Oliver Eglin delves into the archives of Barcelona’s Museu Picasso
Ernest Hemingway described Madrid as, “the most Spanish of all cities, the best to live in, the finest people, month in and month out the finest climate.”[1] Arriving in Madrid at dusk – a city of elegant tree-lined streets, sharp suits and clinking cocktails, glittering in the hot sun, I can’t help but concur. Home to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid is also where the artist Pablo Picasso was sent to attend art school at the age of just sixteen. He did not stay long, but the paintings he saw at the Prado Museum by the likes of Goya, Velazquez and El Greco would have a lasting impact on his work. Although his stay was brief, Picasso’s own legacy in Madrid would be monumental; Guernica, the most iconic of his paintings, is now housed in the city’s Museo Reina Sofía and stands as the twentieth century’s pre-eminent anti-war painting, a monochrome masterpiece on suffering and violence.
This month PHotoEspaña opens in Madrid. It is an annual festival of photography and visual arts and, as part of this year’s iteration, an exhibition is taking place at Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa from the photographic archives of Barcelona’s Museu Picasso. 2023 marks fifty years since Picasso’s death and also the sixtieth anniversary of Museu Picasso Barcelona. The exhibition encompasses Picasso’s latter years and gives an intimate survey of his life, documenting both the creative process as well as his leisure time, with the two often overlapping.
Picasso once said, “it’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.”[2] This exhibition looks at some of the key relationships in Picasso’s life and the extent to which his public and private persona intertwined with the art itself. As well as his wife Jacqueline and his circle of close friends, there are interactions with the gallerists, collectors and publishers who supported Picasso throughout his career. We see how these relationships were key to the development of Picasso’s career and in particular how Jaume Sabartés, who later became his secretary, helped to establish the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. Having turned his back on his homeland under Franco’s fascist regime, the exhibition shows the way Picasso was able to maintain a connection with his Spanish roots through the establishment of the museum, gifting various works in the pursuit of his dream for a monographic collection in the city he loved.
Some of the most captivating photographs shown here are of brief encounters in Picasso’s life, like that with a group of gypsy flamenco musicians and dancers who were invited to perform at the artist’s home. Picasso seems at ease in everyone’s company, whether wrestling with his son, strumming on a mandolin, or chatting to a taxi driver at the roadside. The photographer Lucien Clerge said of his relationship with Picasso, “we were fifty-three years apart, a world and, at the same time, nothing! He had that gift of putting you on an equal footing.”[3] Picasso had an energy and vigour that defied his age and these photographs go some way to explaining how he maintained his passion for painting, working relentlessly from childhood through to old age.
The exhibition is filled with images of Picasso and his dogs, most notably the dachshund Lump, with whom Picasso shares several playful moments, such as the sequence in which he creates a paper rabbit for the dog to play with. Lump subsequently devoured the rabbit maquette and Picasso apparently declared the dog to be the first creature to have ever eaten a Picasso. In another typical scene from the exhibition, a series of photographs begins with a depiction of Picasso sitting down for a fish dinner. After sucking the bones clean, Picasso discovers the form of the carcass and begins to press out a clay mould. Laying his newly formed ceramic fish into the face of a bowl, he pauses briefly for a cigarette whilst contemplating his new creation. Photographs such as these display perfectly the playfulness of Picasso’s work and his ability to take simple objects and turn them into art. This scene is typical of Picasso’s working method, he could produce great amounts of work within a short period and, in another sequence from the exhibition, he is said to have painted twenty-seven aquatints on copper plates in the space of just three hours. Photographs absent of Picasso, such as those of a desolate Jacqueline in the day’s following his death, are also particularly fascinating, as we see both the void left in his wake, but also the sheer scale of work Picasso had produced so late into his life.
Picasso’s interminable passion for creation led him to amass a prolific body of paintings, sculptures and drawings that now fill museums and galleries the world over, and his contribution to our culture is unquestionable. Despite this he is an artist who divides opinion and his reputation often precedes that of his art. The celebrity he coveted would seem to be at odds with the self-imposed isolation in which he chose to work and, in this sense, the exhibition asks more questions than it answers. ‘Picasso in Photos’ succeeds both as a visual account of Picasso’s life, but also as a study of his relationship with the camera, both in a material sense as part of his working practice and, more interestingly, as a vehicle for perpetuating his own mythic self-image.
‘Picasso in Photos’ is held at The Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa Exhibition Hall in Madrid and continues until 28 July 2023. PHotoEspaña, the International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts of Madrid runs from 31st May to 3rd September 2023. phe.es
[1] Ernest Hemingway, Death In The Afternoon, (Vintage Publishing, 2000)
[2] Pablo Picasso quoted in Alfred H. Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, (Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1975)
[3] Lucien Clergue, Picasso in Photos, (Madrid, Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa, 2023)
