12th March 2013

The early Picasso in Malaga

The Museo Picasso Málaga has just inaugurated an exhibition entitled “Picasso of Malaga. Earliest works”, curated by Rafael Inglada, which looks into the ties between Picasso and his city of birth. This exhibition has been organized with the support and collaboration of the Museu Picasso, Barcelona.

The exhibition brings together 53 works by Picasso, most of which are from his childhood and early youth, along with a selection of works from his later years that reveal how Malaga left a mark on his work.  Furthermore, it includes 35 works by other artists settled in Malaga at the end of the 19th century and more than 100 documents that recreate how the city was at that time.

Exhibition galleries. Photo: Jesús Domínguez © Museo Picasso Malaga

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8th February 2013

Changes in the Collection of the Museu Picasso

It is a well known fact that museums do not permanently exhibit all the works of their collections. For reasons of conservation or due to the curatorial discourse, a large number of drawings and paintings are systematically changed, turning the Collection into a living organism that is renewed and modified non-stop.

Our Collection is very rich in terms of works on paper – drawings and prints, that, for reasons of preventive conservation, oblige us to change them every three or four months. This allows us to exhibit all the works and even the smallest ones, which take on special relevance by being put in context.

Visitors at the galleries of the museum’s Collection

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9th November 2012

The thousand faces of Jacqueline Picasso

On the occasion of the exhibition “Picasso ceramics. Jacqueline’s gift to Barcelona” the museum presents a selection of prints that bear witness to the relation of the artist and the muse.

Jacqueline with black scarf. Picasso, 1959. Lithography: lithographic crayon on zinc, printed on paper
Portrait of a woman II. Picasso, 1955. Lithography: lithographic crayon, with frottage, on transfer paper, transferred to stone, printed on paper

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5th September 2012

Selection of etchings by Picasso

During this summer we have presented in the museum’s rooms a selection of etchings produced by Picasso between 1920 and 1940, which form part of the museum’s collection and are not usually exhibited so as to preserve their conservation.

Minotauromachy. Pablo Picasso, 1935. Etching and scraping.

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3rd May 2012

Talking about Picasso’s Guernica at Montjuïc

The Generalitat de Catalunya’s Memorial Democràtic initiative has organized a series of activities, exhibitions and talks to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Civil War bombing of the civilian population.

Guernica. Pablo Picasso, 1937. Oil on canvas

Although aerial bombardment had been used in previous wars, the Spanish Civil War was the first in which the civilian population was subjected to intensive and continuous attack from the air. First in Euskadi — the Basque Country — and then all over the country, the rebel General Franco’s army and its Italian and German allies systematically bombed defenceless towns and cities behind the lines. This aberrant tactic continued during World War II and culminated in the dropping of the atomic bomb, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then the bombing of the civilian population has been a common practice in almost all wars. Read more »

17th November 2011

Picasso in Tel Aviv

From 17 November 2011 to 20 January 2012 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is hosting the Picasso exhibition “Tauromachy. Works from the Collection of the Museu Picasso Barcelona”. The initiative has come about as part of the cooperation agreement between the Museu Picasso and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), which chose to show Picasso for the first time in Israel, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two states.

Table of registers Read more »

20th October 2011

A Palazzo by the Arno for Picasso

The Palazzo Giulia Rosselmini Gualandi, a magnificent Renaissance mansion on the banks of the Arno, is home to the Fondazzione Palazzo Blu, and is hosting the exhibition “Ho voluto essere pittore e sono diventato Picasso” — I Wanted to Be a Painter and I Became Picasso. This is the first ever show of Picasso’s work in the city of Pisa and it runs from 14 October 2011 to 29 January 2012. The major retrospective brings together some two hundred works, including paintings, drawings, ceramics and etchings, and traces Picasso’s output from 1901 to 1970. The show has been organized and coordinated by the Giunti Arte Mostre e Musei cultural council, and was curated by Claudia Beltrami Ceppi.

Entrance to the exhibition with the Leaning Tower in the background Read more »

17th December 2010

Let’s Explore the Collection: “Science and Charity Revealed”

“Science and Charity Revealed” marks the start of a series of small-format exhibitions or displays designed to offer a ground-breaking and in-depth vision of key works in our collection.

Launching this new approach here at the Museum is Science and Charity (1897), one of the most significant works in the collection and arguably the most representative of Picasso’s formative years. The oil painting Science and Charity marks the culmination of the young painter’s experience of official academic art education in nineteenth-century Spain, and at the same time the point at which he broke away from the influence of his art-teacher father. Accompanied by a selection of works by other artists, background documentation of the period and the results of the latest scientific studies of pigment and composition carried out here at the Museum, this important painting can now be seen as never before. Read more »

26th March 2010

The unseen work involved in putting on an exhibition

Our latest exhibition, Secret Images. Picasso and Japanese Erotic Prints, has been awarded the ACCA Catalan Art Critics’ Association prize in the Historical Research Exhibitions category. The ACCA 2009 Awards ceremony was held on March 23 in the MACBA, where the prize was received by the Museum’s Director, Pepe Serra, and the two curators, Ricard Bru and Malén Gual. This award represents a much-appreciated recognition of our work and a stimulus to undertake further research along similar lines. We almost feel as if we were dreaming. Not only have we learned a lot and had great fun working on this project, but the exhibition has had a very positive reception from critics and public alike and now we have won the prestigious ACCA Prize, which we have collected so excited. Read more »

2nd March 2010

The Offering : a surprise donation to the museum

One of the greatest joys of my professional life was when we learned from the Daily Telegraph of 1 May 1984 about the will of the late Lord Amulree. Basil William Sholto Mackenzie, 2nd Baron Amulree, KBE, FRCP (1900-1983), a leading specialist in geriatrics and chronic illness, President of the Society for the Study of Medial Ethics and Liberal Peer and Whip in the House of Lords from 1955 until 1977, had bequeathed a painting by Matisse to the Tate Gallery, a Monet at the National Gallery of Scotland, a Braque to the Israel Museum in Jersusalem and Picasso’s The Offering to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. It was the English art historian and collector Douglas Cooper (1915-1985) who informed the Museum of Lord Amulree’s wonderful donation and put us in touch with the executors.

Once the legal and tax details had been dealt with, The Offering was shipped to the Museum and presented on 19 November 1985. We on the staff experienced the usual combination of initial surprise and an almost euphoric gratitude felt by any museum receiving a donation, but magnified in this case by our complete lack of personal knowledge of our generous benefactor, the entirely unexpected nature of the legacy and the importance of the work, because the series of drawings and paintings devoted to the subject of the offering is vital to any understanding of the path that led Picasso to the invention of Cubism. This gouache, small in size but very big in significance, and one of the Museum’s most emblematic works, is a paradigm of how Picasso gathered so much from the past and then dynamited it sky high to create his own language. Read more »