When a modernist meets his roots
A ten year long project...
The genesis of the exhibition as taken a decade. While the death of Pablo Picasso occurred in 1973, Francisco Franco Bahamonde (Franco) is still in place until he died in 1975.
At that time, the curator of the exhibition Carmen Giménez, served as Executive Advisor to the Spanish Minister of Culture, Javier Solana. And later on, she developed a program of international exhibitions for museums in Madrid until the 90s. After that, she focuses on the creation of the first Guggenheim satellite in Bilbao, which opened in 1997.
During all of those years, many exhibitions were curated by her, and an important part of the collection of modern art in Spanish museums is acquired due to her knowledge.
During those time, and during a course of the acquisition of "La femme au vase" (Woman with Vase) for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Carmen Giménez entered in contact with Paloma Picasso.
Fast foward to the 2010s, when the current director of the Kunstmuseum Basel, Josef Helfenstein discussed with her friend Carmen Giménez about an exhibition linking two masters: Pablo Picasso and El Greco, due to the importance of El Greco into the development of cubism.
Fast forwards to a few years later, on the 1st of September 2016, he became the director of this world-renowned institution. With that in mind and a core group of oeuvre of Picasso showcasing all of his period, the project was starting. Six years later, the show opened, a long period of conception between the research, the loan restrictions and appointments to get those priceless masterpieces and to create the juxtapositions Carmen Giménez and the team wanted.
An exhibition and five inner dialogues
Discovery
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The first room of the exhibition serves as an introduction to the links between Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973) and El Greco (1541 - 1614). As the start of his artistic career, and while being in Spain, Pablo visited the Museo del Prado, and, like every good artist, he copies and learned from the oldest.
Thus, the first room of the show is mostly dedicated to those works on paper depicting the figure of El Greco and the one inside his oeuvre. But, for Picasso, El Greco is a fascination due to his portrait. He evens one said "What I really like in his work are the portraits, all those gentlemen with pointed beards."
“Because Picasso and I copied El Greco in the Prado, people were scandalised and called us Modernistes. We sent out our copies to our professor in Barcelona [Picasso’s father]. All was well so long as we worked on Velázquez, Goya and the Venetians – but the day we decided to do a copy of El Greco and sent it to him, his reaction was: ‘You’re taking the wrong path.’ That was in 1897, when El Greco was considered a menace.”
Blue(s) and Pink(s)
In 1899, the young Pablo Picasso met the painter Carles Casagemas. At that time, Pablo Picasso was associated with the Catalan “modernistes". And, with his move to Paris, Pablo Picasso and Carles Casagemas discovered and created a new period in their oeuvre. But when Casagemas committed suicide in 1901, Picasso was more then frustrated...
In a particular picture titled "Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas)", Pablo is marking the beginning of this blue period and his painterly inspiration to El Greco. Later on, the pink period will bring the softness of the figure of El Greco, the details and the beauty of the sitter.
“I had already seen a few of his paintings, which impressed me very much. That was when I decided to take a trip to Toledo, and it left a profound impression on me. It’s probably owing to his influence that my human figures from the blue period became elongated.”
Structure
The oeuvre of Picasso will drastically change, with new inspirations in mind coming from ancient Iberian art (700–500 BCE) and African art from the former French colonies. The artist will redefine the proportion, the shapes and the colours of his figure.
As a model, El Greco was a crucial painter for the emergence of Cubism. When you compare the picture of El Greco titled "The Virgin Mary" to a sketch for "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", the similarities are important. The length of the figure, the colours, the reduction in the size of the works and the different colours planes.
Actualised structure
At the start of the 20th century, the oeuvre of El Greco was started to become more known and study. Thus, the figure of El Greco was for the Parisian avant-garde a kind of inspiration, kind spirit man who defined a new form of expression in the 16th century.
It is quite likely that the artist is still in the head of Pablo Picasso in the decades that follow. But, as the years past, most of his inspiration will not only be limited to the figure of El Greco, but also to old masters in general.
When you juxtapose religious pictures by El Greco to Pablo Picasso cubist picture, you can be struck how the composition is literally the same. Beside this aesthetic judgement, the two artists share some visual parallels: the reduction of pictorial space, the monochrome backgrounds, the fragmentation of forms and clear edges.
Picasso and old masters
The inspiration of Pablo Picasso to Old Masters is quite impressive, because it spends all of his career and life. With the use of historical costumes in his latest works and the confrontation of his style through references such as El Greco, Picasso knew he would became a master such as them.
“I have a feeling that Delacroix, Giotto, Tintoretto, El Greco, and the rest, as well as all the modern painters, the good and the bad, the abstract and the non-abstract, are all standing behind me watching me at work.”
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Kunstmuseum Basel | Neubau
Date: 11.6.2022 – 25.9.2022
Curator: Carmen Giménez, with Gabriel Dette, Josef Helfenstein and Ana Mingot
Ticket: Available on the website of the Kunstmuseum Basel OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstmuseum Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 8
CH-4010 Basel
Phone: +41 61 206 62 62
Fax: +41 61 206 62 52
Mail: info@kunstmuseumbasel.ch