What I Learned at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona

Nature Morte au le Compotier (1945)
I really liked this one, and I don't know why

The Picasso Museum in Barcelona occupies part of an extensive warren of narrow medieval streets, alleyways, passages, arches, courtyards, stairways and dead-ends in the Born section of the old town.  Its location there gives it an extra dimension, adding a depth of history and a cool feeling of stone, and a little mystery as well.

Those who know me will understand when I say that the arrangement of the museum - generally from his early life to his later life, not strictly consecutive but more a series of stages - made the visit interesting from the beginning.  One of our best museum experiences ever was the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where his work is arranged consecutively and you can see - and feel - both his mental illness and artistic brilliance progress, until at the end, it's hard to look at.

The Picasso Museum is not as dramatic, probably because Picasso's life was not as dramatic as Van Gogh's.  But it did give his art a really interesting perspective - one that anyone can interpret any way they wish.  I was immediately struck by some of those perspectives.  Here they are.

Picasso was born in 1881, and his talent was apparently evident well before he grew up.  It's almost unbelievable that a teenager had the maturity and skillset to produce these paintings; his father was an art teacher and museum curator, which probably helped, but still.  

In addition, we can see the influences of lots of other artists and artistic styles in his teenage work.  This reminds us that Picasso didn't spring fully-formed onto the art scene as 'Picasso;' he learned and practiced and, in his case, showed great competence in a wide variety of milieus.  I learned that Picasso wasn't just a primitive surrealist; he was a pretty accomplished master of many artistic forms.

Here we go.  Remember - click on pics to embiggen.

What were you doing when you were 12?  Picasso was painting this:

Seascape - the Beach at Orzan

And a little later, when he was fifteen, and probably obnoxious, he created these wonderful paintings:

Aunt Pepa

Wouldn't you love to immortalize that certain relative this way, for all time?  Seriously, though, here's a classic portrait with all the familiar elements - but look how expressive that face is!  What did he really think about Aunt Pepa?  A mature work in many ways.

Who knew Picasso did big-format realism as a teenager?  I didn't.

By 1896, when he was still fifteen, the time for history and religious paintings was long gone, but he did one anyway - just so show that he could?

Primera Comunion (5'6" x 3'10")

Incredible.  Yet my first reaction was that they were brother and sister, and the boy is picking up the vase in order to throw it at his sister, who is getting all the attention.  See?  Every picture tells a story.

At sixteen, he produced this enormous painting in a more modern style - yet one more thematic box checked:

Science and Charity (8'2" x 6'6") 

Not only an enormous, superbly executed painting, but one that tells many different poignant stories and leaves us with more questions than answers.  But - Abbey and I liked this very small study a lot better -

Study - Science and Charity

And let's not forget self-portraits, which make up a huge portion of Picasso's oeuvre:

Self-Portrait with Wig

Self-deprecating humor, no less.  And again, such an expressive face!  Seventeen years old.  Some of the later Picasso starts to come through - maybe a little cynical and distant.  Yet his self-portrait a year later (pic from internet; it's in the Museum but I didn't get a picture of it) is entirely different:

Serious and intense, with some grim confidence.  It is a lot of fun to go through all of Picasso's self-portraits, in chronological order - his stylistic evolution is only one of the stories they tell.

By the way - here he is at 83:

Painter at Work (1964)

And at 90:

Dude has learned some stuff.

I didn't know that he was still very young during his Blue Period - from about age 19 to about 23.  The Blue Period was, apparently, the result of his reaction to the suicide of his best friend, Carles Casagemas, who he painted, when he (Picasso) was eighteen:

Portrait of Casagemas

Not much warmth there, but the familiar intensity could be saying any number of things about their friendship.  Also, Carles was not that far from his own suicide.

Two Blue Period pieces:

Barcelona Rooftop (1903)

Jaume Sabartes (a lifelong friend)

And two pieces done in 1917; so similar in subject and pose, but each masterfully representing an entirely different and distinct style.  He's still a master of realism, but he's already experimenting - successfully - with surrealism:

Woman in a Mantilla

Blanquita Suarez

And another one, sixteen years earlier, when he was twenty, which combines the two.  Abbey was intrigued about the pose and the way the body was tilted and what that meant.  And look at that face!

Waiting - Margot (1901)

I can't leave out his Impressionism, which is well-represented at the Museum:

Leaving the Theater (1901)

In one of the first rooms of the exhibit, there is a whole long wall with dozens and dozens of sketches from Picasso's childhood, were saved by his family and miraculously made their way to the Museum after he died.  Here's just one - again, a little humor - or a hint of emerging surrealism?

Le Sage (1899)

A few more that I really liked, and then I'll quit.

One of my favorites - look at the physicality, movement, the life in this drawing:

The Reapers (1948)

It's hard not to overlay some of his Cubist and later figures on this sketch; they share that energy, bodies in coordinated action, moving gracefully but strongly and purposefully.

Picasso lived in Paris throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which has been called a rehearsal for WWII.  He was profoundly affected by it, and "Guernica," his masterpiece, is a kick in the teeth.  He also produced a number of satirical parodies of Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator, many of which were on the wall in Barcelona:

The Dream and the Lie of Franco

Picasso pulls no punches; he mediates his anger with humor, but there's plenty of both in this series.

One of western culture's most famous paintings is Velazquez's "Las Meninas," a large-format, seventeenth-century painting depicting a number of figures, some from the court of the Spanish King Philip IV.  To use a term from music, the painting has been "covered" countless times over the centuries: painters have provided their version of Velazquez's complex elements; the attraction stems from "....the way its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and for the uncertain relationship it creates between the viewer and the figures depicted."

Right up Picasso's alley.  I liked these two takes on "Las Menimas."*  For the first one, Abbey was interested in how body parts appear and disappear, change shape and position, and show up in odd places.  The dress, however, is outrageous enough on its own and is reproduced faithfully.

I just thought Las Meminas was funny.  That's all.

The Infanta Margarita Maria (1947)

Las Meninas (1957)

 NOTE:  The original colors in some of these pictures did not always survive the transition from canvas to digital memory, and then to upload and pasting into this online format.  I certainly could have edited them to provide what I thought was missing, but I'd really have to be Picasso himself to do that accurately, and I'm not.

* - Here's another take on Velazques's "Las Meninas" that is in the Museum's collection but wasn't hanging when we were there.  It's not as funny, but, I think, really provides a look into Picasso's thinking as he applied his Cubist sensibilities to the work - we can use what he's showing us here to help us understand other pieces.  We can see how he got from A to B, because we're so familiar with A:

I'm sorry, though, that he left the dog out.  Or did he?