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 »

Share

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.

Read more »

Share

Doctoral Thesis on Picasso’s Iconography

On Monday, November 9, the doctoral thesis ‘Picasso’s Iconography between 1905 and 1907. The Influence of Pompeian Painting’ by Conchita Boncompte, and supervised by Dr. Lourdes Cirlot, was read at the Universitat de Barcelona.

The thesis sets out to demonstrate the influence of Pompeian painting on the work Picasso produced between 1905 and 1907, an influence that was supported by and engaged in dialogue with Picasso’s milieu and his experience of Catalan Romanesque from his stay in Gósol. The highly stimulating presentation of this study, which runs to more than 700 pages, and promises to open up new avenues of research, has already prompted many to wish that it be made accessible to a wider readership.

It would be an impossible task to summarize here the wealth of research and visual information put forward in the session, and we have therefore asked the author herself to give us a brief extract:

Read more »

Share

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.

Read more »

Share

Museu Picasso 2.0: A space for conversation

Welcome to the Museu Picasso de Barcelona, and welcome to the blog!

Our and your museum is the result of Picasso’s desire to leave something of himself to the city of Barcelona, where he served his apprenticeship and spent several extended stays. We are proud to say that the people of Barcelona have a truly exceptional museum, created by the artist’s express wish. The Museu Picasso in Barcelona is undoubtedly the centre of reference for understanding Pablo Picasso’s formative years up to his Blue Period. The collection then makes a chronological leap forward to 1917, when the artist returned to the city, and then again to 1957, with the complete series of Las Meninas.

Read more »

Share