Artists' wallpaper

A look back at the phenomenon of wallpaper as an artistic medium, on the occasion of the exhibition "Célébration Picasso - La collection prend des couleurs" (Picasso Celebration - The Collection Takes on Colours), which can be seen until 27 August 2023 at the Picasso National Museum in Paris.

We know this when we visit the wallpaper museum in Rixheim, Alsace, or the collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris: from panoramic wallpaper to graphic wallpaper, via trompe-l'œil or material effects, this medium can be a real work of art for sale. But it is less likely to excite the contemporary art market or to be exhibited in art galleries. And yet! "Warhol was the first to make a work of art out of it, imagining it covered in fluorescent pink cow heads on a yellow background," Daphné Bétard tells us in her article for Beaux Arts Magazine in May. "Provocative, feminist or subversive, he is now the XXL receptacle of the world's upheavals. When he is not dynamiting museography, as is currently the case at the Musée National Picasso-Paris.

The full-page illustration in this issue of the art magazine "Tendance" is a work of art in itself. It makes you want to take it and create collages in travel books or new works of art. The myriad of butterflies by the British artist Damien Hirst, who dominated the British art scene in the 1990s as part of the Young British Artists group, while at the same time being highly controversial and hyper-mediatised, like the rows of garish close-ups of potatoes and light bulbs, John Baldessari, an American conceptual artist of the post-modernist movement, has created a line of trivial images to plaster our overly-wise interiors, which speak to both ephemeral beauty and over-consumption.

"Apparently it is smooth, repetitive, passive, purely decorative... So why do artists feel so passionately about wallpaper? "Because in their hands, it is the opposite. They have been able to detect its propensity to stimulate the imagination, to provoke the retina, to transcend walls, to make them fall down and open them up to other horizons. Explosive, provocative, delirious, hypnotic, subversive, wallpaper has become the receptacle of their vision of the world and their wildest dreams. Through it, Sarah Lucas floated balloons made of cigarettes in the depths of a black background, similar to planets drifting in the cosmos - the trip took place at the Sadie Cole HQ art gallery in London in 2000 for her exhibition The Fag Show."

Even David Bowie got into wallpaper in 1995! For his first exhibition as a painter at The Gallery in London, the star who died in 2016 leaving more memories as a musician than as a painter created a wallpaper called Conflict, in collaboration with two other British stars, better known in the art market, Lucian Freud and Damien Hirst. A male nude painted by Lucian Freud was immersed in one of those famous formaldehyde boxes where Damien Hirst used to keep bugs, all on a floral and printed background by the English firm Laura Ashley. Not only did this wallpaper serve as the scenography for David Bowie's installation, but it was also an integral part of his artwork.

"Artists have turned wallpaper on its head and made it a medium in its own right," explains Daphné Bétard. "The phenomenon is not new, but it is gaining momentum," says the Centre international d'art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC), which two years ago launched an international survey of the most daring initiatives in this field. Wallpaper first became popular with Andy Warhol, who gave it its first major role. Before the Austrian architect and precursor of Brutalism, Adolf Loos, and the Bauhaus, condemned wallpaper to oblivion, the great currents of applied arts such as Arts and Crafts or Art Nouveau had already brought it into the modern era.

"The Cubists had included it in pieces in their collage paintings, the Surrealists Dali and Magritte had tried their hand at it, as had Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle, but it was Warhol who turned wallpaper into a work of art in its own right," explains the Beaux Arts Magazine journalist. It was for his exhibition at the Leo Castelli art gallery in New York in 1966 that the master of the Factory covered the walls with fluorescent pink cow heads on a yellow background, "envisaging the exhibition space as an immersive, multidisciplinary place, accessible to as many people as possible. The wallpaper is no longer a support, it interacts with its environment and the space-time in which it is situated.

The concept was taken to its extreme by Daniel Buren, who systematically used alternating white and coloured vertical strips, each 8.7 cm wide, to cover the architecture and urban space and to emphasise the interdependence of the work with its context, both physically and symbolically. The artist questioned the causes of the rejection in the 1980s of "the decorative dimension of art". Before making a comeback in the 2000s, wallpaper was for a long time put on the back burner, considered kitschy and outdated. It was not until publishers, designers and artists exploited its infinite formal possibilities, relying in particular on technological advances that made it possible to produce ecological, digital, phosphorescent, QR code and even LED paper, that its guaranteed visual effect became attractive again.

"But beyond the sensational and the spectacular, wallpaper is popular as the interior equivalent of street graffiti," the journalist points out. "It allows words, signs, images and political messages to be inscribed that no one can ignore any more. The General Idea collective, for example, struck a blow in 1987 when it took up the aesthetics of Robert Indiana's famous LOVE logo to talk about AIDS, repeating the word AIDS on the walls to denounce the misinformation, shame and fear that surrounded the disease. "Ten years later, to address issues of patriarchy, immigration, cultural identity and transmission, the artist Zineb Sedira reappropriated the Islamic geometric motifs by integrating portraits of her grandmother, mother, herself and daughter, as well as an autobiographical text calligraphed in Arabic, French and English, in the common language of the different generations.

And we have not forgotten the shock caused by the artwork of the Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar presented in the exhibition devoted to contemporary wallpaper by the Mudac in Lausanne in 2010: Thousand and One Days. At first glance, these are very attractive sets, taking up the aesthetics of traditional ornamentation... but representing, on closer inspection, scenes of torture inflicted by the totalitarian regime. Yes, wallpaper is a work of art.

Image : Pablo Picasso - Bull head - Spring 1942
saddle and handlebars (leather and metal) - 33.5x43.5x19cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris, Dation P