The Man and the Medium

N 1943, LIVING in Nazi-occupied Paris amid shortages of many different kinds of goods, Pablo Picasso made a lucky find. “By chance, I managed to get hold of a stock of Japanese paper,” he wrote to his friend Brassaï, the photographer. “It cost me an arm and a leg! But without it, I’d never have done these drawings. The paper seduced me.” Paper seduced Picasso throughout his life, and what he did with it seduces us to this day. His relationship to the material was intimate and multifaceted—he not only drew and printed on it but cut it, pasted it, folded it, crushed it, and sculpted with it. While Picasso’s oil on canvas works bring the