2nd of March 2010

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 »

15th of February 2010

Picasso’s Las Meninas

Valentín Roma

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.

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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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16th of November 2009

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:

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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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27th of October 2009

The Sound of Painting

Has it ever occurred to you that we can listen to a painting?

A starting point: Picasso’s 1897 painting Science and Charity. A sound intervention. This is the proposal developed by playwright Victòria Szpunberg and sound engineer Lucas Ariel as part of the programme Seen by… Visions of the Museum’s Collection this October, putting forward a new critical vision and personal appreciation of Picasso and his work. Far removed from conventional readings and art-historical interpretations of the artist, this fresh, unusual, daring, experimental proposal presented itself as the starting point for a possible investigation into the ’sound painting’. It has proved interesting for many reasons.

Szpunberg and Ariel start with a picture from the artist’s early academic period, a religious subject that is perhaps not one of his most outstanding works, and by means of a peripheral figure, an invalid, a model, a woman of little significance in Picasso’s life and work, and establish a narrative discourse in sound.

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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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29th of June 2009

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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27th of May 2009

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.

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