In 1904, Pablo Picasso left Barcelona for France, pretty much for good, though he returned for an extended stay from June until November of 1917. That brief visit is the subject of a small exhibition at the Museu Picasso that commemorates the centenary of the event.
By the time the 35-year-old Picasso returned in triumph to the city where he had spent his adolescence, his father was dead, his surviving sister, Lola, (another sister had died young) was raising a large family, and his ageing mother still lived on Carrer de la Mercè in the Barri Gòtic. Picasso, on the other hand, had found fame and fortune in Paris, where he occupied a central place in the heady artistic circles of the Cubist art revolution.
He was also about to marry for the first time, to a Russian dancer with the Ballets Russes, Olga Kohklova. Their shared interest in the travelling productions of Serge de Diaghilev’s ballet brought the couple to Barcelona as the company was on tour and scheduled to perform at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in both the spring and fall of 1917. Picasso had designed some of the sets and costumes for the opera.
This three-room exhibition places Picasso’s avant-garde work in context by filling the first gallery with traditional paintings and prints, which were shown in an exhibition of French art that year at the Palau de Belles Arts. The wall text is curiously unhelpful in informing the visitor about the location of this palace (a Google search revealed that it formerly stood on Passeig de Lluís Companys, opposite the Parc de la Ciutadella), as well as whether or not the loan works, including a Sisley Impressionist landscape, were part of the 1917 exhibition there.
The second gallery is filled with photographs of Picasso and Kohklova as tourists in the city (at Tibidabo, Montjuïc, on La Rambla, and at hotels on Passeig de Colom). A vitrine filled with correspondence, souvenirs, bullring (Las Arenas) tickets and hotel receipts, all of them scrupulously preserved by the Picasso archive in Paris, rounds out the historical information. Sketches for the performers’ costumes in the ‘Parade’ section of the Ballets Russes production are included, and the wall text teases the viewer with an oblique reference to a ‘scandal’ that influenced how the opera was previously received, but we are left hanging with no further explanation.
The curators have pulled everything they could find from 1917 out of storage and tried to come up with a theme. The result is a mishmash that shows Picasso killing time while waiting to return to his real life in Paris. What is extraordinary to observe in the last gallery is the wildly divergent range of styles that the artist employs over the course of six months. Here he paints Kohklova ‘a la andaluza’, wearing a mantilla, in a traditional academic style, and there he goes fully abstract in a series of Cubist still life/portraits. His well-known view of the Columbus statue at Drassanes is a hybrid of the two styles. A drawing of a painfully wounded horse neighing to the sky predates his Guernica, amazingly, by two full decades.
The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition makes the content look more compelling than it is on the walls. In print, the six-month period is fleshed out with every page of drawings from Picasso’s sketchbooks, and an essay by Malén Gual fills in the gaps that are left by the wall text of the small exhibition. The catalogue also touches on the global turmoil of the time, which goes unmentioned in the exhibition.
Most interesting, for me at least, is the proximity of two other exhibitions that are peripherally related to the 1917 show. As you leave the main event thinking, ‘Is that all there is?’, you can cross the hall and ponder an unusual offering for the art museum: an installation focused on boxing 100 years ago in Barcelona. At the tail end of the show about the charismatic poet-boxer named Arthur Cravan, there is a gallery dedicated to Picasso’s own fascination with the sport, including some little-seen Cubist depictions of boxers. If the visitor ventures upstairs in the museum, an exhibition about the mature Picasso, in the Lacourière-Frélaut workshop (‘El Taller Compartido’), sharing his vast printmaking knowledge with two of sister Lola’s sons, brings the family photos downstairs full circle.