IN AN OFT-CITED REMARK reported by Françoise Gilot, Picasso declared his mononym to have been predestined: “I wanted to be a painter, and so I ended up becoming Picasso.” This quotation decorates the exhibition catalogue accompanying “Picasso: Blue and Rose,” the Musée d’Orsay’s survey of Picasso’s formative years, establishing the tone for the exhibition as a whole. Yet the statement leaves much unanswered: What did it mean, precisely, to have become “Picasso” in becoming a painter? What form of personhood did art provide for Picasso, and was there ever a chance of his becoming something else

This exhibition, curated by Dieter Buchhart in collaboration with the Brant Foundation, gathers an impressive 120 of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings, sculptures, and drawings, the majority of which have never before been exhibited in Europe. The inclusion of so many unfamiliar works (more than a few masterpieces among them) gives the retrospective a rare freshness and underscores the contemporary resonance of Basquiat’s oeuvre. Thirty years after the artist’s death, his heroic portraits of African American musicians and athletes, countered by disturbing evocations of racism, poverty, and police