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 »

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We’ve finally got the Collection online!!!

After more than two years’ hard work it’s a great pleasure to be able to offer a first online version of the database of the Picasso Museum’s catalogue, with more than two thousand works. Making the collection accessible online was one of the major objectives for 2009.

It is difficult to transmit the muddle of mixed feelings: first of all a high degree of satisfaction (almost emotion!), to finally see tangible results for such an effort put in by the whole team who have collaborated and opened up to the public a thorough knowledge about our collection of the works of Picasso. I will mention just a few of the functionalities that the system presents:

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The Why and the How of the New Presentation of Las Meninas

The return of Las Meninas to the museum after being out on loan for the exhibitions Picasso et les maitres, at the Grand Palais in Paris, and Picasso. Challenging the Past, at the National Gallery in London, together with the important gift of a preliminary drawing of the series, has led the Museum to a new presentation of the series of variations on the great painting by Velázquez that Picasso made between August and December 1957.

Our intention has been to respect the will of the artist and faithfully reflect his creative process. According to his friend and biographer Roland Penrose (Roland Penrose, Picasso. His Life and Work, 3rd e., University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1981, p. 434), Picasso was adamant thet the complete series of 58 paintings be kept together. He resolved not to sell any of them, and in order to ensure this unity he donated the whole series to the Museu Picasso of Barcelona in 1968. Interestengly, the artist left a record of the rhythm at which he was working, dating all of the canvases on the back, and even noting the order of execution on the occasions when he painted more than one on the same day. Read more »

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We’ve got something special to celebrate: a brand new addition to the Museu Picasso!

Since last May 26, the Museu Picasso has the only known preparatory sketch for the  Las Meninas series, which reveals how Pablo Picasso conceived and addressed that great work. He made sketch the very day before painting the first canvas in the series.

Thanks to the generosity of Catherine Hutin, the daughter of Jacqueline Picasso, the museum now has the only known sketch of Las Meninas. Catherine is following in her mother’s footsteps in maintaining Pablo Picasso’s close ties with the city of Barcelona.

We know that Picasso shut himself in the studio at La Californie, his villa near Cannes, from 16 August to 30 December 1957 to work on the series Las Meninas, one of the most in-depth analyses ever made of the great painting by Velázquez. We shall very soon be privileged to contemplate the Picasso canvas (been on temporary loan to the National Gallery for the exhibition Picasso.Challenging the Past), dated August 17, 1957, together with the sketch, and delight once more in the artist’s greatness.

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