27th May 2013

This spring’s changes to the Collection

During this month of May we are carrying out new changes in the works exhibited in the Collection. In some cases, as for example the works on paper, the changes are being done for reasons of preventive conservation, but we are also taking advantage of these modifications to be able to show all the wealth of the Collection following a coherent expositive discourse and bringing to light works which perhaps are not so well known from these periods of Picasso.

Visitors in the galleries of the Collection

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9th May 2013

Narration of the arrival of Las Meninas to the museum by Lluís Permanyer

On this day, back in 1968, Las Meninas series, donated by Picasso, came to the museum. The journalist and essayist Lluís Permanyer tells us:

To have managed to be the first to publish the big news about the donation of the Picassian Las Meninas to Barcelona deserves an explanation.

Las Meninas. Pablo Picasso 1957. Oil on canvas. 194 x 260 cm. MPB 70.433 | Las Meninas (Isabel de Velasco). Pablo Picasso, 17/11/1957. Oil on canvas. 24 x 19 cm. MPB 70.484

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29th April 2013

Inhabitants of the museum: Aunt Pepa

Josefa Ruiz Blasco, born in 1825, was the aunt of Pablo Picasso and the eldest of the eleven brothers and sisters of the Ruiz Blasco family. She lived with her sister and brother Matilde and José (Picasso’s father) in the Plaça de la Merced of Malaga until he got married and then she went to live with her youngest brother Salvador. The death of Josefa coincided with the days of the last visit of Picasso to Malaga, in 1901.

Josefa Ruiz Blasco Ricardo Huelin Collection | Pablo Picasso. Portrait of Aunt Pepa. Malaga, June-July 1896. Oil on canvas.57.5 x 50.5 cm. Donationby Pablo Picasso, 1970. MPB 110.010

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16th April 2013

IV “Picasso in Words” Award

What story do you think lies behind some of Picasso’s works? Barcelona’s Picasso Museum and the UOC’s lletrA project invite you to take part in the “Picasso in Words” micro-story writing competition.

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11th April 2013

From Picasso “Pour Sabartés”

When Anna Guarro and I sat down in February to programme the series of articles of the blog dedicated to the 50 years of the Museum, these lines were not foreseen.  Well, what I mean to say is that personally I hadn’t thought about writing anything else about Sabartés. It was Anna’s idea, who proposed writing a text entitled “Pour Sabartés”. Sincerely, initially it seemed to me that perhaps there was already enough with so much Sabartés, but it’s clear, “What the boss says, goes” (with all my affection, Anna), so I took the idea on board and decided I would think about it in April.  And now that I’ve sat down to write, I have to say that, after doing the exhibition and the booklet about the origins of the Museu Picasso, where I have tried to be as objective as possible, and having written the blog entry about the papers of Sabartés, from which the “dedication” and affect that Sabartés had towards Picasso emerges, I can now see that this could be the opportunity to let my intuition run free and to try and transmit how I feel the “dedication” of Picasso towards Sabartés.
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3rd April 2013

The lizards of Juan Marsé in the Reading Club

Testimony of the years in which Rabos de lagartija is situated (Lizard tails, the novel by Juan Marsé which was the focus of the latest session of our Reading Club) the professor and poet Lluís Izquierdo led us through the Barcelona of the Franco period like an authentic guide.

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27th March 2013

Anecdotes and impressions of the 50th anniversary

On Saturday March 9th the Museu Picasso celebrated the 50th anniversary of its inauguration. Quite a milestone, particularly if we take into account the Barcelona of 1963 and the political environment of the time.

Placement of the plaque of the Museu Picasso. c. 1966. Photo: Hernández

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12th March 2013

The early Picasso in Malaga

The Museo Picasso Málaga has just inaugurated an exhibition entitled “Picasso of Malaga. Earliest works”, curated by Rafael Inglada, which looks into the ties between Picasso and his city of birth. This exhibition has been organized with the support and collaboration of the Museu Picasso, Barcelona.

The exhibition brings together 53 works by Picasso, most of which are from his childhood and early youth, along with a selection of works from his later years that reveal how Malaga left a mark on his work.  Furthermore, it includes 35 works by other artists settled in Malaga at the end of the 19th century and more than 100 documents that recreate how the city was at that time.

Exhibition galleries. Photo: Jesús Domínguez © Museo Picasso Malaga

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6th March 2013

Sabartés, that great friend

The Museu Picasso will be fifty years old. On this occasion we will publish in our blog a series of articles that commemorate this event and that get the museum’s trajectory closer to the citizens.  There were many people who worked together and fought hard to make the dream come true of opening a museum dedicated to the artist in Barcelona, the city with which Picasso felt closely tied. And there are also many anecdotes which built up this story.  Through these people and the anecdotes, we would like to narrate our history.

We start this series talking about one of the key figures in the formation process of the Museum: Jaume Sabartés (Barcelona, 1881 – Paris, 1968), personal secretary and great friend and confidant of Picasso.

Picasso and Sabartés

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22nd February 2013

Between notaries and artists in the Reading Club

With Claustre Rafart, who has studied the history of this museum, the latest session of the club focused on one of the most surprising figures of Barcelona from the second half of the 20th century, the notary Raimon Noguera. Because the reading that brought us together this time was precisely, El notari Raimon Noguera i el llegat de Picasso, Miró i Pau Casals (The notary Raimon Noguera and the legacy of Picasso, Miró and Pau Casals), by Agustí Pons, the biography of this deluxe secondary player, discrete and efficient, that enabled the fact that the foundations of three universal Catalans would be inaugurated in Barcelona, that being pro-Franco, was adverse.

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