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.
