31st January 2012

Farewell to Pepe Serra: assessment of a phase

When our director Pepe Serra said goodbye to the team at the Museu Picasso he told us: ‘We have done ten years’ work in five years.’ What follows is a brief summary of some of the projects carried out during his time as director.

· Research and development of exhibitions that contribute knowledge and added value.

“Feasting on Paris. Picasso 1900-1907” (2011). Self-Portrait with Palette, Picasso, Paris, 1906 |  “Picasso Looks at Degas” (2010). Read more »

26th January 2012

The Making of “Picasso 1936. Traces of an Exhibition”

The putting together of “Picasso 1936. Traces of an Exhibition” was a very special challenge. There we were, an art museum, proposing a show containing no original work of any kind: in the words of the curator of this radical venture, Sílvia Domènech, it was a question of creating an exhibition of documents rather than with documents, in order to conceptualize the significance of the Picasso Exhibition held in Barcelona, ​​Madrid and Bilbao in 1936 through analysis of the archives.

Interview with Silvia Domenech, curator of the exhibition Read more »

19th January 2012

The Pieces of a Jigsaw

I’ve always liked books with pictures. When I was little I spent a lot of afternoons on the sofa leafing through one of the few books with photographs that we had at home. Years later I worked as editor on a collection of history books, which were also illustrated, and I remember my boss at the time saying that the combinations of images should speak for themselves.

Provisional and final versions of a page of the second number of the Focus collection”Picasso 1936. Traces of an exhibition” Read more »

17th January 2012

Picasso’s Barcelona Roofs

We are pleased to share with you some excerpts from an article by Francesc Pujols, ‘The Rooftops of Barcelona’, ​​first published in “La Publicidad” on 18 June 1920. Though written a few years after Picasso’s time in Barcelona, when he painted a number of pictures with the city’s rooftops as their theme, the writer seems to be describing some of the works in our collection. We are thankful to the poet Enric Casassess for sending us the article, which came to his mind as he was walking round the Museu Picasso.

Roofs of Barcelona. Pablo Picasso, 1903 Read more »

5th January 2012

With two eyes, a nose and a mouth

‘Overcoming the fear of drawing’, ‘teaching us to see in different ways’, ‘correcting and correcting to make it better’, ‘a lot of ideas and plenty of resources’, ‘a framework of contextualized art references’, ‘I had a wonderful time’: these are some of the responses we were given by the teachers at the Pere Vila primary school when we talked over the joint training sessions with the Education Service at the Museu Picasso.

Pere Vila primary school. Photo: Kisa

Read more »

30th December 2011

The Museu Picasso’s 2011 in images

The task of choosing the most representative images of this year that is coming to an end was far from easy. Between us, we have worked on a lot of projects! Exhibitions, activities, research and restoration, education, registrar, library, publications, communications, administration, visitor services… it’s a long list. Here, then, is just a taste of what the museum has done in 2011.

Read more »

23rd December 2011

My experience in California after the Museum Management postgrad

After completing the Postgraduate course in Museum Management: how to make a museum work, run by the Museu Picasso and IDEC-UPF, I did my postgraduate practice in the Museu Picasso. During the four months I was there my work focused on studying the museum in its environment, in relation to the surrounding neighbourhoods, in the context of Ciutat Vella as a district with a lot of history, which conditions its cultural present. This search for information reflected the museum’s commitment to developing a strategy that embraces policies of proximity and the importance of working with the local community around it.

Yerba Buena Family Day:  Children’s Creativity Museum, MOAD Read more »

20th December 2011

Conference on decorative printed paper at Museu Picasso

The presentation of the process of restoring the Palau Aguilar’s 16^th-century polychrome printed wallpaper recovered in 2010 (see the article on the website) was a perfect opportunity for a professional get-together on Monday the 12th.

The director of the Museu Picasso, Pepe Serra, opened the conference with a reminder of the important contribution made by technical expertise (materials, creative processes, etc) in the documentation not only of the museum’s collections and also of its buildings.

Restoring the Palau Aguilar’s ceiling Read more »

15th December 2011

Accessibility for All

This month we attended the conference on Culture and Social Responsibility ‘3.0 Communication and Total Accessibility’, organized by the Museu Marítim de Barcelona. With the participation of experts, people with disabilities and developers of associated technologies, the conference dealt with some of the keys to achieving a ‘virtual/digital’ world without barriers.

Although great advances have been made, much remains to be done and our cultural institutions have a crucial role to play in facilitating access to culture for everyone. In this article we will focus on the issue of accessibility in relation to the web.

Read more »

12th December 2011

Picasso for everyone: tailoring our workshop visits for children with cerebral palsy

Throughout the month of November the museum’s Education Service ran a new pilot programme to enable children with cerebral palsyto take part in our special workshop visits.

A few months ago twoteachersfrom the Escola Nadís SCS school, Llum Tormo and Maria Traid, contacted us to ask about the possibility of adapting the content of the activities we offer to schools to cater to the specific needs and abilities of their students, and in particular of two groups, one aged between 10 and 19 and the other of children aged from 4 to 10.

Workshop at the room Las Meninas Read more »