22nd of July 2010

Picasso’s Cadaqués

This July sees the opening in the Museu de Cadaqués of the exhibition “Picasso’s Cadaqués: the Centenary of Pablo Picasso’s Stay in Cadaqués 1910-2010″. Curated by Pere Vehí and Ricard Mas, the show boasts an impressive selection of photographs, drawings and oil paintings by artists associated with the little town of Cadaqués. Read more »

16th of July 2010

An Unforgettable Evening: Satie’s music fills the Museum’s rooms and courtyards

A few days ago we presented a thoroughly out-of-the-ordinary activity at the Museu Picasso: as a complement to the current “Picasso vs. Rusiñol” exhibition, which among other things touches on the friendship of both artists with the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925), we put on a special performance of the complete repertoire of Satie’s compositions for piano.

That last fact alone is enough to make it clear that this was no ordinary concert: having assembled all of the works for piano, some of which were very difficult to get hold of, the recital lasted almost six hours! Read more »

7th of July 2010

The fleeting puzzle of Picasso’s The Embrace. The story of a discovery

The history of this discovery has two dates, 2004 and 2010. In the summer of 2004, during a visit to the Diocesan Museum in Barcelona to see the exhibition “Els 4 Gats. From Casas to Picasso”, I first saw a very unusual drawing by Picasso, on loan from a private collection. The work was presented as if it were complete and was in the form of a vertical strip, long and narrow (59 x 12.6 cm), on which only a building and a carriage could be discerned. The medium was pastel, in vibrant tones. Surprising and little known as the work was, there could be no doubt it was a picasso. Read more »

28th of June 2010

The students ‘open up’ Las Meninas! Joint Venture between the Escola Deià and the Museu Picasso

On Thursday, 17 June the Museu Picasso hosted the presentation of the book LAS MENINAS # SÈRIE OBERTA, the result of collaborative venture between the Museum and the Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny Deià. The story begins with an invitation to the city’s art schools with the aim of opening the doors of the Museum and generating dialogues with young design students, encouraging them to take a fresh and freely critical look at the institution.

The Escola Deià, which specializes in interior design and ephemeral architecture, centred the project on the exhibition concept, with a particular focus on the series Las Meninas, one of the most important works in the Museum’s collection. Read more »

22nd of June 2010

“Picasso Looks at Degas” opens in the USA: this autumn, the only European headquarters in the Museu Picasso Barcelona!

On 12 June the museum of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute inaugurated the American phase of the exhibition “Picasso Looks at Degas“, which will have its unique presentation in the European Museu Picasso from 14 October.

The Clark Institute is a highly prestigious museum and centre for research in the history of art in Williamstown (Massachusetts), in the heart of New England. Just a couple of hours north of New York City, the town hosts a wealth of cultural activities during the summer, and the opening, part of the annual Summer Gala, brought together over 300 people in the Clark’s lovely gardens. Read more »

11th of June 2010

The Cannibal Gaze: Picasso swallows up Rusiñol

Would you like to know the story behind the current exhibition at the Museu Picasso? The show’s curator reveals some of the choices and decisions in the process of conceptualizing and staging the exhibition Picasso vs. Rusiñol.

The exhibition narrative

The idea of this exhibition is to establish a discourse on the relationship between Picasso and the leading exponent of Catalan art when Picasso was living in Barcelona, Santiago Rusiñol. Although Picasso’s links to Catalan art are well known, very little has been written specifically about the relations between the two men, a circumstance which made a considerable amount of original research necessary. Read more »

3rd of June 2010

At the Picasso Museum We Want to Create Community Spirit! We Explain Our First Project in Collaboration with Schools in La Ribera

At the Education Service of the Picasso Museum we have developed our first neighbourhood project over the 2009-2010 school year, a proposal for collaboration with the educational institutions attended by the children who are our neighbours. Our primary aim is to offer the museum as an educational resource for primary and secondary schools in La Ribera for them to use it as a starting point for exploring their reality, as well as work with Picasso in a cross-disciplinary way.

The programme is designed to offer proposals which vary in subject matter, format and duration that are suited to the realities of each institution. We also want to incorporate an artist into the process of designing the project and developing it, since working with contemporary artists contributes modern languages, familiarises the students with creation processes and enables Picasso’s work to be brought into the present. Read more »

1st of June 2010

This year, 2010, is a year of great exhibitions about Picasso’s work!

Throughout 2010 exhibitions about the work of Picasso are taking place around the world; this is a great year for anyone interested in his work.

At present, apart from the temporary exhibition that just opened at the Picasso Museum on the relationship between Picasso and Santiago Rusiñol, the exhibition “Picasso: Peace and Freedom”, on art and politics in Picasso’s work at the Tate Liverpool can be seen, among others. An exhibition on Picasso and the horse has also recently been inaugurated at the Picasso Museum of Málaga, and since last month a major exhibition of the complete collection of Picasso’s work from the museum’s collection has been opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In this same city, an exhibition of Picasso’s engravings can also be seen at the MoMA. Read more »

30th of April 2010

Some of the special Picasso museums are truly unique!

There are a number of museums around Spain specifically devoted to the works of Pablo Picasso, with their own unique monographic collections. Just recently the Museo Picasso-Colección Eugenio Arias in Buitrago de Lozoya (Madrid) celebrated the 25th anniversary of its opening.

The museum and its collection have a fascinating — and moving — story behind them. Eugenio Arias was Picasso’s barber and friend, and he put together this significant collection on the basis of the works given him by the artist during the twenty-six years of their friendship. Read more »

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 »