3rd November 2009

How we chose the winners of Become a Fauvist and more about the process of the competition on Flickr.

It’s now three months since 30 July when we threw ourselves into this photo initiative in parallel with the Kees van Dongen exhibition of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and last week the short-listed pictures in the Become a Fauvist competition were posted up on Facebook and Flickr. Now, on the blog, we’d like to let you share the sensations of those three months of competition and, above all, show you the winning photos and some of the runners-up.

Become a Fauvist was exciting for us: this was the first interactive experience that we have organized with your help and your contributions. Using Flickr we were able to enjoy this participation to the full, and thanks to your enthusiastic response to the initiative – and taking advantage of the city festivities – extended the competition an extra week to give those of you who still hadn’t snapped the photo you were looking for a little more time.

The jury responsible for selecting the finalists and the winners was made up of the Director of the Museum and the heads of the following departments: Publications, Press and Communication, Photographic Archive and Internet.

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7th October 2009

‘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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12th June 2009

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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