When he was 17 years old, Picasso traveled to Madrid to study at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts at the suggestion of his father, also a painter, José Ruiz y Blasco. But letters and drawings from that time show that instead of attending classes, he spends his days copying the old masters at the Prado Museum. In one of them, he notes, “Yo, el Greco”, confessing even without intending it the name of what would be “his first love of youth” and one of the most persistent over time, according to Carmen Giménez, one of the greatest specialists in Picasso, for whom the influence of the Cretan was essential in the birth of cubism, one of the revolutionary movements of the 20th century.
El Greco’s thesis as the first cubist painter, or at least his great inspirer (Picasso himself recognized him, who, ignoring Braque, claimed his invention and subscribed to the theory that his origin was Spanish), was deployed by Giménez herself. a year ago now in a splendid exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Basel and now it has an impact on it in the Prado, a museum in which Picasso was not only a copyist but also a director, appointed during the Civil War by Manuel Azaña, then president of the Government of the República, for a salary of 15,000 pesetas, although he never took office.
Picasso, El Greco and Cubism (until September 17), which is part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death, is a much smaller sample than the one mentioned in Basel but equally revealing. “What El Greco and Picasso have contributed is another world, and that world will remain here forever,” says Giménez.
“Never before had I imagined that El Greco brought cubism to Picasso, or at least the opening he needed to see in a different way,” adds the curator, who has brought together the apostles Saint Simon, Saint Bartholomew’ and Saint John the Evangelist. , which Picasso contemplated in Toledo, with the San Pablo from a private collection. In front of them, four works by Picasso: Mandolin Player (from the Beyeler Foundation), Accordionist (Guggenheim Museum), Man with a Clarinet (Thyssen-Bornemisza) and The Amateur (Kunstmuseum Basel), all of them painted between 1911 and 1912.
