The Picasso year declines in an infinite number of shades and encourages museums around the world with the work of the artist from Malaga to propose new ways of exploring it. In Berlin, two sister institutions have opened the exhibition Spanish Dialogues: The Picassos of the Berggruen Museum visit the Bode Museum, which juxtaposes Picasso pieces and Spanish works from previous centuries. Objective: to cross the borders of time, artistic genre and historical convention.
The Berggruen museum has a hundred paintings, sculptures and drawings by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), while the Bode, located on Museum Island, houses the most important collection of Spanish sculpture from before the 19th century in Germany. The pieces will look at each other, and will question the visitors, from July 13 to January 21 of next year in the Bode museum building.
“For Picasso, art had neither a past nor a future. It did not evolve, it was neither ancient nor modern, but was to be judged only by its relevance in the present; Picasso studied, interpreted and adapted the work of his predecessors and thus demonstrated how important it is to look at the past in order to understand and represent the present”, said Veronika Rudorfer, curator at the Berggruen museum and one of the three curators of the exhibition, on behalf of the team. .
The others are María López-Fanjul Díez del Corral, curator of Spanish art at the Bode –who could not participate in the presentation–, and Gabriel Montua, director of the Berggruen. The exhibition is part of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023 program, an initiative of the Governments of Spain and France for the 50th anniversary of his death, which promotes more than fifty exhibitions and events in renowned cultural institutions in Europe and the United States. Joined.
In two rooms of the Bode museum we see how characters and motifs face each other, such as Picasso’s El sailor (1938) and a portrait of Juan José de Austria painted in the 17th century by Juan Carreño de Miranda; or the polychrome wooden sculpture Dama castellana, by an unknown author, dated around 1530, and the oil painting Woman in an Armchair, drawn from Picasso’s brush in 1939. In both duets, the representation of power and personality is projected. We also observe how the Mater Dolorosa in polychrome wood by Pedro Roldán, from the end of the 17th century, and the Picasso painting Retrato de Nusch (1937) dialogue, to see feelings and emotions, very present in the religious art of the Spanish Baroque, and that also they attracted the great artist of the 20th century.
“From a very early age, Picasso acquired reproductions and originals of art from old masters and contemporaries, which served as a constant source of reflection for his works,” continues Gabriel Montua, director of the Berggruen. Spanish art occupied a central place in his universal imaginary, because he had known all its wealth in his childhood and studied in places as diverse as Malaga, A Coruña, Barcelona or Madrid ”. Knowing deeply the collection helped Picasso to create his artistic revolution.
