Garden of the Musée PicassoParis

“All the images we have of nature, we owe to painters. It is through them that we perceive them. That alone should make them suspect.”

Picasso

The garden of the Musée Picasso lies in the heart of Paris, in one of the densest arrondissements of the capital, with the lowest ratio of green space per inhabitant.

It is the garden of the Hôtel Salé, considered the largest and most extraordinary, not to say extravagant, of the great 17th-century Parisian mansions. The mansion has since had many uses. In turn it was the embassy of the Republic of Venice, a literary depository during the French Revolution, the Ganser and Beuzelin boarding school attended by Balzac, the École centrale des arts et manufactures, the workshop of the master bronze-founder and art metalworker Henri Vian, followed by a consortium, the City of Paris School of Applied Arts, attended notably by Daniel Buren, and finally the Musée Picasso. Its garden was then divided in two: one garden for the museum and another for the people of the neighbourhood.

The successive plans bear witness to these many uses. It is very difficult to identify a single garden that could serve as a reference.

There is, however, a singularity in the plan. The axis of the courtyard façade does not coincide with the extension of the garden axis. Daniel Buren highlighted this singularity in a very beautiful installation called ‘Miroir Imparfait’ (2008-2009).

The project proposes to reunite the two gardens, to create a night garden for the museum and a day garden for the neighbourhood, to diversify the tree layer to give a much stronger sense of nature in this very mineral district, and to diversify uses according to the times of the year.