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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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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‘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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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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‘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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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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