude that this is surely the most purely solid of Picasso collections. Even the clinkers are interesting. A mural-size collage called “Women at Their Toilette” looks like a crazy quilt and forms a link to Abstract Expressionist scale. His most famous “bad” painting, “Massacre in Korea,” is on hand, to show that even Picasso couldn’t create a masterpiece at will.

The experience feels so complete, one wonders how much fuller it could possibly be. Well, it’s no insult to the museum to point out that, if printed estimates are accurate, there are enough existing Picassos for at least 10 museums like this one in the Salt House.

What a guy.