Michał Sobański is a PhD candidate at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris. He studied History of Art, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Vienna and the Sorbonne as a laureate of a Scholarship of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research as well as a Scholar of the French Government. After obtaining a diploma of initiation to heritage conservation as part of the Classe Prépa Talents of the Institut national du patrimoine and the École du Louvre, he acquired professional experience in several museums in Paris, such as the Fondation Giacometti, the Musée de l'Orangerie and the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.
At the Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po, Michał Sobański is working under the supervision of Professor Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac on anxiety and
sexuality in Picasso's series of bathers, which the artist realised between 1927 and 1937. His doctoral project attempts to understand this dystopian
moment in the Picassian oeuvre in its complexity, both political and psychological, touching the history of art as well as of psychoanalysis. Its
purpose is to study one of the most remarkable series that the Musée national Picasso-Paris keeps today in its collections.
Michał Sobański is a laureate of the first doctoral fellowship offered by the Musée national Picasso-Paris in partnership with the Almine and Bernard
Ruiz-Picasso Foundation (FABA) and the Museo Picasso Málaga. His research project coincides with a crucial moment for the institution, marked by the recent opening of the Centre d'Études Picasso, whose mission is to preserve the museum's archives. As a research fellow, he contributes to the study of Picasso's work through various research and exhibition projects.

EXPERIENCE

• Since 2025: Research Fellow at the Musée national Picasso-Paris
• 2025: Curatorial Internship in the Direction of the Musée de l’Orangerie with Claire Bernardi
• 2024-2025: Curatorial Internship in the Direction of collections at the Fondation Giacometti with Émilie Bouvard
• 2024: Curatorial Internship in the Department of modern collections at the Musée national d’art moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou) with Aurélie
  Verdier

EDUCATION 

• Since 2025: PhD Candidate in History of Art at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po
• 2023-2024: Diploma of Initiation to Cultural Heritage Conservation of the Institut national du patrimoine
• 2023-2024: Preparatory Class for the Culture Heritage Examination at the École du Louvre
• 2021-2023: Master’s Degree (M2) in History in Modern and Contemporary Art at Sorbonne Université
• 2022-2023: Master’s Degree (M1) in Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics at Sorbonne Université
• 2017-2021: Bachelor’s Degree in Arts and Humanities at the Universität Wien (Austria)

The subject of bathers undergoes a profound renewal with the emergence of modernism. At the turn of the 20th century, it becomes the pretext for
most artistic research exploring the contiguity of man with nature. For Cézanne, human beings are defined within a collective, by the ability to be
in communion with their environment. Matisse's Joie de vivre is a quest for the affirmation of life. The protagonists of this scene, which Pierre Schneider described as an “evocation of Virgil's paradisiacal landscape”, indulge in pleasures and find fulfilment in music, dance and closeness to
others.
Discovering the same subject in Picasso's work from the 1920s and 1930s leads us to realise the affective and stylistic gap that separates it from
other interpretations of this motif. His bathers first wander along the beach, overcome by an immense torment, looking for the entrance to a cabin that
nonetheless seems inaccessible to them. Then, we witness them playing ball, a ball that none of them ever manages to catch. The seaside ultimately becomes the backstage of a political conflict or trauma caused by the loss of the model. Unlike the positive value attributed to the subject of bathers in the first half of the 20th century, the beach becomes in Picasso's work a place of anxiety, threat and defeat.
The objective of this research project is to understand how the traumatic experiences to which the artist exposes his figures at the seashore
become a pretext for the explicit sexualisation of their bodies. The problem thus formulated refers to Freudian psychoanalysis, where anxiety and
sexuality are not mutually exclusive, but instead causal conditions for one another. Two texts by Freud are crucial to the analysis and understanding
of this question. Written between two major conflicts of the 20th century, “Mourning and Melancholia” from 1917 and “Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety” from 1926 form the core of the reflection on the stylistic and political losses that Picasso suffers in his studio in the 1920s and 1930s.

Thesis supervision : Laurence Bertrand Dorléac

• Since 2025: PhD Fellowship of the Musée national Picasso-Paris, the Fondation Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA) and the Museo Picasso
  Málaga
• 2025: Research Scholarship of the Fondation Malatier-Jacquet (Fondation de France)
• 2023-2024: Excellence Scholarship Talents of the Institut national du patrimoine
• 2022-2023: Excellence Scholarship of the French Government (BGF Master)
• 2019-2021: Excellence Award of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research

• « Égotopies de Simone de Beauvoir », in Émilie Bouvard (dir.), Beauvoir, Sartre, Giacometti. Vertiges de l’Absolu, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Institut Giacometti (17 June-28 September 2025), Paris, Fondation Giacometti / Lyon, Éditions Fage (Texts of Émilie Bouvard, Kate Kirkpatrick, Géraldine Gourbe, et al.), pp. 135-143.
• « Alone, in Front of the Mirror. Absences in Picasso’s Studio », in Symposium international de la Célébration Picasso (1973-2023), Paris, UNESCO (7-8 December 2023), 2024, Online : https://cep.museepicassoparis.fr/alone-front-mirror-absences-picassos-studio.

CONFERENCES

• « "Ma nouvelle adresse est 11 bis, rue Schœlcher." Égotopies de Simone de Beauvoir », Colloquium, Simone de Beauvoir et l’art, Paris, Institut Giacometti, 10 October 2025.
• « Sauvetage. Peintre sans son modèle », 2nd International Congress of Young Picassian Researchers, Paris, Musée national Picasso-Paris, 22 September 2025.
• « Perdre la tête. La sexualité acéphale de Georges Bataille », Congress of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, Surréalismes, Paris, The American University of Paris, 28-30 October 2024.
• « Brâncuşi’s Dream of a Flight. The Impossibilities of an Inhibited Form », International Symposium, Modern Sculpture, Essence and Difference: Reflections on the Work of Constantin Brâncuşi, London, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 26 April 2024.
• « Seule, devant le miroir. Absences dans l’atelier de Picasso », International Symposium of the Picasso Celebration (1973-2023), Paris, UNESCO, 7-8 December 2023.
• « Picasso and Las Meninas. On the Other Side of the Painting », Conference accompanying the Exhibition Spanische Dialoge. Picasso aus dem Museum Berggruen, Berlin, Museum Berggruen / Bode-Museum (Berlin State Museums), 19 October 2023.