Thyssen Museum commemorates the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s deathPicasso, sacred and profane‘ shows how the painter approaches the Judeo-Christian tradition by reinterpreting the paintings of classical artists.
Paloma Alarcó is the curator of the exhibition, which will open this Tuesday and stay until January 14, 2024. Built a plot based on thirty years of production by the Malaga artist It holds these three corners.
The first of these, iconophagyIt is based on Picasso’s passion for visiting museums and collecting photographic reproductions. The second corner is his personal labyrinthwith his paintings that look like a diary of his life, in which he conveys his problems, loves and hates. And third sacred and profane ritesIt is where he approaches the sacrament that he captures the beliefs and superstitions of his Spanish childhood.
Some engravings by El Greco, Rubens, Murillo, Delacroix and Goyaestablishes a surprising, moving dialogue with the paintings of Picasso, among others.
This is an example of Zurbarán’s ‘Woman in an Armchair’ with ‘Santa Casilda’ or Velázquez’s ‘Portrait of Doña Marina of Austria, Queen of Spain’ with ‘Man’s Head’, which are unpredictable pairings. This Tuesday, Guillermo Solana, director of the museum, combines tradition and avant-garde in painting.
The exhibition brings together 40 works, 22 of which belong to Picasso and eight from the Thyssen collection; these included loans from the Musée National Picasso-ParisFrom collectors and institutions, such as the statue of Pedro de Mena from the Valladolid Sculpture Museum.
“Picasso can be rejected in countless ways,” warns Paloma Alarcó, who emphasizes that each historian, museum and curator at this year’s commemoration “presents him in a different and enriching way.” anniversary and yet he thinks that “Picasso remains a mystery“.
Picasso’s idea that there is neither past nor future in art, there is always the present, led the curator to dilute the boundaries between tradition and modernity.
“Picasso He saw himself as a kind of shaman“With unbridled freedom and creative power,” he explains, “he erased the boundaries between the sacred and the profane by communicating between past, present, and future, between civilizations, and in this way,” he explains, “draw from many sources to create your own art.”
An exhibition where the painter looks at the masters to reinterpret them: “He even said that El Greco was the first cubist painter.“. It draws inspiration from Zurbarán of the late 1920s, or Rivera’s tenebrist works to capture a dramatic moment of his marriage to Olga and their separation.
This is the moment when his world changes and the figure of the minotaur, his “alter ego”, emerges; through this moment he captures vulnerability and sexual violence, humanity and bestiality. A painter who tells about his life describes Alarcó through his art.
Paintings that address universal themes such as death, sex, violence, joy and painIn the exhibition where Picasso evolved, it focuses on one artist and “he never abandons them, he always keeps in mind the masters that he transformed into his own syntax,” warns the curator.
In the last room, Picasso describes the historical situation he lived in, the 1930s, the period of the birth of totalitarianism, the Catholic tradition of his childhood, and his revival of bullfighting. a struggle that represents violence because it ties it to the idea of evil.
A moment when he became interested in Goya again, sometimes with erotic Goya, sometimes with the disasters of war. “A mixture from which Guernica emerged“.
Picasso captures his life and history in a synthetic way in his works, not without reason Paloma Alarcó concludes in one of the painter’s notes that “the sacred and the profane are identified with the present and the past”: “Greco, Velázquez. inspire me” (1898-1899).