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 »

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.

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14th of December 2009

If you can’t come to the museum, the museum will come to you

Getting closer the users, making the museum more accessible, taking the museum where there are public who can’t visit it, are lines that we are working on to open up. Since the beginning of the year at the Museu Picasso we have started, little by little, but surely, to intensify the relation with other entities and collectives of Barcelona. There are various reasons for this: to establish relations with those closest to us, with those who can add value and with those who need it most.

Today we will talk about the collaboration of the Museum with the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, internationally recognised for its specialisation in paediatrics. Since October we have held, once a week, a workshop of masks and storytelling based on the works of Picasso.

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3rd of November 2009

How we chose the winners of Become a Fauvist and more about the process of the competition on Flickr.

It’s now three months since 30 July when we threw ourselves into this photo initiative in parallel with the Kees van Dongen exhibition of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and last week the short-listed pictures in the Become a Fauvist competition were posted up on Facebook and Flickr. Now, on the blog, we’d like to let you share the sensations of those three months of competition and, above all, show you the winning photos and some of the runners-up.

Become a Fauvist was exciting for us: this was the first interactive experience that we have organized with your help and your contributions. Using Flickr we were able to enjoy this participation to the full, and thanks to your enthusiastic response to the initiative - and taking advantage of the city festivities - extended the competition an extra week to give those of you who still hadn’t snapped the photo you were looking for a little more time.

The jury responsible for selecting the finalists and the winners was made up of the Director of the Museum and the heads of the following departments: Publications, Press and Communication, Photographic Archive and Internet.

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30th of October 2009

Making Museums More Accessible

How can we help blind people see art? Is there a way for people with impaired hearing to hear the power of artistic expression? How can we enable a person with a mental disability get the most out of art? In short, how can we improve access to museums and exhibitions for everyone? These and many more issues were the subject of a very intense Conference Day on 26 October, devoted to learning about and discussing the lines of work and the experiences of art museums to become more accessible. The venue: Gaudi’s building, La Pedrera. The speakers and audience: museum professionals and representatives of various disabled people’s associations.

The findings will be presented at the Museums Workshops: Culture and Best Practices. Accessibility and Inclusion to be held in the Museu Marítim de Barcelona from 4 to 6 November. The following is only a summary of some of the presentations.

A lot of us were looking forward to hearing the speaker from the MoMA, and no one was disappointed. Francesca Rosenberg, Director of Community and Access Programs in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Education, gave a clear and complete exposition of the many initiatives they are involved in, such as

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27th of October 2009

The Sound of Painting

Has it ever occurred to you that we can listen to a painting?

A starting point: Picasso’s 1897 painting Science and Charity. A sound intervention. This is the proposal developed by playwright Victòria Szpunberg and sound engineer Lucas Ariel as part of the programme Seen by… Visions of the Museum’s Collection this October, putting forward a new critical vision and personal appreciation of Picasso and his work. Far removed from conventional readings and art-historical interpretations of the artist, this fresh, unusual, daring, experimental proposal presented itself as the starting point for a possible investigation into the ’sound painting’. It has proved interesting for many reasons.

Szpunberg and Ariel start with a picture from the artist’s early academic period, a religious subject that is perhaps not one of his most outstanding works, and by means of a peripheral figure, an invalid, a model, a woman of little significance in Picasso’s life and work, and establish a narrative discourse in sound.

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7th of October 2009

‘Become a Fauvist’: The Voting Has Started

The big day is here! Are you ready to vote for your favourite photo? A little more than two months after the announcement of the Museum’s ‘Become a Fauvist’ competition, organized by our official Flickr community group to coincide with the Kees van Dongen exhibition, the time has come to start the vote.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support and participation, because we’re delighted to say that your response to the competition was extraordinary - so extraordinary that we had to extend it by an extra week! You sent in almost 300 photos to our first-ever competition on Flickr, with the theme of ‘Become a Fauvist’. The basic idea was that the colours should be the dominant element in the photograph, and that you should experiment, using your imagination and creativity to pay a small personal tribute to Fauve art.

In the first place, we want to congratulate all of you who took part - the quality of your pictures deserves the highest praise, as you can see below:

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2nd of October 2009

What will be doing at the Museu Picasso for the 2009-2010 season

Last Monday the Museum presented its new programme for the 2009/2010 season in an incomparable location - the renovated Las Meninas Room.

Before presenting the program and the exhibitions calendar, the Director, Pepe Serra, stressed two basic ideas that underpin the Museum’s lines of actuation. Firstly, the idea of complexity and heterogeneity: ‘We must bear in mind that audiences have changed and diversified a great deal while museums have remained very static,‘ Pepe Serra said at the press conference. Society has changed and museums need to evolve accordingly. Hence the need for critical reflection in order to make the Museum’s programmes more complex and more heterogeneous, offering different things, but always on the basis of a project, with each one contributing value.

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27th of May 2009

The Night of the Picasso

Saturday, 16 May saw the latest Night of Museums, an initiative promoted by the Council of Europe, which for the last five years has provided us with the exceptional opportunity to discover and visit more than 2,000 museums all over Europe between 7.00 p.m. and 1 a.m.

In Barcelona 27 different museums took part, with audio-visuals, cinema, concerts, perfomance art, guided visits, readings… on a Saturday night… and for free!

Who goes to a museum at night? Who caught that cultural Saturday Night Fever? Here is our report on The Night of the Picasso.

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