Year of Picasso: 42 exhibitions from the Prado to New York for the 50th anniversary of his death

From the Prado to the Center Pompidou and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, 42 exhibitions will be organized around the world to mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, an “unprecedented mobilization” for “modern art’s most famous artist”. according to Madrid and Paris.

The “Picasso year”, which has been in the works for 18 months by France and Spain, will mobilize “38 important institutions in Europe and the United States”, Spanish Culture Minister Miguel Iteta told reporters today, kicking off celebrations at the museum Reina Sofia of Madrid.

These exhibitions will allow “showing all aspects” of the Spanish artist, who was born in 1881 in Malaga (southern Spain) and died in 1973 in Mouzen (southeast France), with a series of “conferences” and “public discussions” about the painter and his work, added his French counterpart Rima Abdul Malek.

The celebrations will begin on September 23 at Fondation Mapfre, in Madrid, with the exhibition “Pablo Picasso and the Dematerialization of Sculpture”. They will conclude in April 2024 at the Petit Palais, Paris, with a retrospective on “Paris of the Modernists (1905-1925)”.

Overall, events paying tribute to the Spanish painter, whom the French minister described as “the most famous and most emblematic painter of contemporary art” will take place mainly in Spain, France and the United States but also in Germany, Switzerland , in Romania and Belgium.

Among the institutions that have been mobilized is its Metropolitan Museum New York (Met)the Prado Museum in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and the Picasso Museums in Barcelona and Paris.

The aim is “to present Picasso as he was”, highlighting his “artistic legacy” and “the duration of his work”, emphasized Miguel Iteta in front of the painting Guernica, painted in 1937 by Picassoone of his most famous works around the world.

The painting — which depicts the massacre in the Basque town of Guernica, which was bombed in April 1937 by Nazi air force that came to support General Franco in the Spanish Civil War — is “a proclamation for peace,” added Rima Abdul Malak.

This advocacy “takes on a special significance” at a time “when war is raging at the gates of Europe and where we are on the side of the Ukrainian people,” the minister insisted, in a reference to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Beyond the political and historical references, the retrospectives organized in the framework of the “Picasso year”, will be the opportunity, according to the organizers, to also present the “exaggerations” and “contradictions” of the artist.

Long revered for his artistic genius, Picasso’s figure has been clouded for several years by accusations of misogyny and violence against his partners, brought into the spotlight by the #MeToo movement.

The painter of “Misses of Avignon” and of the “Crying Woman”, who spent most of his life in France, was mainly accused by the journalist Sophie Sauveau in her book “Picasso, le Minotaure” of being a “jealous”, “perverted” and “destructive” man .

“It’s important that the public gets to know Picasso better and also get to know the part of violence that he had in him. It’s something that we shouldn’t hide,” Rima Abdul Malak admitted today, estimating that we shouldn’t “belittle all of his work.” Picasso” because of this theme.

The relationship of the Spanish painter and sculptor with women will be approached mainly in the context of an exhibition scheduled to be presented at the Brooklyn Museum (New York) in the summer of 2023.

RES-EMP

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