Pablo Ruiz Picasso died 50 years ago and the world pays tribute this Saturday to the one who was one of the great geniuses who revolutionized the history of art with events and exhibitions that celebrate his work and his artistic heritage. Different countries in Europe and America celebrate events and explosions in memory of Picasso, born in Malaga on October 25, 1881 and died in the French town of Mougins on April 8, 1973.
Eight museums, six in Spain and two in France, are dedicated to him in cities linked to his biography: in his hometown of Malaga -where there are two museums-, in Barcelona and Madrid, where he studied, in A Coruña, Paris and Antibes, where he lived and worked. Another is in the Catalan town of Horta de Sant Joan, which helped stimulate Cubism. But is Picasso still important for young people?
Markus Müller is director of the Pablo Picasso Museum in Münster, the only one dedicated to the artist in Germany. “He is an important figure for all those who are creative,” he says. However, a large part of the most current avant-garde points “rather” to Marcel Duchamp, his “great intellectual and conceptual counterpart”. For the youngest, it is no longer as “provocative”, as it was in its time, but it is still a great “stimulus”, says Müller making a play on words in German.
Feminist critiques: prolific not only in art
Picasso’s life and work would be inconceivable without women like Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot or Jacqueline Roque. The artist, with a captivating dominant personality, had many partners and love affairs. And his treatment of women has been increasingly criticized as part of the “MeToo” movement. In the United States, “he is sometimes mentioned at the same time as Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen,” says Müller.
Picasso, in his studio in Vallauris, France, in 1953.
He left around 16,000 paintings and drawings, 1,200 sculptures, 3,000 ceramics and thousands of lithographs, the most extensive work by a visual artist in the twentieth century, from the ‘Young Ladies of Avignon’ to ‘Guernica’. But he also made cultural appropriations “completely uncritically,” according to Müller, as with African masks and sculptures in a colonial context. The Münster museum addressed this in a special exhibition in 2022 and currently shows Picasso in “A Collector’s Choice – Picasso, Miró, Schlemmer, Kirchner & Co.” alongside other classical masters of modern art. With the “Given to Show” exhibition, part of the “Picasso Celebration 1973-2023” honoring the artist worldwide under the auspices of the Picasso Museum in Paris, the one in Münster focuses on highlighting his marketing skills and inclination towards self-portraiture.
The National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA) of Buenos Aires has just inaugurated also in Argentina the exhibition “Picasso in the heritage of the Museum” that brings together more than 30 of his works -including engravings, drawings, paintings and ceramics- of the different pictorial stages and the different styles of the Malaga painter, in which there is a great presence of the artist’s women, the most controversial chapter of their life but that they have rescued since, says its director, Andrés Duprat, they are “against cancellations”.
Meanwhile, the prices of his works have continued to rise, says Anne Rinckens of the Van Ham auction house in Cologne. For the first time in more than 25 years, with “Buste de femme” (1971) an important painting by Picasso will be available on the German art market. Van Ham will auction it on June 5 with an initial seven-figure estimate.
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