Ocaña, Maria Teresa

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

M U S E U M S  
T H E  PICASSO M U S E U M  
A MUST FOR ALL ART-LOVERS, THIS MUSEUM HOUSES, 
IN A BEAUTIFUL SETTING, ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT 
COLLECTIONS OF PICASSO'S WORK IN THE WORLD. 
he Picasso Museum, in Barcelona, 
housed in three beautiful medie- 
val palaces, is an important centre 
for the study and contemplation of the 
work of one of the leading innovators of 
artistic language of the twentieth century. 
The fact that the Ruiz Picasso family settled 
in our city towards the end of last century 
was the key that opened the way to the 
present museum. In 1970, Pablo Picas- 
so, who had spent his youth in Barcelona 
and maintained links with Catalonia 
throughout his life, made known his wish 
that al1 the artistic work that had been de- 
posited in his sistefs house should be 
added to the collection at the incipient 
Picasso Museum, founded in 1963 thanks 
to an agreement with his friend and secre- 
tary Jaume Sabartés and with the munici- 
pal authorities. 
This museum, then, houses a unique and 
extremely important sample of Picasso's 
work from the formative yean of his 
youth. The bullfight scenes and the doves, 
which he produced in Malaga in 1889 
and 1890, represent Picasso's first steps 
as a child in artistic terraine attempting to 
dominate line, and are a foretaste of the 
artistically mature Picasso who used these 
doves as his symbol and whose bullfight 
scenes became one of the most important 
artistic legacies in the history of twentieth 
century art. 
The exercises carried out in Corunna and 
Barcelona between 1891 and 1896, 
along with the free, spontaneous 
drawings, show a gradual move away 
from academic teaching and the concent- 
ration of al1 his creative energy in a series 
of portraits and landscape sketches 
created in total freedom and in which his 
artistic personality begins to be seen. 
Canvasses such as Primera Comunión 
(1 896), La Tía Pepa (1 896) and Ciencia y 
Caridad (1 897) are the main evidence of 
this part of the artist's production. Later 
on, his connection with the tavern "Els 
Quatre Gats", which between 1897 and 
1903 becarne the epicentre of the 
Catalan artistic avant-garde, is clearly de- 
picted in the series of paintings of his 
various Catalan friends and in the 
sketches for the illustration he did for the 
establishment's menu. 
The varied colours of the paintings he 
produced during his first visits to Paris 
reach a culminating point with La Nana 
and Margot in 1 901, clear examples of 
the lmpressionist style although the dau-  
ling brightness of the colours places them 
M U S E U M S  
in what could be called a Prefauvist line. 
The museum's colledions also contain an 
ample seledion from the artist's "Blue Pe- 
riod". Beiween 1901 and 1 904, Picasso 
produced a series of pajntings in which 
the polychromy of the preceeding period 
was replaced by an almost total monoch- 
romy based on the combination of blue 
tones, and his subieds take on a markedly 
symbolic nature. The most important of 
these paintings are Desemparats (1 902), 
La dona del floc de cabells (1 903) and El 
Foll(1904). 
On the other hand, Picasso's classicism, 
glimpsed in the splendid portrait of La 
Seriora Canals (1 905), leads up to Arle- 
quín (1 91 7), one of a series of Postcubist 
works al1 painted the same year, during 
his stay in Barcelona. 
As well as this early work by the ar- 
tist, which makes the Museu Picasso de 
Barcelona unique in its field, special men- 
tion should be made of the fifty-seven 
oil paintings which make up the Las Me- 
ninas series (1 958), improvisations on the 
painting by Velázquez, in which Picasso 
shows an overwhelming creative and 
analytical capacity, as in the extensive 
collection of graphic work carried out by 
the artist. 
Nevertheless, the Picasso Museum, whose 
initial nucleus has grown into an important 
institution, does not only exhibit its own 
collections, but has also established a pro- 
gramme of exhibitions on the work of 
Picasso and his contemporaries, which, as 
well as producing a delightful harmonious 
contrast beiween the three medieval 
buildings and the work exhibited in them, 
is at the same time on the way to becom- 
ing a mouthpiece for the artistic trends in 
Barcelona in the present century. • 


The Picasso Museum

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Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert