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Secret Images. Picasso and Japanese Erotic Prints
- Date From 5 November to 14 February 2010
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Over the centuries Japanese erotic prints have been known by different names, such as shunga, makura-e or warai-e. Another related term was higa, meaning ‘secret images’. This catalogue presents for the first time some twenty of these prints which belonged to Picasso. In order to establish a thought-provoking dialogue we have selected a number of Picasso’s own erotic etchings and various works by other artists, both Japanese and Western, which together shed new light on the phenomenon of European interest in Japanese art and on the links between this and the work of Picasso.
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Kess Van Dongen
- Date From 11 June 2009 to 27 September 2009
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Kees Van Dongen played a decisive role in the great artistic upheavals of the early 20th century as a member of the Fauvist movement. This exhibition shows the artist’s evolution from his student years to the peak of his career and evokes many of his aesthetic ties and exchanges with Picasso, with whom he temporarily shared the Bateau-Lavoir. Born in a suburb of Rotterdam, Van Dongen’s career was spent mainly in Paris where he came to live in 1897.
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The virulence and extravagance of his canvases provoked repercussions abroad, particularly within the Die Brücke German expressionist movement. Together with his orientalism, contemporary with that of Matisse, this places Van Dongen at the very forefront of the avant-garde. His bold and vibrant works – often compared to “prodigious orgies of light, heat and colour” – testify to the affirmation of his own style within the history of modern art, alongside Matisse and Picasso.
The exhibition has been designed chronologically and includes examples of the artist’s work in different fields: painting, of course – in which, wrote Elie Faure, Van Dongen “wrote the sensual poem of the world” – but also illustration and graphic work. Assembled in the light of new research and including previously little-known works, the exhibition also provides a new perspective on the artist.
- The exhibition is displayed in 7 rooms following a chronological presentation and the hall, where the connection between Van Dongen and Barcelona is explained. It presents 78 works by Van Dongen and 4 by Picasso, plus historical documentation.
Chief Curators: Jean-Michel Bouhours, chief curator of Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, París and ex-director of the Nouveau Musée National de Mònaco, and Pepe Serra, director of the Museu Picasso, Barcelona.
- Exhibition Website
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Living Things: Picasso Figure / Still-Life
- Date From 21 November 2008 to 1 March 2009
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From 1907, Picasso opened his work to metamorphosis. He increasingly made one thing into another. In particular, he turned figures into things and things into figures, or even created things that were also figures.
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This exhibition brings together sketches, studies, prints and paintings to show some of the ways in which this happened in Picasso’s work through the Cubist period and then between 1924 and the early 1930s as he engaged with and responded to the Surrealists.
It is called ‘Living Things’ because Picasso’s exchanges between figures and objects animate the inanimate. Heads are also guitars, still-lives become automata, and finally, in the later rooms, objects perform like actors on stage or are pulled apart as if the defenceless victims of attack.
The exhibition presents 68 artworks, most of them by Picasso:
- 49 paintings, among them 2 oils by Juan Gris
- 9 drawings
- 8 photographs by Waléry
- 1 print
- 1 collage and also digitized images from Picasso’s sketchbooks.
Curator: Christopher Green, Professor from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London
- Exhibition Website
