Thyssen Museum Marks Picasso’s Death Anniversary with a Meditative Dialogue Between Sacred And Profane
The Thyssen Museum commemorates the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s passing with a show that navigates how the artist reinterprets classical painting through the lens of Judeo-Christian imagery. The exhibition invites visitors to consider Picasso as a bridge between old and new traditions, revealing the knots where sacred symbols meet everyday life.
The gallery, curated by Paloma Alarcó, opens this Tuesday and runs through January 14, 2024. It builds a narrative from three key axes that trace thirty years of Picasso’s prolific career, anchored in the Malaga-born painter’s enduring fascination with visual memory and religious iconography. The curatorial frame highlights how Picasso reimagines canonical forms while staying in constant dialogue with the past.
The first axis, iconophagy, explores Picasso’s passion for museums and his habit of collecting photographic reproductions. The second axis situates his work as a personal labyrinth, a diary-like reservoir of thoughts, loves, and conflicts expressed across his canvases. The third axis, sacred and profane rites, examines how he engages with sacraments and the beliefs and superstitions rooted in his Spanish upbringing.
The show features engravings by masters such as El Greco, Rubens, Murillo, Delacroix, and Goya, creating surprising and moving dialogues with Picasso’s own paintings. This dialogue is intensified by unexpected pairings like Zurbarán’s Woman in an Armchair with Santa Casilda, or Velázquez’s Portrait of Doña Marina of Austria, Queen of Spain paired with Man’s Head. These juxtapositions illuminate how tradition and modernity can coexist on the same wall. In one instance, a museum director blends reverence for the past with a push toward new meanings in painting.
The exhibition assembles 40 works, with 22 pieces by Picasso and eight from the Thyssen collection. It also includes loans from major institutions such as the Musée National Picasso-Paris and items from collectors, including a Pedro de Mena statue from Valladolid’s Sculpture Museum. [Citation attribution: major public collections and private lenders are acknowledged in exhibition materials].
As the curators note, Picasso remains an inexhaustible subject for interpretation. Each historian, museum, and curator contributes a distinct and enriching perspective on the artist’s work. The commemoration acknowledges Picasso as a persistent mystery—an artist whose life and art resist simple definition.
Picasso’s conviction that there is no strict separation between past, present, and future in art guides the curatorial approach, which blends tradition with modern experimentation. The idea of “present endurance” in art becomes a throughline for the show, challenging static boundaries and inviting fresh readings of familiar images.
Viewed as a kind of shaman, Picasso is presented as a creator who harnesses freedom and creative energy to erase artificial divides between sacred and profane. The exhibition suggests that he drew from a wide spectrum of sources and connected them in new ways to form his own distinctive language.
In this dialogue with the masters, Picasso is portrayed as looking outward to El Greco and other pillars of art history, while simultaneously reinterpreting their forms through a modern sensibility. The show also traces Picasso’s engagement with Zurbarán late in his career and Rivera’s tenebrist scenes, which illuminate pivotal moments in Picasso’s personal life, including his marriage to Olga and their later separation.
There is a notable moment when Picasso’s world shifts and the figure of the minotaur emerges as an alter ego. Through this figure, the narrative conveys vulnerability, sexual tension, humanity, and even brutality. The artist’s life is presented as a continual conversation with history that is inseparable from his own experience.
Universal themes such as death, sexuality, violence, joy, and pain recur throughout the works. The exhibition showcases Picasso’s evolution in a way that foregrounds the artist’s persistent engagement with the masters who shaped his syntax. The curators stress that Picasso never abandons his dialogues with these influences.
In the final room, the historical backdrop of the 1930s comes into view, along with the rise of totalitarianism, his childhood Catholic traditions, and the renewed attention to bullfighting. The display frames violence as a force linked to the notion of evil, while offering a nuanced look at how Picasso processed these upheavals through his art. The show culminates in a reflection on Goya, sometimes in erotic light, at other times amid the tragedies of war, suggesting what gave rise to Guernica.
Ultimately, Picasso’s synthesis of life and history is presented as a deliberate artistic act. The curatorial note emphasizes that the sacred and the profane can be identified with both present and past, quoting influences from Greco and Velázquez as enduring inspirations for Picasso’s ongoing exploration of form and meaning. The exhibition invites viewers to witness a master who continually redefines the boundaries between tradition and innovation.