Barcelona
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It all started about a decade ago, when an in-depth study of ‘Rooftops of Barcelona’ (1903) brought to light an underlying painting that referred directly to ‘La vida’, another of the masterpieces of Picasso’s blue period. At that time, such a discovery was the ideal excuse to organize an exhibition focused on that introspective and melancholy period in which the man from Malaga plunged after the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas and in which the great star, recently arrived from the Cleveland Museum Of Art, was precisely ‘La vida’. Now, ten years after that, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona has wanted to get away from the flashes and infiltrate the interior of the canvases to discover what hides that Prussian blue with which the painter worked conscientiously between 1901 and 1904.
Specifically, the Barcelona museum has focused on four canvases of the time to present an unpublished project on the technical studies of the main works of the permanent collection. «It is a collection exhibition but with a new look. The duty of a museum is to take care of the collection, study it and teach it”, highlights the director of the Barcelona center, Emmanuel Guigon, for whom the really important thing about this ‘Project Blue’they are the “bottoms of the tables.” “We are going to see behind the works and discover four unpublished works that do not really exist, they can only be seen through x-rays,” he adds, referring to research carried out with the collaboration of the National Gallery Of Art in Washington, the University of Barcelona and the Nello Carrara Institute of Applied Physics in Florence. In addition, the museum exhibits for the first time ‘The blind’, drawing dated 1903 that the Barcelona City Council acquired at a public auction last October.
The work, done in blue ink and pencil on the back of a postcard, closes a tour that opens with the ‘Still Life’ from 1901 and the radiographic and reflectographic study of a painting under which a couple hides « very deformed» that the curator of the exhibition and curator of the museum, Reyes Jimenez, related to other works such as ‘Harlequin and his girlfriend’. “We had no idea that a couple would emerge. It is clear that Picasso makes the metamorphosis of the objects from the characters: he transforms two living characters into a still life », explains Jiménez, for whom one cannot simply speak of reuse. “Just saying that you reuse a fabric would be very basic,” he adds.
The latter is clearer, for example, in ‘The Blue Cup’ (1903), oil under which a character had already been discovered and in which the use of infrared has now revealed that there are actually two superimposed figures: two male heads in profile that seem to dialogue with the classic face of a decorated frame from 1902 and that were buried by the layers of dark blue almost black. In this case, a fiber optic reflectance technique has also been used to study the blues. “This reuse and repainting is something very Picassian,” says Jiménez. The practice, he adds, is not exclusive to the blue stage, but is repeated throughout the artist’s career.
‘Jaume Sabartés with pince-nez’ (1901), an iconic piece from the dawn of the blue period, also comes with a surprise, and a double one: the first, a female portrait that could be that of an inmate of the Saint-Lazare prison. The second, typographical remains and adhered ink from a newspaper that allow us to specify the more or less exact date on which Picasso traveled from Paris to Barcelona in 1902. «He must have wrapped the painting with the newspaper when the painting was still fresh and there was the transfer”, details the curator, who recalls that until now it was not clear when Picasso returned from his second trip to Paris. Now it is known that it had to be after January 18, 1902, since that day is the copy of ‘Le Journal de Paris’ that the artist ‘brought’ with him.
‘Rooftops of Barcelona’, with its layers of paint in cold and muted tones covering the much more vivid colors of the couple that hides below, it closes the scientific part of an exhibition that is not limited to showing the original paintings, but also reproduces the technical processes in didactic videos, compares different pictorial plans and contextualizes findings with drawings from the collection. “It is a scientific exhibition but it can also be popular,” says Guigon.
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