16th 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 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 »

11th 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 »

1st 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 »

2nd October 2009

What will be doing at the Museu Picasso for the 2009-2010 season

Last Monday the Museum presented its new programme for the 2009/2010 season in an incomparable location – the renovated Las Meninas Room.

Before presenting the program and the exhibitions calendar, the Director, Pepe Serra, stressed two basic ideas that underpin the Museum’s lines of actuation. Firstly, the idea of complexity and heterogeneity: ‘We must bear in mind that audiences have changed and diversified a great deal while museums have remained very static,‘ Pepe Serra said at the press conference. Society has changed and museums need to evolve accordingly. Hence the need for critical reflection in order to make the Museum’s programmes more complex and more heterogeneous, offering different things, but always on the basis of a project, with each one contributing value.

Read more »