Henry Taylor

The Henry Taylor exhibition at the Musée national Picasso-Paris has been developed in close collaboration with the artist, taking a broad approach and offering in places a retrospective perspective. Curated by Joanne Snrech, curator at the Musée national Picasso-Paris, this exhibition is part of the institution’s ongoing research and exploration of Picasso’s influence and reception within the American art scene. It thus continues a series of exhibitions that began with Faith Ringgold in 2023, continued with Jackson Pollock in 2024, and featured Philip Guston in 2025. It will also pave the way for a major retrospective dedicated to the Harlem Renaissance movement, scheduled for spring 2027, affirming the museum’s commitment to broadening and renewing the interpretation of the American art scene.

The exhibition brings together around a hundred works — paintings, sculptures and installations — through which Henry Taylor explores the richness and complexity of the human experience. Whether depicting friends, family, anonymous individuals or public figures, his compositions offer a vivid and profoundly human vision of our times. Taylor thus weaves visual narratives that blend individual trajectories with collective realities, combining personal experiences, shared memory and dialogues with art history. His reinterpretations of significant works of art, notably those by David Hammons, Philip Guston and Pablo Picasso, demonstrate how Taylor draws on the past to reinvent the present.

The exhibition catalog features an introductory text on the artist’s career by the curator, Joanne Snrech; an interview between Cécile Debray and Henry Taylor; an art history essay on the representation of U.S. history in the artist’s work by Elvan Zabunyan; a reprint of a text by Laura Hoptman originally published in 2012 for MoMA; and a chronology by François Dareau. The texts are completed by an iconographic body of works, unfold in five thematic parts: The Weight of the Ordinary, Bearing Witness, What Didn't Make the Record, Between Memories and Observation, Painting as Necessity.