12th of March 2010

In the Museu Picasso we tell stories… with imagination

Last Saturday took place the first “Contes i Tocs” that this Spring Patricia McGill will tell to children and their parents within the museum galleries.

This activity was organised by Marta Iglesias from Public Programmes. I wanted to attend both out of professional interest so as to get to know this new offer for the family public, but also, as a mother, to live this experience with my children.

The participants and Patricia met up in the Pati Finestres of the museum, and that was where the story began. Nice blue coloured monsters with three eyes and one leg, started to spring up in everyone’s imagination, while she made us take hold of a rope, and pulling on it, led us round the rooms of the museum until we reached Las Meninas, where we found more monsters, princesses, cats and dogs, vacuum cleaner-coffee machines, piano-boats, and even the Little Prince and Little Red Riding Hood… The children and their parents added bits to the story and she intertwined the stories while offering a different way of looking at the works of Picasso, based on her words and our imagination, both individually and what we constructed together between us. Read more »

8th of March 2010

The work of extending the Museum is now progressing at a good pace

After several months of intense archaeological work occasioned by the discovery of remains of mediaeval and Roman Barcelona just as excavation of the site was getting under way, the construction firm has finally been able to bring in the machines and start work.

At present it seems as if all there is to see is a big hole, but a closer look reveals the structural elements of the building - the pillars, the bearing walls and the entire perimeter. Read more »

3rd of March 2010

The Picasso Museum on Twitter @museupicasso

Yes!!!  We have finally joined Twitter, the social network that we needed to complete the first phase of  our Social Media presence, launched in May 2009. Some of you are maybe wondering, but, weren’t you already on Twitter? And others may ask why weren’t you? Or even , why are you now?

I have answers for all these questions (sort of). The first one is a clear No. And there were several  reasons for that. First, to start small and grow from there. We opened this blog and profiles on Facebook, Delicious, Flickr, Youtube and Slideshare. The most time-demanding for us are the blog and Facebook. Twitter is tricky; it may seem that to post a short message now and then is not much time-consuming. Read more »

2nd of 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 »

15th of February 2010

Love at First Sight: how we select the catalogue’s cover

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. Read more »

15th of February 2010

Picasso’s Las Meninas

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.

Read more »

3rd of February 2010

Current Art Takes its Place in the Museum

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.

Read more »

2nd of February 2010

Best practices in the management of a museum

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.

Read more »

21st of January 2010

20 major projects for 2010 in Museu Picasso

We are starting to carry out a number of ambitious projects for this year. It is possible to take this jump forward due to new lines of action and new services (education, activities, research, internet, publics, etc.) that have taken on form and grown at a good pace. There is still a lot to do, in a social, cultural and economic environment that is permanently changing. The museum, thanks to the effort and professionalism of the whole team, continues on its path towards the aim of positioning itself as a centre with a totally consolidated public vocation for generating knowledge around the figure and work of Picasso at an international level, while at the same time closely linked to the social and organisational networks of the city, and activator of processes of creation.

Below is a list of the major projects that we are working on. Some of them starting and to be completed within the year, while others have a longer time scan, and will start and continue a process that will be completed over the next few years, as is the case of the new reasoned catalogue.

Read more »

20th of January 2010

21 images of what happened in 2009 in the Picasso Museum

Looking back over 2009, what can we say we are proud of? Of the number of visitors? Of course that’s important but not more than other aspects, although naturally we value and are very grateful for the number of visitors we receive.

However, what we really are proud of is the fact of promoting the educational programme, of having produced some temporary exhibitions that, as a result of the research, have contributed new knowledge about the works of Picasso, of having renovated the museographic presentation of the series of Las Meninas, of having restored the ceilings of the Palau Aguilar, of the increase in loans of works to international exhibitions, of having started the works of the new building that will accommodate the new services of Knowledge and Research, of having put the collection online, of having renewed the spaces of security with leading-edge technology,  of having increased the acquisitions of the collection of the museum, of having diversified the offer of activities and with a multi-disciplinary vision, of having actively entered in the social networks or 2.0, of having invited international and national experts to collaborate with the museum.

Read more »