Picasso
The Seduction of the classic
A hundred and thirty major works made up of paintings, wall hangings, engravings and ceramics from international museums and prestigious private collections, that tell the story of the magnetic personality able to represent the spirit of an age that was Pablo Picasso.
The exhibition is a journey through the themes that are so characteristic of Picasso’s work, from the years when he was learning his trade from 1895 to 1903, through the mythology of the bullfight to the forms and colours of the Mediterranean, which Picasso came to interpret with influences from his stay in Italy in 1917. At that time he studied the ancient Greeks and Romans, while also introducing the triumph of the Spanish tradition in the monumental work that is curtain of the Minotaur's body dressed as Harlequin from 1936, lent to us from its new home in the Les Abattoirs museum in Toulouse. The first section of the exhibition is dedicated to Mediterranean places, in the sense of the images and places the artist had within him, opening with the youthful works painted in Malaga and in Barcelona. One work from this period that stands out from the period of his training was that of the Torso of a Young Man of 1897. The second section focuses on Picasso’s stay in Italy in 1917, which was in time to translate into his attention to the human form.
The central part of the exhibition shows works produced from the early thirties right up to 1960, and includes paintings, drawings, ceramics and engravings, particularly those made in 1957 to illustrate the classic manual of José Delgado, La Tauromaquia, which was published in 1959.
The fourth and final section looks at the forties, which critics regard as the period of his “return to the Mediterranean”, revealing some little known aspects of the multi-faceted personality of the Spanish master. The works have come from the Picasso museum in Barcelona, Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Picasso museum Paris, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and from Toulouse, Antibes and Malaga.
