Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Picasso’s Path to Guernica


Museo Reina Sofía
April 4, 2017 – September 4, 2017 

2017 will mark the  80th anniversary  of the first public showing of one of the most  iconic paintings in art history,


 Pablo Picasso. Guernica, 1937. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017 

Pablo Picasso ’s Guernica , initially exhibited in the  Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. The Museo Reina Sofía therefore organize Pity and Terror.  

Picasso’s Path to Guernica , a major exhibition that will bring together some 150 masterpieces by the artist from the Reina Sofía’s own Collection and more than 30 institutions around the world , including the Musée Picasso and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the  Tate Modern in London, the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, as well as  private collections  like those of  Nahmad and Menil.

This is the  25th anniversary  of the arrival at the Museo Reina  Sofía of this painting, which was commissioned by the Republican government for the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris with the aim of presenting an artistic  denunciation of events in the Spanish Civil War.

Unlike other retrospectives on the art of the Málaga-born genius, this show places the emphasis on the  evolution of Picasso’s pictorial universe , with  Guernica at its  epicenter, from the late 1920s until the mid-1940s, a period when the artist brought  about a  radical change  in his oeuvre. Through key works from that period, it will be  possible to analyze the transformation undergone in Picasso’s art from the initial  optimism of Cubism to his search in the 1930s, a period of great political tumult, for a new image of the world lying between beauty and monstrosity.

Guernica is thus treated not as an isolated piece but as a fundamental work forming part of the evolution of  Picasso’s art. A study of the structure of his works in those years reveals the new path undertaken by the artist through the gradual introduction of different spaces and figures, scenes of  both frenzied and static action, and situations of violence, fear or pain, often expressed by means of destructured bodies, all finally issu ing into a political art that culminates in the most famous of his works.

Fantastic, not to be missed article.