25th January 2011

A Donation to the Picasso. With a Cat

For all of us at the Museum the greeting card for Christmas 2010 and this new year that has just begun had a star that was foreseeable but at the same time unexpected: a photograph of Pablo Picasso! The unexpected part is that this is an unpublished photograph, the very existence of which was previously unknown.

Pablo Picasso – Vallauris 1954 (donation)

Read more »

12th August 2010

The visitors of Paris museums in images

Like the photo blog about their visitors that came out about the museums of New York, today we dedicate one to the visitors of the museums of Paris, taking advantage of the participation in the Rencontres Web-Musées, which we also write about on the blog. The truth is, a certain amount of time has gone by, and there are so many things to talk about on this blog, that it has stayed on our to-do list. Now that the time for holidays has come, to take and look at photos, we would like to share it with you. Read more »

22nd 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 »

3rd 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 »

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.

Read more »

19th October 2009

The Digital Image in the Museu Picasso: a Project in Collaboration with the University

On the 7th and 8th of October I attended as a representative of the Museu Picasso at the two lectures by Carles Mitjà, a professor at the UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), spoke at the Working Sessions on the control of image quality at the Sonimag photo & multimedia fair. I am still asking myself how I, with my very limited knowledge of the digital image, came to be taking part in a speech full of algorithms on digital image quality… This is, then, a story of collaboration and mutual enrichment.

When I joined at the Museu Picasso just over a year ago the Director expressed his very real concern about the issue of ‘photography’ in the Museum. Despite my background of 14 years working in the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona, I remember insisting that I could introduce some degree of order and establish organizational and conceptual criteria, but that what was needed in the twenty-first century was digital images, about which I knew very little. I realized that the Director and I saw eye to eye on this, both of us aware of the importance of the issue for the proper functioning of the Museum, but we were also aware of the magnitude of the tragedy. So with this in mind I set to work.

Read more »

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:

Read more »