Imagine you’re browsing among the art catalogues in a bookshop, without looking for anything in particular. The first thing that strikes you about all of the books there — from a distance, even before you can read the titles — is the colourful covers. Reproductions of famous paintings, intriguing details, familiar styles, indecipherable typefaces… you stroll over to a table next to the shelves and pick up a catalogue. Could you say just what it was that attracted you to it? What made you go for this one rather than some other? If the cover had been different, would have you have looked inside it anyway? And when you did open it, was the interest that the cover aroused in you confirmed by the contents, or were you disappointed?

We tend to think that in the case of an art catalogue, like any other book, the cover is the bait dangled in front of the reader, the siren song we hope will entrance you. Choosing one design over another is not simply a matter of taste. The decision is made according to what we want to say to you, what part of the content we want to focus on, what we believe will attract your attention.

1 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Forgetting Velázquez. Las Meninas.
2 & 3 Other proposed graphic designs. Jason Ellams

Too classical? Too cryptic? Elegant? Daring? Obvious? Will it be interpreted correctly? Des it tie in with the Museum’s line? Is it going to look dated in a year or two? We ask ourselves these and many other questions in the process of choosing the cover of the new catalogue we are working on.

1 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Secret Images. 2 & 3 Other proposed graphic designs. Nino Cabero

In some cases the selection process can take weeks. On other occasions there is unanimous agreement at the first meeting. We often ask the designers who work with us to put forward a range of options, not to feel confined to putting into visual form an idea that we have given them, and to risk offering us even conflicting alternatives. They have been working on the project for months, so nobody understands better than they do the expressive potential of a particular image or the power of a certain typography. Luckily, we can rely on their patience and professionalism when the choice proves difficult.

But the cover is not just image or typography: it’s something we touch, it’s a fundamental part of the physical body of the book, binding it, defining it, supporting it. The choice of format and materials, whether it’s a paperback or hardback, whether or not it has a jacket… whether to put the title on the spine, and if so, how… whether or not to commission a text for the back cover… All of these things have their own particular significance, each one means something and is sure to generate a lot of very different responses among the visitors to our exhibitions who buy our catalogues.

Marta Jové
Publications

Do you think we made a good choice? Which cover would you have chosen?

Valentín Roma

As part of the series ‘the Collection seen by…’ the Museu Picasso invited professor Valentín Roma to give a talk, and we are now posting on our blog the excerpts most directly related to Picasso’s famous work. This is a highly stimulating, playful and provocative text: 5-star recommended reading.

I would like to propose two terms in relation to Picasso and Las Meninas. The first term is tradition. The second term is promiscuity.

We can distinguish four kinds of artistic promiscuity: the promiscuity of the flesh, the promiscuity of time, the promiscuity of the gaze and the promiscuity of history.

[...] We come at last to the fourth promiscuity, that of history, and here we arrive, finally, at Picasso.

To speak of appropriationism in Picasso’s Las Meninas is to refer to something inexact and excessively partial. At the same time, to speak of variation is to focus exclusively on a way of working that is neither a part of Picasso’s legacy nor even a distinguishing feature of his art.

I have been invited to talk about this series of pictures and I have to confess to you – and I’m not joking – that I scarcely understand them. I wish I were John Berger, but unfortunately for you I’m not, so instead I shall try to put forward a series of ideas that the Las Meninas series suggests to me and that I would like to share with you.

The first idea is that Las Meninas makes me think of an adolescent diary, one of those diaries in which someone writes down everything that happens to them and then, years later, manifest themselves as a repository of psychological skirmishes and emotional swings. Those leaps from the inconsequential to the structural, from the anecdotal to the defining are somehow to be found in these paintings. I intuit in these gestures a certain didactic spirit, as if Picasso in 1957 had wanted to learn something from Velázquez. And of course we learn as much from things that are almost meaningless as from that which is important. We learn by opposition, testing out the limits of things, what their ends are.

The second idea is that when we look at Picasso’s Las Meninas we do not see Velázquez either reinterpreted or deconstructed. Nor, I would go so far as to say, do we see Picasso. What we see is simply a way of looking at a picture. That may not seem very epic, but in fact it can be extremely important. A lot has been said about the stillness of Velázquez’s paintings, that ‘lack of air’ Cortázar referred to in relation to Velázquez and also to Mondrian. If this is true – and surely in some sense it is – Picasso managed to bring Las Meninas to life, to extract from them whatever impenetrable icon they have within them.

The third idea is that after looking and learning, Picasso ‘popularized’ Velázquez’s Las Meninas and in so doing somehow humanized them, rescuing this wonderful picture from the reverential discourses of art history, from the fetishism of the museums, from the indiscriminate fascination of the masses and even from the deranged gaze of contemporary artists like Jeff Wall or Alfredo Jaar.

The fourth and last idea is rather wicked. I don’t think of Picasso as a ‘humanitarian’ artist, so I cannot see this operation of his of looking at, learning from and humanizing Velázquez as some felicitous school exercise. I feel, rather, that Picasso was ‘coming on to’ the history of painting, to use an old expression; he was flirting: he was, in short, being promiscuous. I will name no names, but there are artists who make a moral and aesthetic currency of consistency, and there are others who centre what they do on infidelity, on the disorganized, the incoherent, the rhapsodic.  I do not mean this as an indictment of romanticism or an apology for rapture. Many years ago, when I was younger and was studying art history, I had absolutely no interest in Picasso because I thought of him as ‘antiquated’, because he was a painter whom everyone liked and because every year, at Christmas, the Caixa de Sabadell gave you an illustrated book about Picasso. Today, however, he seems to me to be an artist who merits serious analysis, set free of all the stereotypes that have been landed on him. As you see, this talk is also an act of infidelity, another gesture promiscuous.

Valentín Roma

Art historian, exhibition curator and professor of aesthetics and digital culture

What does Picasso’s Las Meninas suggest to you?

Do you think of it as a tribute to Velázquez, an apprenticeship, a reinterpretation, an exercise of freedom?

This January I joined the Museu Picasso to take over the running of Public Programmes, the department responsible for cultural and educational services and the web. I’m really excited about joining the team here at a time when the Museum is so full of energy and plans for the future, and it’s very rewarding to know we are contributing to its evolution through our knowledge, imagination and work. I’ll be keeping you up to date on developments in the department and the work of the team.

I want to tell you now about one of the first activities I’ve been involved in here, the collaboration between the MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona) and the Museu Picasso in relation to the retrospective exhibition of work by Canadian artist Rodney Graham at the MACBA.

In his appraisal of Rodney Graham’s career, Bartomeu Marí, Director of the MACBA, emphasizes his exploration of the conventions of contemporary art, such as those that have to do with the figure of the artist. He has often included himself as a figure in his works, depicting stereotypes of artists in sophisticated settings. Among other conventions he has addressed are those that come to light in the contrasting of high culture and popular culture, which sometimes feed into one another and mirror wider social and cultural conventions.

The exhibition, curated by Friedrich Meschede, is articulated into a series of areas: a  library/archive zone that explores the artist’s engagement with literature; an installation that, evoking the title of the exhibition, Through the Forest, presents light as an element of salvation; several rooms devoted to Graham’s photographs, films and videos, some of which have not been shown for many years, dealing with instances of appropriation and relation between popular and high culture, and a section that explores identity and the figure of the artist. The exhibition concludes with the series of paintings Picasso, My Master, from 2005: a process of reflection on the limitations of conceptual art, the field in which he has always inscribed his work, Graham began to explore the languages of painting, taking as his referent the work of Pablo Picasso.

Where this exhibition ends, another proposal begins, this time at the Museu Picasso. Starting from the idea of a dialogue with works by Picasso, Graham has created Possible Abstractions, a specific project for the Museum. On the basis of a comic strip from a 1950s magazine that touches on questions about the meaning of contemporary art and stereotypes in avant-garde art, the artist takes a decidedly ironic and humorous look at the language of abstraction, invoking too the drawings that Pablo Picasso did on the pages of similar magazines, a number of which are in the Museu Picasso collection.

This is a new venture for us, the first time we have included work by a living artist in the programme of the Museu Picasso, and we are very happy to have done so in association with the MACBA and with the personal involvement of Rodney Graham. We hope you’ll come and visit the show and we would love to hear your comments.

Anna Guarro

Public Programmes

What do you think about the Museu Picasso showing work by living artists?

• See photos of the installation at the Museu Picasso
• Download PDF booklet (in Catalan/Spanish/English)

The management of cultural institutions, which is talked about a lot nowadays, goes back a long, long time.  Who doesn’t know the Greek or Roman theatres?  They didn’t function by themselves.  For sure, behind the stages, there were people, the majority often anonymous, who made sure that everything functioned correctly.

And what can be said about museums? Throughout the world there have been teams of people, sometimes more numerous, often rather reduced, often referred to as administration, and now linked to resources, who have carried out the ‘functional’ work.

At the Museu Picasso of Barcelona there are a number of us that work in the administration of the centre.  We could call ourselves the back-office.  Everything from the area of production, maintenance, security, management of the public, management of the services and obviously the economic administration.  Without each of these functions, it would be difficult for the museum to open its doors every day and offer the visitors exhibitions, talks, concerts, and all types of activities linked, in our case, to the life and work of Pablo Picasso, or the neighbourhood in which we are located,  La Ribera.

As part of the basis of our work, I have made a list of the basic concepts which are fundamental for the good running of a museum.  Because, overall, the most important thing for carrying out the task that we are charged with as a museum centre – to collect, conserve and spread, is the fact that the team of people, each at their level, fulfil with the greatest possible efficacy and efficiency their responsibility.

These values are:

1.- Organisation

Tasks defined with balanced work responsibilities, explicit procedures so as to be able to work with security.

2.- Information

Information structured to the maximum so as to enable the decision-making by each and every one of those who work in the museum.  The dynamism of the information, both upward and downward, is a key element in terms of the success of the coordination.

3.- Trust

In the professionalism of the team.  Everyone has to be responsible for their work by searching for mechanisms of self-evaluation, and by being accountable to the person to whom they depend.

4.- Complicity

Those who work in the museum have to feel they are part of the project.  A complicity that isn’t exempt from a critical spirit, thus making sure the project progresses and improves.

5.- Being demanding

In terms of a job well done, towards ourselves, and towards the rest of our colleagues, but above all, oriented towards the citizens, that one way of another, have placed in our hands the legacy of the artist.

6.- Planning

So as to know where we are going and how to get there, both in terms of time and resources.

7.- Teamwork

There is nothing, or almost nothing that can be done alone.  We always need to work in agreement with the rest of our colleagues, both to enrich ourselves, as well as being complementary in collaborating what we can contribute to the projects of the others.

8.- Imagination

Coordination, planning, being demanding… but above all with imagination.  By doing our bit, we can turn the daily routine into something more interesting, enjoyable and different.

9.- Flexibility

Not everything is black or white.  It’s the small details that help us work with others.

10.- Complementarity

No-one is perfect, by definition.  For this reason, what one person doesn’t know, another may know, and where some may not manage to reach, the others may be able to do so!!  It is important to know one’s strengths and weaknesses, and those of the ones we work with!

So far these make up a possible Decalogue of the values which, from my point of view, should be integrated into our day to day work.  It’s not a question of summarising numerous books and courses about museum management, and neither does it aim to invent anything new.  I have just wanted to share with you  these reflections, adding a final point that describes the work I do in the museum.  I understand that management consists of working on fulfilling the Decalogue while at the same time acting as a facilitator so that the ideas become projects, and that these become exhibitions, activities, agreeable spaces, gratifying visits, and all of them signifying a quality contribution to the cultural production of our city.

Núria Fradera
CEO