Next April 8 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (Málaga, 1881–Mougins, France, 1973), an anniversary that comes to fuel Picassomania with a multitude of exhibitions. But while one part of the world prepares to celebrate the work of the great colossus of modern art, the other, that of MeeToo, grabs the man by the chest and places his cracked figure at the center of the debate on machismo and violence against women. women. The Picasso Celebration, organized between the Spanish and French governments, has programmed fifty exhibitions, some in progress or already closed, such as the one that has just closed its doors at the Museu Picasso on the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (more than 120,000 visitors ), but the party has only just begun. Carlos Alberdi (Madrid, 1956), commissioner of the Picasso Year in substitution of José Guirao, who died last July, makes a positive assessment of these first months, trusts that the celebration will serve to make his work known in Spain "beyond its most recognizable icon: the dove of peace” and regrets that he wants to be presented as “a villain from a book”. "You have to understand him for what he was: a man from the late 19th century," he says.
Is the controversy over his private conduct with women turning young people away from Picasso more and more?
Young people is too broad a concept and it is difficult to generalize. Young people are generally very critical. For them he is sometimes too big a character, too heavy in the history of art, who must be confronted. And that is seen a lot in some criticisms that have to do with private life, Picasso and women... It's early. We are going to see throughout this year how this confrontation is resolved. Picasso will have his problems but at the same time it is a reality in the art of the 20th century. I am thinking, for example, of the exhibition Picasso: Untitled that will be seen at La Casa Encendida and how the fifty artists who have been invited to put new titles and describe fifty works from their last stage are going to deal with it. But we will also have to be attentive to other types of phenomena to find out what they think, because due to their very young condition, their expressions are in the minority and tend to take place in somewhat marginal places.
The Meetoo revives criticism at a time when gender issues are at the center of the conversation.
That is one of the important conversations of the moment and the celebration also addresses it. There are at least three exhibitions that focus on that theme. The Montmartre Museum has explored his relationship with Fernande Olivier and the Kunstmuseum dedicated another exhibition to the only two women who wrote books about his life with him, Olivier herself and Francoise Gilot. The Brooklyn Museum will also open a third one from the perspective of feminism in June. That is there, it floats in the environment... and it is a constant in the media. In the first place I recommend going to the safest sources, the books of their women, first-hand testimonies. Because the section that I call hard, which paints Picasso as a villain from a book, seems a bit excessive to me, without reliable data to support it.
They are not complacent books. In My life with Picasso, Gilot, also a painter, does not leave her human side very well off. She sees him as a Bluebeard.
They are not complacent, it is true, but it is that nobody can understand the figure of Picasso without understanding that he is a man from the end of the 19th century. He is a very old gentleman born in the late 1800s. His figure should not be sweetened but neither should he be simplified. He is not a one-dimensional character but rather someone very complex: a man from Malaga with an obviously macho upbringing, but passed through Parisian bohemia, with his promiscuous ways of relating... Sparks fly in his relationships, but at the same time he relates to very powerful, intelligent Picasso was too Picasso. His relationships with both men and women should not have been easy, but matters related to private life, by their very nature, tend to remain hidden.
Something that no one questions is his status as a popular icon, but is his work really known in Spain?
I don't believe it. She is known precisely for her great icons, the Gernika or the Dove of Peace, but apart from that she would even say that The Ladies of Avignon are unknown. And then, of course, it depends from where you look at it. Barcelona has been a very Picassian city, it has the Museu Picasso and occupies a social and cultural space in the life of the city. In Madrid there have not been so many exhibitions, although the Gernika has. Picasso's Spanish collections are very recent and small. The Reina Sofía bought in the time of José Guirao The Offering Lady and Woman in the Garden..., and then there are those of Picasso in Barcelona and those of Picasso Málaga, with the deposits of Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. But apart from that...
For years the character and his work have been market meat and even merchandising (Zara has launched a sweatshirt). Can this barrage of exposures cause supersaturation?
We will know that in time. It is difficult to know what effect this great celebration will have on the figure of Picasso. Obviously there is a risk of saturation but it will also have an effect of re-reading and opening lines of study, of discovery. Picasso are many Picassos. And that explains this explosion of interest. As for the Picasso brand, its conversion into a souvenir object, Rogelio López Cuenca will deal with interventions in museums such as the Romántico, the Ceramics Museum of Valencia or the Altamira Museum.
What is the balance of these first months?
That the ship is going and Picasso continues to give a lot of himself. I also perceive much more enthusiasm and passion here than in France, where he already paid state tributes to him when he turned 85 or 90 years old. Here perhaps there is also that aspect of recovery of a painter who could not return to Spain.
