Picasso stood on the shoulders of giants to become the great colossus of modern art. From his first recorded visit to the Prado Museum at the age of 14, the young painter engaged in a face-to-face dialogue with the old masters, especially Velázquez, Goya and El Greco. With disarming self-confidence, he signs one of his first drawings: "I, El Greco." And towards the end of his life, become a world star and clinging to his brushes to prove to himself that he was alive, he painted the figure of a musketeer on whose frame he inscribed an enigmatic legend: "Domenico Theotocopulos van Rijn da Silva", the less familiar names of El Greco, Rembrandt and Velázquez, whom he not only continued to admire but among whom he already felt an equal.
"Basically, what is a painter? A collector who wants to put together a collection by making himself the paintings that he likes from others", Picasso confessed one day to his dealer Kahnweiler. Over the next few months, with On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, we will see him starring in multiple duets, jumping from museum to museum, measuring himself against those who were his friends and his best enemies; dancing with artists he admired and cannibalized and with those others with whom he had difficulties love-hate relationships and an uncertain ending.Ahead of the celebrations of the Picasso Year, which will be held in 2023, the Basel Kunstmuseum brings him together -from this Saturday and until September 25- with which, according to the main curator of the exhibition, Carmen Giménez, was his "first love of youth" and one of the most persistent over time: El Greco.
But Picasso El Greco, which in a reduced version will travel to the Prado Museum next autumn, is much more than a face to face between two giants. The fascination that Picasso felt for El Greco has been the subject of exhibitions such as the one that could be seen at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, in 2015, under the title Picasso's Greco Passion, curated by Malén Gual. But now Carmen Giménez goes further, splendidly displaying in the galleries the thesis that Francisco Calvo Serraller always defended, with whom he projected the exhibition before his death in 2018. El Greco would have been the first cubist painter three centuries before one of his the key movements of the 20th century avant-garde. "Or at least it was born from him, he had a decisive influence," says the curator. Ignoring Braque, Picasso himself claimed his invention and subscribed to the theory that his origin was Spanish, pointing to El Greco as his greatest inspiration.
Barely a few hours before its opening, Carmen Giménez walks through the rooms of the Kunstmuseum Basel accompanied by the co-curator Ana Mingot and Paloma Picasso, the artist's daughter, amazed to see some of the preliminary drawings of The Young Ladies of Avignon confronted with The Coronation of the Virgin, by El Greco, the image of the Immaculate Conception suspended on a crescent that in Malaga, blasphemous, moves to a brothel, with the central figure stepping on a fleshy slice of watermelon. "When I see a Picasso it is as if I were seeing a Matisse," says Paloma. "When I go to a museum I'm not going to see Dad's works but Pablo Picasso's," she points out, and she heaves a weary sigh when she is asked about the Picasso emerging in the new light of the
The exhibition consists of some thirty couples who bring to light a whole world of elective affinities, with moments such as the meeting of the Portrait of Madame Canals, recently arrived from the Barcelona museum, and The Lady with an Ermine, which for years was thought to be by El Greco and currently attributed to Alonso Sánchez Coello. Picasso was one of the earliest proponents of Cretan when it was not yet in fashion. He discovered it as a teenager during his time as a student at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts and immediately afterwards in modernist Barcelona, where painters such as Rusiñol championed his claim as a great pioneer of modern artistic freedom (in 1984, together with Zuloaga, they led in procession from Barcelona to Sitges the two paintings they had acquired from Paris to deposit them in the Cau Ferrat). What did Picasso see in him? "A champion of radical expression, he was an eccentric who was lucky enough to be rejected as court painter to Philip II and was thus able to embrace artistic extravagance. It gave him the poise he needed to make a permanent break with the art of the past ". He paved the way for an artistic avant-garde that was later followed by so many others."
Exceptional loans have reached Basel, such as the splendid Saint Jerome from the New York Metropolitan, here accompanied by Unknown in the style of El Greco, although it is largely nourished by the splendid collection of Picassos from the Kunstmuseum, to which the artist himself, already At the age of 86, he gave away four oil paintings in gratitude for what is known as 'the miracle of Basel', when the Swiss city -which today has forty art centers in just 30 km2- took to the streets, in 1967 , to prevent two paintings by the painter from Malaga from leaving the city and voted for their acquisition in a referendum.
The exhibition stops at the Blue period, perhaps the most studied and where its influence is best recognized, with The Adoration of the Name of Jesus (around 1577-79) and its dance partner, Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas), oil of 1901 made after the traumatic suicide of his friend. As he had also observed in The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in Toledo, he divides the canvas into two separate planes, the earthly and the heavenly, but eliminates the religious content, showing a sky that has more to do with pleasures and sex. But the true heart of the exhibition is the room dedicated to Cubism, where you can surprisingly see the poses of the Apostles from the Museo del Greco and the compositions of other religious images hidden in monochrome paintings, of fragmented figures barely hinted at.
Late in his life, Picasso even created a parody of the Burial of Count Orgaz, transforming the protagonist's body into a roast chicken and replacing a figure that was a self-portrait of El Greco with an image of himself in a striped sweater. The quote is from Hélène Parmelin in Picasso Unknown: "I have the feeling that Delacroix, Giotto, Tintoretto, El Greco and the rest, as well as all modern painters, good and bad, abstract and non-abstract, are all behind me watching me as I work".
