Picasso Versus Rusiñol

Picasso versus Rusiñol The essential asset of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona is its collection, most of which was donated to the people of Barcelona by the artist himself and those closest to him. This is the museum’s reason for existing and the legacy that we must promote and make accessible to the public. The exhibition Picasso versus Rusiñol is a further excellent example of the museum’s established way of working to reveal new sources and references in Picasso’s oeuvre. At the same time, the exhibition offers a special added value in the profound and rigorous research that this project means for the Barcelona collection. The exhibition sheds a wholly new light on the relationship between Picasso and Rusiñol, through, among other resources, a wealth of small drawings from the museum’s collection that provide fundamental insight into the visual and iconographic dialogues between the work of the two artists. The creation of new perspectives on the collection is one of the keys to sustaining the Museu Picasso in Barcelona as a living institution that continues to arouse the interest of its visitors. Jordi Hereu Mayor of Barcelona 330 The project Picasso versus Rusiñol takes a fresh look at the relationship between these two artists. This is the exhibition’s principal merit: a new approach, with a broad range of input, to a theme that has been the subject of much study and about which so much has already been written. Based on rigorous research over a period of more than two years, this exhibition reviews in depth Picasso’s relationship — first admiring and later surpassing him — with the leading figure in Barcelona’s art scene in the early twentieth century, namely Santiago Rusiñol. Through an extraordinary series of visual and iconographic dialogues between the work of Picasso and Rusiñol, the curator of the exhibition, Eduard Vallès, has done an outstanding job in tracing Picasso’s evolution from admiration for Rusiñol, to appropriation and finally to rejection: a process the Malaga- born artist would repeat with other artists over the course of his career. Finally, I would like to stress that the exhibition is organised in conjunction with the Museu Cau Ferrat Museum in Sitges, which is currently undergoing refurbishment and so is able to make available for this project an exceptional collection almost in its entirety. Thus, this exhibition is also a unique opportunity to see side-by-side and in relation to each other two public collections which are key to any understanding of early twentieth-century Catalan art. Jordi Martí i Grau Cultural Delegate 331 In June 2008, we presented in conjunction with Cau Ferrat in Sitges the book by Eduard Vallès Picasso i Rusiñol. La cruïlla de la modernitat (Picasso and Rusiñol: The Crossroads of Modernity). The book was published as part of the celebration of Rusiñol Year, which took place in Sitges between 2006 and 2007. Upon reading the book, we sensed the potential of its thesis as the basis for an exhibition and, indeed, that same day we drew up the agreement for this exhibition, which we present just two years later, accompanied by a new publishing project. In our view, this exhibition is exceptional for several reasons. Firstly, because it offers a unique opportunity to see first hand, for the first time, the connections between two of the most important public collections in the country: the Museu Picasso in Barcelona and Cau Ferrat in Sitges. The temporary closure of Cau Ferrat as it undergoes refurbishment enables us to reflect in an exhibition the entire sweep of the thesis and research project that bring to light the close relationship between these two artists in the context of modernista Barcelona. For the Museu Picasso, this exhibition also represents the fulfilment of one of the museum’s main endeavours, to exploit its whole collection. The show spotlights and places within a new narrative numerous small-format works by Picasso which play a central role here, to the extent that they evidence the visual dialogues and lines of relations between him and Rusiñol. For the Consorci del Patrimoni de Sitges, the exhibition represents a unique opportunity to bring Cau Ferrat to Barcelona, to make it accessible to an extremely broad public and, at once, showcase Santiago Rusiñol as the complete artist; as a high priest of art, as he put it. Meanwhile, this is the first of Cau Ferrat’s collaborations with other institutions that, over the coming two years while the museum remains closed for works, will give its collection greater exposure. 332 In addition, we believe that the show provides a new reading of the figures and work of both Picasso and Rusiñol. ‘Picasso versus Rusiñol’ reveals and demonstrates the Malaga-born artist’s evolution from imitating to surpassing Rusiñol. We wish to acknowledge our profound gratitude to Eduard Vallès, the exhibition curator, for the magnificent job he has done, the fruit of over two years of intense dedication and rigorous research. The exhibition would not have been possible without the extraordinary generosity of the numerous institutions and private collectors who have lent us works. To all of them, we would like to express our special thanks for their contributions, which are essential to this project. We also wish to acknowledge the participation in this catalogue of Margarida Casacuberta, Eliseu Trenc and Vinyet Panyella, authors of the texts herein, along with Eduard Vallès. Finally, our sincere thanks to the teams from the Museu Picasso and Cau Ferrat for their tireless dedication and involvement in the project. Antoni Sella i Montserrat Pepe Serra Director Director Consorci del Patrimoni de Sitges Museu Picasso in Barcelona 333 The Rusiñol paradigm. From curiosity to homage EDUARD VALLÈS ‘[Santiago Rusiñol] played a major role in Picasso’s development, as a champion of Modernisme.’ Pierre Daix, Dictionnaire Picasso, 1995 ‘It is difficult today, now at some distance, to grasp what the presence of that personality once meant in the artistic realm and even in the social realm of Catalonia. In many ways, and in his time, Santiago Rusiñol was the innovator par excellence in the local sphere. For years and years, many young souls saw in him something of a symbol of idealism, at war with the vulgarity of that realm, and in his name of a kind of symbol of freedom and sincerity.’ Eugeni d’Ors, Cincuenta años de pintura catalana, 2002 In a period of approximately just four years Pablo in the portrait portfolio of an artist. In the first Picasso did at least twenty-one portraits of Santiago place, there is the great diversity of readings and Rusiñol.1 Notwithstanding any other conclusions situations found in the portraits, not at all common one might draw from this, it reveals an interest in Picasso given that he had a tendency to construct beyond the parameters of normality. We could cite iconic images that he sometimes reproduced — other artists that attracted the attention of Picasso in often in runs — of the people that interested him. such a small space of time and with a large number In the second place, several of these portraits of portraits — Apollinaire, for example — but the highlight some of the fields in which Rusiñol stood circumstances were not the same. And above all, we out or was a leading figure, that is, they incorporate are not talking of the same Picasso, since his interest a factor of recognition of Rusiñol’s role in certain in Rusiñol coincides with the start of the forging of areas. And a third reading — perhaps the most novel his own personality, a process which had its point — we have only been able to see after several years of of greatest intensity in Barcelona, not for any work, once we had acquired sufficient perspective. reason inherent in the city but due to the time in This last gaze at the process of portraying Rusiñol Picasso’s life at which it occurred. Picasso arrived has revealed the existence of an unequivocal in Barcelona at the age of thirteen and left when sequencing of the portraits, which must be read he was twenty-two and a half, a key period in the as the plastic correlation of Picasso’s increasing formation of any person. closeness to and gradual distancing from his subject. The fact that Picasso did so many portraits of In short, there is an almost exact chronological Rusiñol cannot be described as extraordinary, parallel between the years of Picasso’s effective however, in Picassian terms; Picasso’s capacity introduction into the cultural life of Barcelona for portraits was enough for this and more. (1899-1904) and his portraits of Rusiñol. Nonetheless, three readings which rarely occur in Individually, these three readings can each be found other instances make the case of Rusiñol remarkable in Picasso’s series of portraits of other personalities, 334 but it is difficult to detect all three in any one artist but the claim, coming from a Picasso scholar who as in the case of Rusiñol. This personal and intimate knew Picasso personally, cannot be ignored; on process focused on Rusiñol becomes the best of the contrary. This ‘major role’, however, requires metaphors for Picasso’s attitude towards the artistic not only careful analysis — which is one of the aims world of Barcelona, to which, as we shall see, of this book — but it also needs proper qualification he was not at all alien. so as not to pervert its meaning. One must be very An iconological reading of these twenty portraits careful whenever one seeks to establish connections previously mentioned suggests a process we might involving Picasso because often, in an attempt to easily describe as being made up of three phases and link him to absolutely everything, one oversteps the begins with curiosity — portraits done perhaps from bounds of good sense.

Load more