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.

The work of extending the Museum. Photo: Josep Maria Llobet

Last week the big tower crane that will be used to construct the building was set up. The current estimate for completion of the work is about eleven months, and it is expected that by the spring of next year the Museum’s Education Services and the Centre for Documentation and Research will be fully operational in their new home on the Plaça Jaume Sabartés.

The work of extending the Museum. Snowing…

Museum’s newsroom

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. But, I’d disagree: if you want to have a good presence there you need to have some tweet-strategy that fits into the general museum strategy and post interesting and motivating tweets, as well as react promptly to your followers’ tweets or DMs. Using Twitter just as a dissemination channel of your activities I think is a poor use of its potentialities. And if you decide to follow other museums and professionals (some museums follows none) it’s a daily task to add to many others. Furthermore, the use of Twitter six months ago in Catalonia and the rest of Spain was much smaller than it is now.

So, and this answers the third question, we decided we were now ripe to start an active Twitter presence. So far we’ve posted 172 tweets and we’ve reached almost 800 followers. The Twitter widget on the left sidebar of this blog acts as a good dissemination channel, as well. We hope the @museupicasso account will keep growing, step by step, both in numbers and in interaction.

Data on 4th March 2010: 795 followers, 135 lists

Too late? I hope not, because although I’ve read on Brian Solis’s blog, The Twitter Star: Nova or Supernova? that Twitter is down, and shows statistics confirming its use is dropping, in our country (and I think in  general in Europe) we are still on our way up. For the Museums and the Web Conference next April, I’d say that we will still have a widespread tweetering, thus continuing the dramatic growth it experienced in 2009 edition.

I’ve been tweeting for months on behalf of the museum as @innova2. This has given us a taste of the platform. And I can tell that for me Twitter is now my first and most important source of info and knowledge on museums and social networking.

Conxa Rodà
Project Manager

What will Twitter’s future be? What do you think?

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.

Pablo Picasso. The Offering. Paris 1980. Guache on cardboard paper with white
primer. 30,8 x 31,1 cm. Donated by Lord Amulree, 1985. MPB 112.716

The discovery of African art and the inclusion of Cézanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses (1899-1906) in the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1907 had an immediate impact on the work of young artists looking for new forms of expression. Like Georges Braque and André Derain, Picasso began making paintings with deliberately schematic, primitive figures, a reflection and synthesis of the compositions of the master from Aix-en-Provence and the formal simplification of African carvings. Friendship, Three Women, Women in the Wood and The offering constituted Picasso’s response to Cézanne’s latest work.

Museu Picasso de Barcelona. The label with the sketch for The Offering (Musée Picasso, Paris)

The Offering celebrates the artist’s reconciliation with his lover Fernande and pays tribute to Cézanne’s few erotic paintings. The first preparatory drawing, on a leaf of a sketchbook dated 1907-1908, shows a reclining woman receiving a bouquet of flowers from a male figure under the watchful eye of an angel. The winged figure has disappeared in the second sketch, and a handwritten annotation in Spanish describing the scene: ‘She is lying on a bed and he / uncovers her lifting the sheet behind the hangings of the / couch and the room, he has / a bouquet of flowers in his / hand’.

Malén Gual
Curator

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.

1 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Forgetting Velázquez. Las Meninas.
2 & 3 Other proposed graphic designs. Jason Ellams

Too classical? Too cryptic? Elegant? Daring? Obvious? Will it be interpreted correctly? Des it tie in with the Museum’s line? Is it going to look dated in a year or two? We ask ourselves these and many other questions in the process of choosing the cover of the new catalogue we are working on.

1 Cover of the exhibition catalogue Secret Images. 2 & 3 Other proposed graphic designs. Nino Cabero

In some cases the selection process can take weeks. On other occasions there is unanimous agreement at the first meeting. We often ask the designers who work with us to put forward a range of options, not to feel confined to putting into visual form an idea that we have given them, and to risk offering us even conflicting alternatives. They have been working on the project for months, so nobody understands better than they do the expressive potential of a particular image or the power of a certain typography. Luckily, we can rely on their patience and professionalism when the choice proves difficult.

But the cover is not just image or typography: it’s something we touch, it’s a fundamental part of the physical body of the book, binding it, defining it, supporting it. The choice of format and materials, whether it’s a paperback or hardback, whether or not it has a jacket… whether to put the title on the spine, and if so, how… whether or not to commission a text for the back cover… All of these things have their own particular significance, each one means something and is sure to generate a lot of very different responses among the visitors to our exhibitions who buy our catalogues.

Marta Jové
Publications

Do you think we made a good choice? Which cover would you have chosen?

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.

[...] We come at last to the fourth promiscuity, that of history, and here we arrive, finally, at Picasso.

To speak of appropriationism in Picasso’s Las Meninas is to refer to something inexact and excessively partial. At the same time, to speak of variation is to focus exclusively on a way of working that is neither a part of Picasso’s legacy nor even a distinguishing feature of his art.

I have been invited to talk about this series of pictures and I have to confess to you - and I’m not joking - that I scarcely understand them. I wish I were John Berger, but unfortunately for you I’m not, so instead I shall try to put forward a series of ideas that the Las Meninas series suggests to me and that I would like to share with you.

The first idea is that Las Meninas makes me think of an adolescent diary, one of those diaries in which someone writes down everything that happens to them and then, years later, manifest themselves as a repository of psychological skirmishes and emotional swings. Those leaps from the inconsequential to the structural, from the anecdotal to the defining are somehow to be found in these paintings. I intuit in these gestures a certain didactic spirit, as if Picasso in 1957 had wanted to learn something from Velázquez. And of course we learn as much from things that are almost meaningless as from that which is important. We learn by opposition, testing out the limits of things, what their ends are.

The second idea is that when we look at Picasso’s Las Meninas we do not see Velázquez either reinterpreted or deconstructed. Nor, I would go so far as to say, do we see Picasso. What we see is simply a way of looking at a picture. That may not seem very epic, but in fact it can be extremely important. A lot has been said about the stillness of Velázquez’s paintings, that ‘lack of air’ Cortázar referred to in relation to Velázquez and also to Mondrian. If this is true - and surely in some sense it is - Picasso managed to bring Las Meninas to life, to extract from them whatever impenetrable icon they have within them.

The third idea is that after looking and learning, Picasso ‘popularized’ Velázquez’s Las Meninas and in so doing somehow humanized them, rescuing this wonderful picture from the reverential discourses of art history, from the fetishism of the museums, from the indiscriminate fascination of the masses and even from the deranged gaze of contemporary artists like Jeff Wall or Alfredo Jaar.

The fourth and last idea is rather wicked. I don’t think of Picasso as a ‘humanitarian’ artist, so I cannot see this operation of his of looking at, learning from and humanizing Velázquez as some felicitous school exercise. I feel, rather, that Picasso was ‘coming on to’ the history of painting, to use an old expression; he was flirting: he was, in short, being promiscuous. I will name no names, but there are artists who make a moral and aesthetic currency of consistency, and there are others who centre what they do on infidelity, on the disorganized, the incoherent, the rhapsodic.  I do not mean this as an indictment of romanticism or an apology for rapture. Many years ago, when I was younger and was studying art history, I had absolutely no interest in Picasso because I thought of him as ‘antiquated’, because he was a painter whom everyone liked and because every year, at Christmas, the Caixa de Sabadell gave you an illustrated book about Picasso. Today, however, he seems to me to be an artist who merits serious analysis, set free of all the stereotypes that have been landed on him. As you see, this talk is also an act of infidelity, another gesture promiscuous.

Valentín Roma

Art historian, exhibition curator and professor of aesthetics and digital culture

What does Picasso’s Las Meninas suggest to you?

Do you think of it as a tribute to Velázquez, an apprenticeship, a reinterpretation, an exercise of freedom?

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.

In his appraisal of Rodney Graham’s career, Bartomeu Marí, Director of the MACBA, emphasizes his exploration of the conventions of contemporary art, such as those that have to do with the figure of the artist. He has often included himself as a figure in his works, depicting stereotypes of artists in sophisticated settings. Among other conventions he has addressed are those that come to light in the contrasting of high culture and popular culture, which sometimes feed into one another and mirror wider social and cultural conventions.

The exhibition, curated by Friedrich Meschede, is articulated into a series of areas: a  library/archive zone that explores the artist’s engagement with literature; an installation that, evoking the title of the exhibition, Through the Forest, presents light as an element of salvation; several rooms devoted to Graham’s photographs, films and videos, some of which have not been shown for many years, dealing with instances of appropriation and relation between popular and high culture, and a section that explores identity and the figure of the artist. The exhibition concludes with the series of paintings Picasso, My Master, from 2005: a process of reflection on the limitations of conceptual art, the field in which he has always inscribed his work, Graham began to explore the languages of painting, taking as his referent the work of Pablo Picasso.

Where this exhibition ends, another proposal begins, this time at the Museu Picasso. Starting from the idea of a dialogue with works by Picasso, Graham has created Possible Abstractions, a specific project for the Museum. On the basis of a comic strip from a 1950s magazine that touches on questions about the meaning of contemporary art and stereotypes in avant-garde art, the artist takes a decidedly ironic and humorous look at the language of abstraction, invoking too the drawings that Pablo Picasso did on the pages of similar magazines, a number of which are in the Museu Picasso collection.

This is a new venture for us, the first time we have included work by a living artist in the programme of the Museu Picasso, and we are very happy to have done so in association with the MACBA and with the personal involvement of Rodney Graham. We hope you’ll come and visit the show and we would love to hear your comments.

Anna Guarro

Public Programmes

What do you think about the Museu Picasso showing work by living artists?

• See photos of the installation at the Museu Picasso
• Download PDF booklet (in Catalan/Spanish/English)

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.

As part of the basis of our work, I have made a list of the basic concepts which are fundamental for the good running of a museum.  Because, overall, the most important thing for carrying out the task that we are charged with as a museum centre - to collect, conserve and spread, is the fact that the team of people, each at their level, fulfil with the greatest possible efficacy and efficiency their responsibility.

These values are:

1.- Organisation

Tasks defined with balanced work responsibilities, explicit procedures so as to be able to work with security.

2.- Information

Information structured to the maximum so as to enable the decision-making by each and every one of those who work in the museum.  The dynamism of the information, both upward and downward, is a key element in terms of the success of the coordination.

3.- Trust

In the professionalism of the team.  Everyone has to be responsible for their work by searching for mechanisms of self-evaluation, and by being accountable to the person to whom they depend.

4.- Complicity

Those who work in the museum have to feel they are part of the project.  A complicity that isn’t exempt from a critical spirit, thus making sure the project progresses and improves.

5.- Being demanding

In terms of a job well done, towards ourselves, and towards the rest of our colleagues, but above all, oriented towards the citizens, that one way of another, have placed in our hands the legacy of the artist.

6.- Planning

So as to know where we are going and how to get there, both in terms of time and resources.

7.- Teamwork

There is nothing, or almost nothing that can be done alone.  We always need to work in agreement with the rest of our colleagues, both to enrich ourselves, as well as being complementary in collaborating what we can contribute to the projects of the others.

8.- Imagination

Coordination, planning, being demanding… but above all with imagination.  By doing our bit, we can turn the daily routine into something more interesting, enjoyable and different.

9.- Flexibility

Not everything is black or white.  It’s the small details that help us work with others.

10.- Complementarity

No-one is perfect, by definition.  For this reason, what one person doesn’t know, another may know, and where some may not manage to reach, the others may be able to do so!!  It is important to know one’s strengths and weaknesses, and those of the ones we work with!

So far these make up a possible Decalogue of the values which, from my point of view, should be integrated into our day to day work.  It’s not a question of summarising numerous books and courses about museum management, and neither does it aim to invent anything new.  I have just wanted to share with you  these reflections, adding a final point that describes the work I do in the museum.  I understand that management consists of working on fulfilling the Decalogue while at the same time acting as a facilitator so that the ideas become projects, and that these become exhibitions, activities, agreeable spaces, gratifying visits, and all of them signifying a quality contribution to the cultural production of our city.

Núria Fradera
CEO

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.

1. The Director Plan 2010-2013 to be completed and put into practice
2. The Scientific / Advisory Board of the Museum to be constituted
3. To progress with the works of the new building for Knowledge and Research
4. To produce the Rodney Graham, Rusiñol, Degas exhibitions
5. To produce two monographic displays: one about the Picasso exhibition in the Sala Esteva in Barcelona in 1936 and another about Science and Charity
6. To plan the new presentation of the collection
7. To enlarge the collection of works and the archive collection
8. To start the first programmes of Knowledge and Research
9. To widen the educational programme
10. To create and put into practice the Plan of Accessibility
11. To elaborate a new guide of the collection and audio-guides
12. To complete and spread the analytical and radiographic study of the collection
13. To complete the online collection
14. To enrich and boost the presence in the social networks
15. To make an audiovisual production about Picasso and Barcelona
16. To initiate a new reasoned catalogue
17. To consolidate the Picassiana network in Catalonia
18. To enlarge the community of members of the Carnet MPB (Picasso Museum of Barcelona Card)
19. To increase the online ticket sales
20. To increase the fund-raising through sponsorship

As with the whole of the selection, we could have included other projects: there are many others which we are currently undertaking that are not on the list, such as, for example loans of works, travelling exhibitions, the formal constitution of the Board of Honour (”historic”), cyclical activities, collaboration with entities and collectives for specific programmes, other new publications, online sales for groups, applications for mobile devices, and possibly a very long etcetera that needs to be assessed, and if necessary, redefined.

I am very grateful to all users, online and onsite visitors, participants in the activities, cooperating entities, and internal and external professionals for the support they give to the museum. Thanks to your energy, your criticisms and your complicity, the museum will continue to grow and improve. I wish you all the best for 2010!

Pepe Serra
Director

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.

We present here a graphic summary in 21 images, 21 aspects or actions of the many that have been carried out, to which the whole team has dedicated a lot of effort and emotion.

All in all, the museum programmed more than 700 activities, followed by 22,000 participants, and received 1,393,357 visits.

1. Open doors to the museum for the city festivities, Mercè 09. Visitors to the room of the Las Meninas, presented with a new museography. Photo: Jordi Mota.

2.- Visit of the new installation of “Las Meninas“, in room 12, along with the drawing of the preparatory sketch by Picasso in 1957, made the day before the start of the series, and generously donated to the museum in 2009 by Catherine Hutin, daughter of Jacqueline Picasso. Photo: Jordi Mota

3.- Pablo Picasso. Sketch for “Las Meninas”. Coloured pencil on paper. MPB 113.292. preparatory sketch by Picasso in 1957, the day before the start of the series, and donated to the museum in 2009 by Catherine Hutin, daughter of Jacqueline Picasso.

4.- Christopher Green, curator of the exhibition, and Pepe Serra, director of the Museum, presenting the exhibition Living Things. Figure and Still Life in Picasso, open until 1^st March 2009, and that received more than 160,000 visitors. Photo: Ronald Stallard.

5.- Exhibition Living Things. Figure and Still Life in Picasso. Photo: Ronald Stallard.

6.- Educational games. In the image, playing an adaptation of the board game Joc de l’oca (similar to Snakes and Ladders) with works from the Museum collection.

7.- Winter workshop: making masks based on the works of Picasso from the museum collection.

8.- Preparing the setting up of the Kees Van Dongen Exhibition. In the image an art restorer analyzing a painting.

9.- A visitor to the Kees Van Dongen exhibition, following the explanations of the professor John Klein. Photo: Lafotografica.

10.- Wood engraving and Japanese paper workshop. In the photo, Tatsuya Mitani orienting the learning of a participant in the workshop. Photo: Jordi Mota.

11.- Meticulous work of a multi-disciplinary team, made up of art restorers specialised in polychrome wood and graphic documents. The intervention of the restoration of the ceiling of the Palau Aguilar has uncovered a rich decorative repertory.

12.- The Mercè 09 festivities in the museum. Photo: Jordi Mota.

13.- Rethinking Picasso. Presentation of the work carried out by the students of the Course of Creative Illustration and Communication Techniques from Eina, School of Design and Art, who interpreted different aspects of the life of the Picasso Museum through illustration.

14.- Application of the fluorescent pistol of X-rays for identifying different metallic elements of a sculpture in bronze.  In the image, a radiographic study of the Picasso sculpture Fernande, from 1906.

15.- Diversity publics of museum. Photo Jordi Mota.

16.- Making the museum accessible to a wide variety of public. The director attending a group of elderly visitors.

17.- Opening of the exhibition Secret Images. Picasso and the erotic Japanese Prints. Palau Finestres. Photo: Ronald Stallard.

18.- A class from the Master’s Degree course that takes place in the museum, from the “Rethinking Picasso” module, within the Master’s Degree The Art of Today, organised jointly with the UAB (The Autonomous University of Barcelona), and attended by students from different countries of Europe and Latin America.

19.- Works for the construction of the new building in the Plaça Sabartés, which will house the Centre for Knowledge and Research. Photo: Josep M. Llobet.

20.- The Night of the Museums, open doors, music and activities to enjoy the early morning hours.

21.- The blog of the museum, that gathers together the various social networks in which the museum is present (Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, Slideshare, Delicious) and which we invite you to share.

You can see these pictures enlarges in the album “Resum Visual del 2009″ / “Visual Summary 2009 of Picasso” on our Flickr channel.

If you want to see video, here we offer you a selection:

-Video of the inauguration of the exhibition Living Things.

-Video of the exhibition Van Dongen.

-Video gallery of Visions of the collection. 

In the next post we will talk about the projects planned for 2010

Conxa Rodà

Project Manager

Have you participated in any of the activities of the museum? What did you like most? What do you think is missing? We’ll appreciate it if you leave your comments here.