Picturing Picasso : revisiting Paul Haesaerts’s visite à Picasso (1950)

A documentary by art critic Paul Haesaerts, Visite à Picasso (1950), shows Pablo Picasso painting on a glass pane placed in between the artist and the camera. Apart from reconstructing the film’s production context, this chapter investigates in what way this lyrical documentary responds to Haesaerts’s notion of cinéma critique, a form of lens-based art criticism. In addition, it analyzes how Haesaerts combines his attention for the temporal development of Picasso’s linear drawings with an interest in post-cubist spatiality. Lastly, this chapter demonstrates how Haesaerts presents Picasso as the ultimate embodiment of the image of the artist as a genius, alluding to both ancient myths of artistic creation and the modern celebrity cult of mass media