The day ahead of us in Barcelona is dedicated to a visit to the Picasso Museum. Probably the most famous painter of the last century, after whom even cafes around the world are still fondly named, studied painting precisely in Barcelona. There he painted his first serious pictures.
The Picasso Museum in Barcelona probably wouldn't exist without a man called Jaime Sabartes. He was born in the same year as Picasso, 1881, but in Barcelona, while Picasso is a southerner from Malaga. It was in the Catalan metropolis that they met as eighteen-year-olds. Jaime studied sculpture and Pablo painting at the Royal Catalan Academy of Fine Arts San Jordi in Barcelona.
Everyone knew the Academy by the name La Ljotja - after the neoclassical building near the port of Barcelona, where the Academy is based. In the same place, two great names studied - Antoni Gaudi architecture, and Pablo Picasso painting.
IN THE HEART OF BARCELONA
We headed to the old town district of La Ribera, which is a ten-minute walk from the Academy. The picturesque streets are already full of tourists. In the labyrinth, we look for a museum and absorb the charm of this region, a favorite among visitors.
Jaime Sabartes and Pablo Picasso remained friends throughout their lives. Jaime was not only a sculptor, but also published poems and texts in magazines. He was a correspondent for Spanish newspapers from Guatemala, spent 23 years in Latin America, and worked as an art professor. After returning to Europe in 1935, he took the job of Picasso's personal secretary in Paris. He writes biographies about him. In 1963, he donated 537 works by Picasso to Barcelona.
The city of Barcelona has combined five separate palaces into one complex in the old town center of La Ribera. The inner courtyard of that complex hides the entrance to the museum. We didn't find it easily, but the search paid off.
The Hajme Sabartes Foundation formed the core of the future museum. After Sabartes' death in 1968, Picasso fulfilled his friend's wish and gave Barcelona another 1000 of his works. The interior of the museum itself is really fascinating.
A surprisingly successful combination of museum functionality and the antique atmosphere of the museum rooms.
What sets this permanent exhibition apart from other museums with more works by Picasso is the fact that you can see the works of the young artist from his Barcelona period, from 1895 to 1904.
THE TEENAGE PICASSO
Picasso's father was a painter and art professor in Malaga, where his son Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuseno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad Riz Picasso was born. Before I came across this information, I thought that this tradition of kilometer-long names was the result of the artistic exaggeration of the scriptwriter of the Zagor comics, whose friend, the Mexican Chico, had an almost infinite name that he was proud of. The famous painter later shortened his name to a reasonable length. I smiled at the thought of how Picasso's famous signature on canvases, which is worth millions today, would have looked like if, on a whim, he had decided to sign himself with the name from his baptismal certificate.
The family stayed in Galicia for his father's work, but Picasso's sister died of diphtheria, so the father and mother moved to Barcelona with their two children. In 1896, Picasso painted the famous portrait of his father there. Picasso is fifteen years old.
Jose Ruiz Blasko, immortalized on his son's canvas, probably could not have guessed that the last name Picasso, which his son picked from his family name as if from a buffet table, would become probably the most famous global sign of painting of the last century.
Picasso's father relied on the classical painting tradition. Picasso will write about this: "Father painted pictures for the dining room; partridges and pigeons, doves and rabbits: furs and feathers were visible on them, birds and flowers were his specialty. Above all pigeons and lilacs".
I was delighted by a canvas painted by Picasso's father, with a favorite motif.
Although the son, especially from his painting of the Lady of Avignon, which he showed to his astonished friends in Paris in 1907, is revolutionaryly different from his father, in some things continuity can be observed.
PABLO'S PIGEONS
I remember that Picasso finished the painting "Boy with a pigeon" in 1901, thus continuing the family tradition. But his pigeons will experience world fame thanks to the bloody twentieth century.
In 1944, Picasso became a member of the Communist Party of France and remained loyal to it until the end of his life. However, he became a pacifist very early on. As a young man, he saw military invalids returning to Barcelona from the Spanish-American wars. And his aversion to war was engraved in his soul. In the Spanish pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, he exhibited his "Guernica" - an artistic cry against the suffering in the Spanish Civil War. But after the Second World War, Picasso created a symbol of peace - a white dove - for world peace congresses. Since the sixties, that pigeon has carried an olive branch in its beak. The Soviet poet, writer and famous war reporter from two world wars and the Spanish Civil War Ilya Ehrenburg knew Picasso well. He once wrote: "Picasso loves pigeons and keeps them at home all the time." He said, laughing, that pigeons were greedy and quarrelsome birds; he does not understand how they could become a symbol of peace. Then he moved on to his artistic pigeons, nearly a hundred sketches; he knew that his bird was waiting for a world flight".
For the dogmatic left, his dove of peace was too far from socialist realism, the right also attacked him. But he remained steadfast. He saw his political engagement as an extension of his art and it never occurred to him to subordinate his aesthetics to ideology.
In the Picasso Museum, I easily find another canvas with pigeon motifs.
The artist created it in his studio in Cannes in 1957 – it's actually a view through a window. The color and recognizable motif appear in nine more pictures from that series.
It is interesting that the critics generally agree that Picasso, painting pigeons, was actually taking a break from his interpretation of a large painting by the Spanish Baroque painter Diego Velázquez.
This painting is known as The Little Ladies of the Court (Las Meninas, 1656). Many artists reacted to this image in the following centuries. Pablo Picasso painted his "1957 Variations" in 44. It is his answer to the genius challenge of Velasquez's painting.
In one room on the first floor, I came across the most famous of them. Picasso's Little Ladies of the Court, to put it simply, revalued the figures in the picture. The five-year-old princess is no longer the main figure. One secondary figure becomes the most striking - the painter Velasquez. Other figures become flat and cartoonish.
The painting in room number 14 is impossible to overlook. Over two and a half with almost two meters of atypically dark palette. The group composition, along with all the other variations from the series, is the only series of paintings by Picasso that is exhibited as a whole in one museum.
After this monumental canvas, it was fun to look at all the other variations. On them, Picasso's color flourished again, paired with Cubist stylization. I remember that in Velasquez's painting in the Prado Museum, the only animal was a Spanish Mastiff, a court dog.
In Picasso's Variations, he was transformed into a child's drawing. In a way, Picasso played ironically with the Spanish court of the seventeenth century.
We stayed a long time in the Picasso Museum. Sometimes we rested on benches watching people from all continents looking at Picasso's works and drawings, whispering to each other as if in church, taking selfies.
The only room I returned to was the one that keeps the first works of the boy Pablo, who is 15 years old and has already skipped two years of painting studies in Barcelona. "Aunt Pepa" that he painted in Malaga got its share of eternity thanks to Pablo's brush from the summer of 1896. The same applies to "The Old Fisherman".
Of course, the self-portrait of an ingenious boy is one of the real attractions of the Barcelona collection.
My favorite is Barcelona Beach 1896.
For me, the mere fact that I see Barceloneta, the city's favorite beach, through Picasso's boyish eye of the summer that passed 128 years ago is exciting enough. On it I can make out two horses and two boats on land.
Even then, the son made a departure from the almost photorealistic technique of his father. Of course, eleven more years will pass until that day in Paris, when the twenty-six-year-old Picasso will show the painting that will later be remembered as the initial canvas of the art revolution - The Lady of Avignon.
In that picture too, he borrowed a motif from Barcelona. Not far from the Academy, Street Avignon comes out onto the coast. It was a red light street. Many people don't know it, but the cubist revolution started thematically in a Barcelona brothel.
Much more could be said about this museum and the artist it is dedicated to. But outside, gorgeous Barcelona awaits us, a metropolis of positive vibes that offers surprises at every turn.
One of them is waiting for us at the corner of the alley near the Picasso Museum. At first glance, it could be an ordinary coffee shop. At the second and every subsequent look, it's about the next small artistic miracle that Barcelona presents to us in the favorite tourist district of El Born. Makso Gallery was founded in 2009 by Argentinian artist Makso Gracia. His shop - meanwhile there are six of them in this area - looks like a Cubist-Surrealist-Popartist work of art itself.
Both Miro and Picasso and Gaudí, even Maxo, show with passion that this city long ago left behind the fear of strong colors, avant-garde dislocation and Mediterranean excess.
That's how even ordinary galleries on the corner quickly become bold visual ventures.
Bonus video:
