April 8 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (Málaga, 1881 – Mougins, France, 1973), an ephemeris that will rekindle Picassomania with a multitude of exhibitions. But while one part of the world prepares to celebrate the work of the great colossus of modern art, the other, that of MeeToo, takes the man by the chin and puts his cracked figure at the center of the debate about masculinity and violence against women. The Picasso Celebration, organized between the Spanish and French governments, has scheduled half a hundred exhibitions, some ongoing or already closed, such as the one that has just closed its doors at the Picasso Museum on the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (more than 120,000 visitors) , but the party has only just begun. Carlos Alberdi (Madrid, 1956), commissioner of the Picasso Year in place of José Guirao, who died in July, makes a positive assessment of these first months, trusting that the celebration will serve to make his work known in Spain “beyond of the most recognizable icon, the dove of peace”, and regrets that he wants to be presented as “a book villain”. “You have to understand him as what he was: a man from the end of the 19th century,” he says.
Is the controversy over his private conduct with women driving young people away from Picasso more and more?
Young people is too broad a concept and it is difficult to generalize. Young people are generally very critical. For them, he is a character who is sometimes too big, too heavy in the history of art, who needs to be confronted. And this is very visible in some criticisms that have to do with private life, Picasso and women… It’s early. We will see throughout this year how this confrontation is resolved. Picasso has his problems but at the same time he is a reality in the art of the 20th century. I am thinking, for example, of the exhibition Picasso: Untitled, which will be on view at La Casa Encendida, and how the fifty artists who have been invited to give new titles and describe fifty works from his last stage will face it. But it will also be necessary to pay attention to another type of phenomenon to know what young people think about it, because due to their own condition their expressions are in the minority and tend to spread in somewhat marginal places.
MeeToo revives criticism at a time when gender issues are at the center of the conversation.
This is one of the important conversations of the moment and the celebration also addresses it. There are at least three exhibitions that focus on this theme. The Montmartre Museum has explored her relationship with Fernande Olivier and the Kunstmuseum dedicated an exhibition to the only two women who wrote books about her life with him, Olivier herself and Francoise Gilot. The Brooklyn Museum will also open a third one, in June, from the perspective of feminism. This is there, it floats in the atmosphere… and is a constant in the media. I first recommend going to the most reliable sources, the books of their wives, first-hand witnesses. Because the section that I consider harsh, that paints Picasso as a book villain, seems to me a bit excessive, without reliable data to support it.
They are not complacent books… In My life with Picasso, Gilot, also a painter, does not leave her human side very well. He sees him as a Bluebeard.
They are not complacent, it is true, but no one can understand the figure of Picasso without understanding that he is a man from the end of the 19th century. He is a very old gentleman born at the end of 1800. His figure should not be sweetened but neither should it be simplified. He is not a one-dimensional character but a very complex one: a Malagasy man with an obviously macho upbringing, but who has lived through Parisian bohemia, with its promiscuous forms of relationship… Sparks fly in his relationships, but at the same time he relates to very powerful women, intelligent Picasso was too Picasso. His relationships with both men and women must not have been easy, but matters related to private life, by their very nature, tend to remain hidden.
One thing that no one questions is his status as a popular icon, but is his work really known in Spain?
I do not think so. It is known precisely for its great icons, the Gernika or the Dove of Peace, but apart from that I would even say that The Ladies of Avignon are unknown. And then, of course, it depends on where you look at it. Barcelona has been a very Picasso-like city, it has the Picasso Museum and occupies a social and cultural space in the life of the city. There haven’t been that many exhibitions in Madrid, even though it has Gernika. The Spanish Picasso collections are very recent and small. The Reina Sofia bought during José Guirao’s time La dama oferent and Dona al jardí…, and then there are those of Picasso from Barcelona and Picasso from Malaga, with the deposits of Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. But apart from that…
For years, the character and his work have been marketed and even merchandising (Zara has marketed a sweatshirt). Can this avalanche of exhibitions lead to oversaturation?
We will know that in time. It is difficult to know what effect this great celebration will have on the figure of Picasso. There is obviously the risk of saturation, but it will also have the effect of re-reading and opening lines of study, of discovery. Picasso is many Picassos. And that explains this explosion of interest. As for the Picasso brand, its conversion into a souvenir object, Rogelio López Cuenca will take care of it with interventions in museums such as the Romantic, the Ceràmica de Valencia or the Altamira Museum.
What is the balance of these first months?
That the ship goes and Picasso continues to give a lot of himself. I also perceive much more enthusiasm and passion here than in France, which already dedicated State tributes to him when he was 85 or 90 years old. Here, perhaps, there is also the aspect of recovery of a painter who could not return to Spain.
