Picasso Museum of Barcelona

Every time we look at a face, we ask ourselves questions that can only be answered with the imagination: what is the person like? How do they feel? What are they saying to us?

From a very early age, and all through his artistic career, Picasso had a gift for capturing what was going on inside the people he portrayed.

Objectives:

• To stimulate the capacity for observation.
• To identify the characteristic features of a face.
• To appreciate, from the expression of face and body, how different moods are depicted.

During the tour of the Museum’s exhibition rooms the group will investigate the various forms of representation that the artist creates and how he alternates between these at different moments in his career. This diversity of styles is set in relation to the key events of the time and personal developments in the artist’s life.

Objectives:

• To bring to light the sources and resources that helped shape Picasso’s art: from his academic training to the social and artistic contexts of Barcelona and Paris and his reinterpretation of the masters of the past.
• To show how Picasso constantly added to his knowledge and enriched his work with themes and influences from the art of the past and present, and how he returned to these at different times in his career.
• To reflect on the motives that lead an artist to analyse and reinterpret the work of other artists.

This workshop will explore the years of Picasso’s youth, marked by his family’s move to Barcelona. At the end of the 19th century, Barcelona was a convulsive city caught up in rapid growth and change — industrial, urban and artistic.

Objectives:

• To situate and contextualize the young Picasso in Barcelona.
• To analyse the artist’s formative years in Barcelona, from his academic training at the Llotja through to the influences of modern painting coming from Paris.
• To compare Picasso’s Barcelona with the city as it is today.
• To learn about the origin and history of the Museu Picasso de Barcelona.

An artist is not born but made. Starting from this premise, students will discover how the figure of the artist is shaped by a series of personal, social, historical and artistic factors and circumstances.

Objectives:

• To place Picasso’s life and work in relation to his time: the ideas, events and people that formed his context.
• To compare and contrast the lives and the socio-cultural context of the students with those of the artist.
• To carry out a visual project based on the students’ own environment.

We invite you to enjoy the only one of Picasso’s series on show in its entirety. This series consists of a sequence of 58 paintings that the artist made between August and December 1957.

Objectives:

• To work with the concept of the series as a creative process.
• To explore Picasso’s working process by way of the works that make up Las Meninas.
• To find out what the idea of a ‘series’ meant for Picasso and what use he made of it.
• To get to know other series made by Picasso in the course of his career.

This introduction to the avant-gardes and their decisive contribution to art history by radically transforming the way we look at and represent the world takes Picasso as its focus, with a tour of the Museum and a screening of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Mystery of Picasso showing the artist at work.

Have you seen ever Picasso working? How did he go about it? Have you challenged your left hemisphere?

Objectives:

• To arrive at a broad understanding of the contribution made by the avant-gardes.
• To learn about the evolution as an artist that led Picasso to create Cubism.
• To gain insights into the artist’s working methodology.
• To trace the change in ways of thinking, seeing and working that follows from using the right hemisphere of the brain, by means of practical examples and applying the theories of Roger W. Sperry.

A tour of the places that bear witness to Picasso’s time in Barcelona, the city where he received his formative training as an artist, by way of a number of works from the collection.

Objectives:

• To locate and contextualise Picasso’s presence in Barcelona.
• To illustrate the differences between the city in Picasso’s time and present-day Barcelona.
• To show how Picasso was trained in the canons of academic painting and moved toward modern painting thanks to the influences that reached him from Paris by way of the café Els Quatre Gats.
• To learn about the origin and history of the Museu Picasso de Barcelona.

For Barcelona artists, Paris and all that went on there were a constant source of inspiration. Picasso was inspired by the creators of modern art in his evolution toward his own artistic maturity, at which point he himself became an example to be emulated.

Objectives:

• To locate and contextualise Picasso’s presence in Barcelona.
• To characterize and compare the cities of Barcelona and Paris in urban, social and artistic terms, contrasting the Cerdà Plan with Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, the Barcelona Universal Exhibition of 1888 with the Paris World’s Fair of 1899 and 1900, Els Quatre Gats with Le Chat Noir…
• To look at the points of contact between Picasso’s work and Parisian painting.
• To learn about the origin and history of the Museu Picasso de Barcelona.

What can you see from the window of your work space? A selection of works from the collection shed new light on how landscape was a recurring theme throughout Picasso’s career.

Objectives:

• To show Picasso’s first beginnings in the genre of landscape under the auspices of the Academy.
• To appreciate how the landscapes of Horta and Madrid mark a turning point in landscape painting à plein air.
• To look at how the artist used the window as a pictorial resource.
• To observe and compare Picasso’s use of the resources of the interior landscape (the artist’s studio) and the exterior landscape: the series Las Meninas.

Copy, appropriation, reinterpretation, version or original work? The analysis of the series Las Meninas provides an introduction to the idea of appropriation, a practice found throughout the history of art in which one artist creates work whose starting point is the work of another artist.

Objectives:

• To show how Picasso engaged with the great masters of art history in his years of artistic maturity, often as a starting point for creating a new work.
• To understand Picasso’s Las Meninas from the perspectives of iconography, composition, space, colour…
• To learn about the artist’s working process by way of the series Las Meninas.
• To question the respective roles of artist, viewer and model in the Las Meninas of Velázquez and Picasso.

Wednesday, September 30, from 6.00 until 7.30 p.m.
Thursday, October 8, from 6.00 until 7.30 p.m.
Advance booking required

• A visit to coincide with the Rodney Graham exhibition at the MACBA
• Times January 29 - May 18, 2010. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings
• Duration 90 minutes approx.
• Class groups
• Price 50 € per group
• Activity organized jointly by the Museu Picasso and the MACBA

The Museu Picasso is contributing to the presentation of the work of Canadian artist Rodney Graham in Barcelona with a special shared itinerary. One of the highlights of the Graham show at the MACBA is the series Picasso, My Master (2005), which recreates with more than a touch of humour the aura of mastery that Picasso’s work possesses, in an unmistakable imitation of the style of the master executed with the skills of an ‘amateur’ artist and Graham’s own personal contribution. The MACBA and the Museu Picasso are proposing an itinerary connecting the two institutions as an opportunity to observe, comment on and have group discussions about the relationship between the two artists’ work

• Places must be reserved in advance using the visits application form at www.macba.cat/educacio, by calling 93 412 14 13 or by email to educacio@macba.cat