In 1988, Cy Twombly was 60 years old and already a universally admired artist, the most sensual and uninhibited of the abstract expressionists, when in a gesture typical of a forger in love he decided to copy a Picasso (Woman with a Flower Crown, 1939), not to sell it, but for the pure pleasure of having it accompany him in his bedroom for the rest of his life. The work, perhaps due to its frank and carefree nature, is responsible for opening El eco de Picasso at the Museo Picasso Málaga, an exhibition in which half a hundred artists reply, challenge, question, dialogue, measure themselves or slap each other with the painter, who of course is also present, as if watching to see that no one takes him down from his pedestal.
The exhibition (from today until March 31) constitutes one of the highlights of the year at the Malaga museum, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary coinciding with the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. But the gigantic shadow of the liberating (and communist) Picasso not only invades the exhibition halls, but also seems to have infected the center’s staff, who yesterday supported his third day of strike by 64% due to an entrenched labor conflict. since the agreement was denounced almost a year ago. Bernard Ruíz-Picasso, the artist’s grandson and member of the board that governs the museum, barely hides his anger. Over the weekend he defiantly faced a group of workers who were protesting with Picasso masks at the entrance to the museum when he was preparing to visit it with his wife, gallery owner Almine Rech, and artist Jeff Koons. A new rally is scheduled for this Monday, in the moments prior to the inauguration, this time in front of numerous guests.
Inside, Massacre in Korea (1951), one of the jewels of the exhibition with which, in the midst of the Cold War, Picasso positioned himself alongside the North Korean civilian victims who were suffering the consequences of a very bloody conflict, reverberates in The Execution of the Wise Men , made by the American Jameson Green expressly for the exhibition. He is not the only one, seventeen other creators present new work in Malaga. They are those who, according to Almine Reig, to whose gallery most of those selected belong, can now confront Picasso freely, without fear or prejudice, unlike their contemporaries, who felt obliged to challenge him, confront him or measure themselves against him.
But, at least here, in that “wild journey” (the expression is from curator Eric Trancy) of relationships between those artists who shared time with the genius and those who were born once he had already died, the veterans – with exceptions like the El Prat artist Cristina BanBan -, win by a landslide: Martin Kippenberger, who in 1996 entrusted himself with the task of making the portraits that Picasso could not paint, Francis Bacon (“Let’s say he helped me see”), Maria Lassnig , Willem de Kooning, George Condo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Karel Appel, David Smith, Georg Baselitz, Philip Guston, Clavé, Barceló… In his own way, he shaped art and also artists.
