2023-11-13 20:28:49
Madrid The figure of Pablo Picasso is usually accompanied by strong, almost depressing adjectives. He himself identified with the monstrous and at the same time melancholic character of the Minotaur, and the stories of his troubled love life have been the key to creating the character. Picasso is the artist considered an egomaniac, a sexist and an abuser, and now, on the other hand, the Reina Sofia Museum delves into a more vulnerable side of his biography, as a “migrant” in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century to the extraordinary exhibition Picasso 1906. The great transformation, as curator Eugenio Carmona, professor of art history at the University of Malaga, says.
So Picasso’s definition of modernity will be based on “otherness” and “interculturality”. “He came up with it because he lived in Paris, as his partner at the time, Fernande Olivier, said, as someone who did not have an axis. Picasso was someone who saw himself in the obligation to add cultures because he was a migrant, something that did not happen to Derain, Matisse or Vlaminck.Picasso, who at home maintained the customs of his place of origin, became completely Catalanized when he moved to Barcelona and is a Catalan artist. And when he arrived in Paris, he got involved with the circle of Catalan artists. And he had to acclimatize to Paris as the capital of the return to order and the avant-garde,” explains Carmona.
The gender fluidity of some of the exposed nudes is also striking. And the curator highlights the “decisive homoerotism” that is present in some works of this year, essential in the work of the Malaga native, and the presence in his life that artists and homosexuals had at a time when the environment was hostile to them, like the writers Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. Equally, Picasso was present with homoerotic photographs and pioneering gay magazines. “We have Picasso’s openness to a spectrum of the capture of erotic sensibility that is almost unexpected eroticism, until it disappears in other moments – says Carmona -. You have to be very strong to withstand the fight against homophobia and the misogyny in the texts, speakers and historiography about Picasso. If you put yourself in another position, it seems that you want to adhere to a fashion, and that’s not it, it’s been talked about since the 90s.” One of these homoerotic works is Dos adolescents: “We have to leave the door open for the viewer to think whether the possible homoeroticism was deposited there by Picasso or by our current gaze.” One of the reasons why all this has remained on a very secondary level is, according to Carmona, the “exaggerated” weight that has been given to The ladies of Avignon.
Likewise, Carmona believes that the two perceptions of the Málaga artist are not incompatible: “The vision of Picasso as a misogynist and abuser should be better recontextualized. Although he was related to anarchist thought, Picasso did not succeed overcome the foundations of heteropatriarchal society,” says Carmona. “Picasso had a very long life, and he lived several lives in one. And he was different at different times. He went through phases. In 1906 he was very imbued with free love, but at the same time it was difficult for him to carry this idea until the last consequences, because they had brought him up in a heteropatriarchal society”, he adds.
Picasso 1906. The great transformation, which will be on display until March 4, is a much-anticipated exhibition. It was announced when Manuel Borja-Villel was the director of the Queen Sofia Museum and was postponed on different occasions. It is now the last major exhibition in the program of commemorations of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023. The exhibition promised a new approach to the stay that Picasso and his partner, Fernande Olivier, made in Gósol between May and August 1906, considered as a turning point on the way to The ladies of Avignon, of which there are hardly any works left in the state. But Carmona goes further and presents the whole year 1906 as a period with its own identity in the career of the Malaga native, in which the settings are Gósol and the previous and subsequent stays in Paris. “This year is a complete process,” says Carmona.
The exhibition, which has the special collaboration of the Picasso Museum in Paris, includes around 120 works, including drawings, paintings and engravings by Picasso, and archaeological pieces and other artists such as El Greco, Corot and Cézanne, who formed part of your baggage. Some of the Picasso loans that the Reina Sofia has obtained are extraordinary, such as the legendary portrait of Gertrude Stein, and Naked with hands togethera painting owned by New York’s MoMA that Carmona considers “another path to modernity that is not that of The ladies of AvignonPicasso probably started it in Gósol and finished it in Paris.
For the commissioner, Naked with hands together is more ambitious, and qualifies The ladies of Carrer Avinyó as a “return to order” in the path of experimentation that he had undertaken that year. Naked with hands together it was also owned by Gertrude Stein and she kept it with her throughout her life. “The relationship with Gertrude Stein was decisive for Picasso; without her he would not have been who he was,” says Carmona. Two more iconic works are L’haremowned by the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Half body nude with jugfrom the collection of Alicia Koplowitz.
The tour is divided into eight rooms, the first of which are dedicated to the body and the nude. Between 1890 and 1906 he had made 580 nudes, and in 1906 alone he made 450, including male and female nudes on different supports. The third, titled scopic drive, is dedicated to how Picasso subverted the relationships between high and low culture with ordinary women who evoke mythological figures. The fourth is dedicated to Picasso’s stay in Gósol, and Carmona has titled it Vernacular mythology. In this area, he highlights how he experimented with “anthropometric forms”, such as the portrait of Josep Fontdevila, the innkeeper of Cal Tampanada. Despite everything, Carmona points out that the impact that the Romanesque had on him, represented in the exhibition by the Virgin of Gósol, kept at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC), manifested itself afterwards, when Picasso already had returned to Paris. Next, Fernande has her own room to analyze how the Málaga artist used her representation as “a signifier waiting to be signified”. “He always starts from something that could be Fernande’s face to reach a plastic or iconographic conclusion,” says Carmona.
The first of the last three rooms is physiognomiesAnd below they can be seen in the same area (transformations) Naked with hands together i Portrait of Gertrude Stein. From this portrait, it is important to note how Picasso repeated his face, in an act of deep identification, in a self-portrait and in a portrait of Josep Fontdevila. Finally, survivals it reflects how Picasso took up themes of this moment, such as women combing their hair, decades later. “In Picasso there is never a moment of clear break or abandonment, but there is permanence and change. Discovering the Picasso of 1906 was waiting for our time,” concludes Carmona.
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