Four decades after his death, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso is experiencing a surge in popularity. A major project dedicated to his relationship with the Mediterranean includes 60 exhibitions all over Europe, and many other galleries are also getting in on the action.
Picasso is all the rage right now, and not just in France. Exhibitions dedicated to the famous Spaniard can be found from Paris to Naples, Rome to Barcelona and Athens. French media has labelled the flood of exhibitions a “folie Picasso,” or “Picasso mania.”
The Spaniard is regarded as one of the most productive artists of the 20th century, with experts estimating that he created up to 20,000 paintings and drawings in more than 60 years.
And that figure doesn’t include his ceramics, collages and sculptures. It’s a huge body of work, meaning there’s plenty to go round.
But the Picasso hype can’t just be put down to his prolificacy. According to art expert Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, grandson of Picasso and his first wife Olga, part of the reason lies in Picasso’s universality.
Today, the artist belongs to the whole world, he says, and his work is instrumental to understanding 20th-century art history.
Ruiz-Picasso, a gallery owner and curator, was one of the driving forces behind the Picasso Museum in Malaga, Picasso’s home town, which opened in 2003.
He also worked on the Olga Picasso exhibition, which opened at the Picasso Museum in Paris in March. The 350 exhibits on display illustrate the moving love story of the painter and his first wife, was the inspiration behind many of the artist’s mother-and-child compositions.
They also reflect Picasso’s artistic development, which began with more traditional-style paintings and moved through many phases, including the “blue” and “rose” periods and his co-founding of the Cubist movement.
For Laurent Le Bon, the director of the Paris museum, Picasso embodies a kind of art that is always suggesting new perspectives. His work is constantly renewing itself, says Le Bon, and that’s why interest in the painter and sculptor never fades.
It was Le Bon who first came up with the idea for Picasso-Mediterranean, a two-year initiative focusing on Picasso’s relationship with the Mediterranean and involving exhibitions at 60 museums. The project, which runs until 2019, includes exhibitions in France, Italy, Spain, Greece and Morocco.
Picasso de Picasso, which is being shown at the Helene & Edouard Leclerc gallery near Brest, north-west France, is not part of Le Bon’s project.
The museum showed more than 200 works of Picasso. What’s particularly special about them is that Picasso kept them with him in his various studios all his life. After his death at the age of 91 in 1973, some of them were inherited by Jacqueline Roque, his second wife.
Emmanuel Guigon, director of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, delivers another reason why the artist is such an inexhaustible source of exhibitions: audiences will never grow weary of him because he was a genius, the Frenchman says.
“He’s one of the founders of Cubism, one of the greatest ceramic artists of he 20th century, an important sketch artist and a sculptor,” says Guigon. That’s plenty to keep people occupied for the next 100 years.
Guigon is planning an exhibition set to open at the end of October which will focus on Picasso and Barcelona.
Picasso studied in the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region, and it also inspired some of his best known paintings, including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” his portrait of five prostitutes on the Carrer d’Avinyo. – dpa
