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.

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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

Art exhibitions, a plural work

Monday 30th November was the culmination of the course, “History of exhibitions. Beyond the ideology of the white cube”, that began at the Macba on 19^th October, and that two of us, the technical staff of the Museu Picasso, have followed.

One of the aims of the course was to take a trip through the history of exhibitions, more than just that of singular works of art. Based on the definition of an exhibition as “a perceptive disposition in itself, a machine for seeing, and an act of learning”, artists, critics and curators, have reflected on seven exhibitions from the second half of the 20^th century that marked a change in the way of presenting works of art within a space, and therefore the way of looking at them.

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5th of November 2009

Revealing Secrets

Organizing an exhibition tends to be an arduous process, but at the same time a very rewarding one for the people involved. For curators and coordinators, the lengthy task of selecting the works that support the thesis, tracking these down and arranging the necessary loans usually brings both joys and disappointments. Each success is greeted with enthusiasm, even euphoria, but every refusal comes as a let-down, damping the whole team’s spirits.

In putting together the show Secret Images. Picasso and Japanese Erotic Prints, the disappointments have been few and the joys many. On the strength of our perception of certain compositional similarities between Picasso’s late erotic works and Japanese prints, and with the idea of ‘rethinking Picasso’ - a key line of action for the Museum at present - we set out to shed light on how Picasso responded to a style of image-making that exercised a significant influence on many Western artists in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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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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8th of September 2009

Only a few weeks left to Become a Fauvist in the Museu Picasso competition on Flickr

October 4 is the new closing date for sending in your photos to the competition we are organizing on Flickr, the photography social network that lets you share pictures with other internet users. Specifically, we are looking for images in which the emphasis is on colour, and inviting you to send in up to a maximum of 5 photos, inspired by the art of the Fauves, to coincide with the current exhibition of work by the Dutch artist Kees van Dongen at the Museu Picasso.

So far quite a number of ‘Fauvist’ artists have been inspired to take part in this latest initiative launched by the Museum. To date the group boasts more than 70 participants from around the world, ranging from Catalonia to Germany to Japan and the USA, who together have submitted over 200 snapshots: colours, colours and more colours, in dazzling contrast, embracing the most original and diverse moments and motifs, in the form of landscapes, travel photos, abstract art… there are no limits! These are just a taster.

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29th of July 2009

A very well-spent morning in Provence: a visit to the exhibition and to Picasso’s Château

Yes, it was a wonderful double visit. First, the exhibition Picasso Cézanne at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, and then on to the Château de Vauvenargues where Picasso lived from 1959 to 1961 and installed his personal collection and his studio.

Picasso Cézanne brings together a superb collection of works from museums around the world. It seems to me that the show opens up a very interesting debate, because I think it is an excellent example of an exhibition intended to attract what is called ‘the general public’ and perhaps less likely to appeal to the experts. Let me make it quite clear here that I am no expert on Picasso’s work. My field of “expertise” is communication and the Internet. But after two and a half years working at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, we can perhaps assume that my knowledge of Picasso is a little more extensive than that of the average member of the public, and I think this is explains the two sets of impressions I brought away from my visit to the exhibition Picasso Cézanne.

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15th of July 2009

‘Wild’ (fauve) is probably the word that best defines the picture the Museum is currently using to publicize its Kees Van Dongen exhibition, but how was the image that is the leitmotif of the campaign chosen?

The choice of image for a communication campaign is a process based on a relationship of complicity involving the Museum’s Director, the Exhibitions Department, the curators, the Publications Department and the Photography Archive, all of whom take part in a process that begins at the moment that the decision is made to put on the show.

The communication campaigns of the Museu Picasso de Barcelona are not off-the-peg but tailor-made haute couture. In saying this I am not being elitist but simply descriptive, because there are a great many factors to be fine-tuned and the best options must be chosen in each case. Communicating exactly the right message is not easy, and the responsibility to show to its best advantage what others have created is the main priority: we are the medium, and we have to bring out the most interesting aspects of each project.

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12th of June 2009

The Explosion of Colour: Van Dongen in Barcelona

Lovers of Fauvism and of art in general will want to visit the Museu Picasso in Barcelona for the first ever retrospective in Spain of the work of Kees van Dongen (Rotterdam, 1877 - Monaco, 1968), which offers a whole new perspective on the artist thanks to the findings of important recent research, and presents a number of hitherto all-but-unknow works.

This retrospective, opened from 11 June to September 2009, co-produced by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and the Museu Picasso de Barcelona and curated by Jean-Michael Bouhours, former curator of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and currently director of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Pepe Serra, director of the Museu Picasso, brings together almost 80 works by Van Dongen and four by Picasso, as testimony to the relationship between the two artists.

Photo of Fernande Olivier. Caption: One of the points of contact between Van Dongen and Picasso was a woman: Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s companion, who modelled for both artists.

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