IMPORTANTE! Comprobar ancho del lomo Pablo Picasso DIALOGUES DIALOGUES 2020–2023 MUSEO PICASSO WITH PICASSO WITH PICASSO COLLECTION MÁLAGA — 2020–2023 COLLECTION ‘In the museums, for example, there are only pictures that have failed… Are you smiling? Think it over, and you will see whether or not I am right. Those which today we consider “masterpieces” are those which departed most from the rules laid down by the masters of the period. The best works are those which show most clearly the “stigma” of the artist who painted them.’ In collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte Pablo Picasso, Head of a Minotaur, Paris, 13 December 1937 [99, p. 247] 0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 2 27/7/20 10:03 DIALOGUES WITH PICASSO — 2020–2023 COLLECTION 0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 3 27/7/20 10:03 Contents P. 31_ Picasso: New Collection 2020–2023 Bernard Ruiz-Picasso P. 35_ Dialogues in the Labyrinth of the Still Untold Deed José Lebrero Stals P. 39_ Dialogues with Picasso Pepe Karmel P. 65_ Catalogue 0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 28 28/7/20 10:36 P. 81_ The Human Figure Commented Works in Picasso’s Drawings, Javier Cuevas del Barrio 1906–1913 Interim Substitute Professor, Universidad de Málaga Pepe Karmel Cécile Godefroy Associate Professor of Art History, New York University Art Historian and Curator, Paris P. 229_ Anna Jozefacka Independent scholar, New York Picasso’s Minotaurs Luise Mahler Michael FitzGerald Leonard A. Lauder Fellow, Leonard A. Lauder Research Professor of Fine Arts and Director of the Art History Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, New York programme at Trinity College, Hartford P. 373_ Eduard Vallès Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Museu Nacional Picasso and the d’Art de Catalunya Popular Heritage P. 403_ of Pottery List of Works Salvador Haro González Professor of Painting and Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Universidad de Málaga 0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 29 27/7/20 10:07 Picasso: New Collection 2020–2023 Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Over the past three years, the idea gradually emerged that the conversation between works in the permanent collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga (MPM) and those on loan from the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA) would greatly benefit from a revised scenography that invites the public to discover certain of Pablo Picasso’s artworks from a new angle. Pablo Picasso, The Siesta, Boisgeloup, 18 August 1932 [86, pp. 216-217] With a presentation that is both thematic and chronological, we have been able to establish connections between Picasso’s various creative periods and single out a number of recurring themes in his work. The purpose of this endeavour has been to highlight the collection’s extensive variety and ultimately engage visitors to appreciate Picasso’s extraordinary creativity. The concept revolves around the exhibit of Picasso’s works in the museum’s twelve permanent rooms; it encourages more dynamic forms of viewer immersion through room texts, photographs contextualising our objective, and digital tablets showing other creations not on display. Each room has its own name and opens with an introductory text. Moreover, the permanent collection’s scenography will be modified every year in order to renew the dialogue between works. To help bring the project to fruition, MPM and FABA invited Pepe Karmel (Associate Professor of Art History at New York University and a leading specialist in the work of Picasso) to serve as Co-curator. We worked under his guidance, along with the MPM team and its Artistic Director José Lebrero Stals, to develop the concept we are now delighted to present. The combined visit of the permanent collection and temporary exhibition rooms will offer museum visitors many opportunities to explore formal or subjective links between the works of Picasso, his special place and influence in the history of modern art, and the manner in which other artists featured here were sometimes also inspired by their contemporaries. All artists share common resources, such as the appropriation and reinterpretation of themes 31 0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 31 27/7/20 10:08 and forms, which they use to create their art and which can help the viewer to further interpret their creative expression. Our programme of temporary exhibitions offers the public a variety of displays ranging from Antiquity to contemporary art, and this is why we are eager to create more interaction between permanent collections and temporary Pablo Picasso, Head of exhibitions and invite visitors to discover how different artistic trends and a Woman, Boisgeloup, 1 October 1933 [80, p. 204] movements relate with Picasso’s work. Collaboration with the MPM’s Educational Centre and Research Centre has also made it possible to offer a variety of activities within the museum to further enhance interaction with the public. This is crucial if we are to share and transmit knowledge. I would like to sincerely thank my mother, without whom this museum would simply not exist, and acknowledge the Andalusian authorities’ decisive role in creating this art gallery, as well as their ongoing support in its development. I would also like to express my gratitude to the teams of the Museo Picasso Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Málaga, Pepe Karmel, Co-curator of the new display, as well as the whole team Man with Hat, Mougins, 11 December 1964 [161, p. 353] of the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte. 32 0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 32 27/7/20 10:08 Dialogues in the Labyrinth of the Still Untold Deed José Lebrero Stals A painting only lives through and for the person looking at it. Pablo Picasso When museums responsibly undertake their mission as custodians of the cultural heritage they hold in safekeeping, they reaffirm their role as propitious places of culture capable of stimulating memory. This is worth remembering here, in the introduction to this new dialogue with the work of Pablo Picasso which takes shape in the publication of this second volume in which a new relationship is presented between the permanent collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga and the important legacy looked after by the FABA (Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte) family collection. Since its inauguration in 2003, this museum has displayed more than 1,200 different works by Picasso. Over the past seventeen years, these works have made it possible for exhibitions with a wide range of focuses to be presented, numerous essays commissioned, lectures of all kinds given, a range of books published, and significant amounts invested in the study and optimum dissemination of aspects of the complex visual universe created over the course of more than eight decades by the artist, who was born in 1881 in Málaga, just a few metres from the Palacio de Buenavista. With the advantage of the perspective of time, and acknowledging the joint effort behind the achievements referred to above, I believe that the most significant success on the museum’s part is that of having assisted the millions of people who have visited the gallery from around the world to come closer to Picasso’s universe. Every time a temporary exhibition ends or a new presentation of the permanent collection takes place, as now, the excessively used but certainly accurate statement that it is the viewer, with his or her particular and unique experience, who gives ultimate meaning to the work Gjon Mili (1904–1984) of art seems ever more true. Here in Málaga, these observers contribute new Picasso painting with light and unprecedented reflections that enrich the truth which the legacy that at the Madoura Pottery, 1 January 1949 we attentively care for contains and invokes. 35 0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 35 28/7/20 10:39 Pablo Picaso, The Artist's It is true that in all four corners of the globe experts continue to formulate Eyes, Paris, 1917, pencil on paper, 5 × 9 cm, aesthetic and ethical theories on and about the artist, with the academic Museo Picasso Málaga, Gift of Christine Ruiz-Picasso, ambition of contributing a new voice to cast light on good news or supposedly MPM1.20 [not in Zervos] unheard-of enigmas concerning a body of work of which it might seem that everything important has already been written. From the four corners of the art world experts (whether Picasso specialists or not) continue to devise exhibition projects with the aim of revealing one last hidden corner that no one has apparently previously noticed. Burning within the world’s most powerful commercial art firms is the desire to sell an oil painting rediscovered in a discreet private collection at the highest price. It would be surprising if this were not the case as we are of course referring to the twentieth-century’s most influential and famous painter. When walking through the distinguished rooms of the permanent collection, however, none of this is comparable to the experience of that fathomless emotion or profound commotion we might surreptitiously observe in the gaze of the anonymous visitors who pause before 36 0807_001-456 ING#3.indd 36 27/7/20 10:08 ‘their’ Picasso in any of the innumerable visual encounters that arise for those who know how to look as they undertake their journey through the galleries. Let us not forget that sight develops before words and that the child looks and identifies before speaking, as noted by that playful and nonconformist British art historian John Berger, or as the Viennese Otto Pächt pontificated at an earlier date: in the beginning was the eye, not the word. Painting is the attempt to make the world visible through the construction of the image; representing it according to some type of norm established by the person who applies him or herself to a mission of such complexity.