“We can see Gernika as a great step of Holy Week that advances from right to left,” Paloma Alarcó, curator of modern painting at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid and curator of her new exhibition, Picasso, dares to say - she herself uses this verb. the sacred and the profane, which will be open until January 14. An exhibition that is part of the great commemoration of the 50 years since the death of the Malaga genius and that, uniting his paintings with those of masters such as El Greco, Zurbarán or Rubens, tries to offer new perspectives on his work. The work, says Alarcó, of “a man who saw himself as a shaman”, who “turned his art into his intimate diary” and which is “still a mystery that will still give a lot of talk.”
For Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the new exhibition at the Thyssen, which explores his grandfather's view of the classical world and the themes of the Judeo-Christian tradition, is “a dialogue, talks between great masters, like a gathering in which these artists talk , they discuss what is reality or the magic of what we can see.” And Alarcó highlights “the Picasso idea that in art there is no past or future, it is always present, he was the artist who managed to dilute the borders between the past, tradition and modernity better than anyone.”
“Picasso - he continues - considered himself a kind of shaman, he was aware of that supernatural power, of his creative freedom, of a creative force that he could not contain. He always considered himself a kind of intercessor between the past, present and future, between civilizations. And there he erased the boundaries between the sacred and the profane. He drank from many sources to create his own art.”
And in that timeless, eternal space, the curator has put the eight Picassos from the Thyssen into dialogue, plus another 14 on loan, with works by the museum's old masters and some more from outside. Going through three fundamental decades with them, between 1904 and 1934, “from that young Spaniard who came to Paris to devour everything to that great painter established in the 1930s.”
In total, 40 works that start showing the “iconophagy” of the young Picasso visitor to museums, “looking at the masters since he came to Madrid to study Fine Arts and entered the Prado, to his visits to the Louvre or the Museum of Ethnography of the “Trocadero.” He had a prodigious memory and collected many images, the basis of his creations. But, the commissioner points out, he did not focus only on the formal aspect of what he saw. “When he entered the Trocadero he differentiated himself from the rest of the avant-garde because he did not see in those objects from the colonies only a formal potential for a more synthetic avant-garde language, but rather he stated that it had something of a spell, an exorcism, special powers. And the same with the ancient masters, he saw them as great creators and he wanted them to transmit his creative power to him, like a magical transmission. “Greco, Velázquez, inspire me,” he noted in some notes from 1898-99.
The exhibition begins by confronting a Christ by El Greco with a painting of analytical cubism by Picasso, Man with Clarinet, showing the verticality that prevails in both. “Picasso went so far as to say that El Greco had been the first Cubist painter,” recalls Alarcó. A Saint Casilda by Zurbarán is contrasted with a Woman in an Armchair by Picasso, and the curator also contrasts a "tenebrist" Saint Jerome by Ribera with a painting that Picasso paints at the moment when he has broken off his marriage with Olga. He paints it in a gloomy way, there is a fantastic dialogue.” “Picasso evolves and at every moment he focuses on an artist, but he never abandons them, he has a creative freedom that absorbs, disrupts and transforms them into his own syntax,” he says.
The second part of the exhibition actually addresses how Picasso's art is his intimate diary. “In the happy period with Olga, with the birth of Pablo, he focuses on the maternity wards of Murillo, Rubens”, whose The Virgin and Child with Saint Elizabeth and Saint John dialogues with a surprisingly modern large-size charcoal by Picasso: The Family . There is also a spectacular Maternity Hospital on loan from the Picasso Museum in Paris. “And when his marriage falls apart due to his relationship with Marie-Thérèse, the focus of interest changes, he enters the world of classical myths and enters the art of the minotaur as his alter ego. There he dialogues with Delacroix and Moreau,” says Alarcó.
A Delacroix of which The Duke of Orleans showing his lover is exhibited, in which he literally lifts the sheet that covers her in bed, just as Faun does discovering a woman, part of Picasso's Vollard Suite. And Gustave Moreau shows a beautiful Galatea with a cyclops next to her, and next to her is the Minotaur caressing a woman from Malaga.
In the third and last room, the historical period where the genius is found with the advance of totalitarianisms has special weight. “For that historical moment,” the commissioner reasons, “he recovers the Catholic tradition that has been deeply felt since his childhood and the tradition of bullfighting. "He had painted bullfights since he was a child, but now the fight between the bull and the bullfighter or bullfighter, which there is also, or picador, becomes violent because he links it to the idea of evil, of the violence that exists in human beings." .
And that, Alarcço warns, “he combines it with a new interest in the crucifixion. And Goya is also mixed in, who is sometimes interested in the erotic, but now he is interested in his war disasters. And from all that mixture of religious imagery, crucifixion and bullfighting, Gernika is going to emerge,” he says. “I dare say in the catalog that from this combination of bulls, violence and religious imagery, we could see Gernika as a great step of Holy Week that advances from right to left,” he concludes.
And he emphasizes one of the Picasso works that they show, The Crucifixion, from 1930: "He never sold it, it was special to him, extremely strange, on loan from the Picasso Museum in Paris. An obscene crucifixion that sometimes follows traditional iconography but in which there are also figures that are a mystery". A work that is accompanied in this case by a painting made by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning two decades later that addresses the same theme and at times, following the cycle of glances, seems like a direct reinterpretation of Picasso's.
