MNAC & Picasso

The exhibition can be visited until next February 26

pablo-picasso_buste_dhomme

The Museu Nacional de Arte de Catalunya (MNAC) leads Pablo Picasso to the Middle Ages in the Picasso-Romanesque exhibition, which illustrates the influence of Romanesque art and its affinities from 40 oils, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and reliefs. In the work of the Malaga artist.

All the works exhibited amidst the Romanesque sculptures and apses of the MNAC, which houses the most complete collection of Romanesque art, come from the Picasso Museum in Paris, as well as a selection of unpublished documents from the Picasso archives belonging to the Parisian museum and which reveal their interest in the art of this period.

The exhibition, which will be open to the public from Thursday to February 26, focuses on two dates that mark the relationship of the artist with medieval art: 1906 and 1934. As explained on wednesday by the curators of the exhibition , Emilia Philippot and Juan José Lahuerta, “in 1906, in a decisive moment of transformation of his style, Picasso settled for a few months in the Pyrenean town of Gósol, almost coinciding with the campaigns of discovery and safeguard of the Catalan Romanesque promoted by the Board of Museums of Barcelona “.

Almost thirty years later, on September 5, 1934, Picasso visited the collections of Romanesque art at the inauguration of the then Catalan Art Museum, now part of the MNAC, and on that visit, accompanied by the local press, the artist from Malaga Stated: “Romanesque art is an invaluable lesson for the moderns.” Although the next day he left for Paris and never returned to Spain, “throughout his life Picasso was treasuring the evidence of that relationship,” recalls Philippot.

The exhibition shows a documentary collection, until now unpublished, that preserves the archives of the Picasso Museum in Paris, full of Romanesque images, postcards of the museum with Romanesque motifs sent by his friends, among them Miró, correspondence and various books and magazines on the theme. The documentary set begins in 1922 with a postcard of Joan Miró and ends in 1964 with another of his friend Joan Vidal Ventosa, passing through a letter from the Picassian anthologist Christian Zervos of 1936.

The exhibition does not attempt to establish a mechanical relationship between Romanesque works and the works of Picasso, nor does it raise the search for a direct influence, since, as Lahuerta has said, “one of the main characteristics of Picasso’s work is precisely his capacity of transforming any influence into something distinct and proper. ” Picasso’s gaze on the Romanesque, Lahuerta adds, “is a look of artistic valuation and not an archaeological look.”

In a first space of the exhibition the first contacts of Picasso with the Romanesque one, centered in the works realized in 1906-1907 in Gósol, are explored in a moment in which it undergoes a return to a certain primitivism, in reaction against the called period Pink color.

Next to the virgin of Gósol, that at the beginning of the 20th century was in its original location and that Picasso himself could see in his Pyrenean stay, works like Bust of man (studio for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), Rostro- Mask by Josep Fontdevila, Fernande with white mantilla, Study for The man of the lamb or the pottery Gazelle of oven decorated with a bust of man with striped sweater.

A second axis has to do with a tragic theme, crucifixion, very present in Romanesque art and Picasso worried at different times of his life, especially between 1930 and 1937. In the space of Santa Maria de Taüll, Romanesque frescoes Coexist with varieties of The Crucifixion, Three Bathers, Beheading Scene or Picasso’s Stiletto Woman.

A final area also refers to a recurring theme in the Romanesque collection of the museum: the skull, metaphor of death, which is one of the major transversal themes in Picasso’s work, expressed through masks and skulls, both Human beings as animals.

Here you can contemplate Woman’s Head, The Kiss, Goat’s Head, Ram Skull, Vanitas, Object with Palm Leaf or Mask.

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Medieval art at the MNAC Museum

Antonio Gallardo donation includes pieces of Romanesque art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from Catalonia and Castile and Leon

Medieval art at the MNAC Museum

The MNAC exhibits from today 20 masterpieces that the collector Antonio Gallardo Ballart has donated to the museum, including pieces of Romanesque art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from Catalonia and Castile and Leon; Gothic tables Serra, Lluís Borrassà or Bernat Martorell, as well as the Renaissance.

With this donation of medieval art, the main produced in European museums in the last 50 years of this type of work, according to the MNAC, the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) happens to have one of the best collections in the world Gothic and Romanesque art, as highlighted by its director, Pepe Serra, showing the works.

Serra explained that the works, “donated generously by Antonio Gallardo, who has found that the MNAC is a good destination” for them, chose the museum itself, which has made a selection of top quality parts first level .

Among the works that are incorporated into the museum’s collection there are also important pieces of key artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as Jaume and Pere Serra, Lluís Borrassà, Bernat Martorell, Pere Teixidor, Martín Bernat and Nicolás Francés.

The donation of Antonio Gallardo, one of the largest shareholders of laboratories Almirall, has been carried out following an agreement of the collector with the museum and the departments of Economics and Culture of the Generalitat, by which also the Catalan government has committed to accept the rest of the collection and payment of future taxes.

MNAC director remarked that he hoped this donation will serve as an example of a philanthropic action, which is not in the mentality of the Catalans, “because it is common to buy.”

After the donation, the works have become the property of the Government, which has joined the catalog of Catalan Cultural Heritage and has given the MNAC to be exposed.

Of the works that pass the museum include fragments of mural paintings from monuments of Catalonia and Castile, all dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which represent a valuable complement MNAC collection.

Jordi Camps, curator and expert in medieval art, said that with this donation a set of spectacular works “or at best dreams we could imagine” is achieved.

For Camps, “it is as if there was a burst of Gothic and Romanesque art that can banish the idea that the Middle Ages was dark” because donating can see in color works so far only been seen in photographs in black and black in some books.

He also insisted that the value of the pieces complements and enriches what we already had the MNAC, and represent an important part names, typography, iconography and references of the museum lacked.

The core of the collection that the museum is reached Gothic painting and among the works that are incorporated there are names that were already well represented, as Bernat Martorell Serra or brothers, who have balanced what was already there.

The Commissioner has emphasized also in a table of Lluís Borrassà, which was represented succinctly in the museum, and the Gothic painting of Nicholas Francésc Miracle of Mount Gargano, who was the author of the altarpiece Gothic Cathedral of León, and it is part of a whole.

This painting, which comes from the church of San Miguel de Villalpando (Zamora), is part of a group that currently is dismembered and divided among several museums, such as Montserrat or the Cincinnati Museum of Art (USA).

On the origin of the collection from the museum management explained that Antonio Gallardo bought over the years with the help of an antiquarian who gave advice in choosing the works, and have stressed that there are very few collectors of this type of gear and leaving very little work of this kind for sale.

The tour of the exhibition is chronological and the walls have been painted blue to highlight the pieces, among which are The Virgin with Child and Angels Jaume Serra, unknown until 1990, or The Crucifixion of St. Peter, Pere Serra, the altarpiece of the church of Sant Pere de Cubells (Lleida).

The MNAC has also published a catalog with sheets of parts, which will also be the subject of a subsequent job search.

Paying taxes through works of art it is provided for in the tax law formula, which allows taxpayers to meet their tax debts through the delivery of artworks cataloged, or other goods registered cultural interest in the records.

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Medieval art at the MNAC museum

What is special controversial paintings of Sijena?

MNAC museum Barcelona

Pieces of art of great pictorial importance have been the protagonists in recent weeks in a dispute over ownership of the same between Aragon and Catalonia and culminating in a trial that started this week. The judge will determine the final ownership of some paintings that carry more than 70 years in Barcelona whose origin is in the Monastery of Sijena, a small village in the province of Huesca.

The works of Byzantine influence, are an important iconographic significance. “They are the masterpiece of Spanish style painting 1200, an advanced period is between the end of the Romanesque and early Gothic art,” says Jordi Camps, head curator of Medieval Art National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), where these frescoes are exposed today.

Fall of Man and Sin

The frescoes were located in the arches of the monastery, explained the Old Testament, with the representation of man’s fall and sin. On the inside you can see very accurate of the ancestors of Christ as “a link between the old and new testament” portraits, Camps said, recalling that there is a tendency of this medieval art movement to the “individualization of the characters “where the drama is the protagonist.

Due to the fire that devastated the religious building in August 1936, during the Civil War, most of wall paintings were lost, although it has been partially preserved wall on the south side, where the flagellation of Christ is represented, His crucifixion and resurrection of the same. Also noteworthy is the presence of animals and monsters in different fresh. “They act as margins of manuscript illumination and no links with the English model that prevailed at that time”

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Frederic Marès, one of the museums of the world’s largest collector in Barcelona

Located in the former Royal Palace, next to the Cathedral, the collection consists of the Catalan sculptor Frederic Marès gave to the City

Frederic-Marès museum Barcelona

Located in the former Royal Palace, the Counts of Barcelona, ​​Frederic Marès Museum is one of the least known of the city and at the same time one of the 10 museums in the world’s largest collector.

“It is one of the most enigmatic museums, most amazing and wonderful that there is Barcelona.” Thus defined its director, Josep Maria Trullén. And the Museu Frederic Marès museums are 2 to 1. While it is true that everything can be seen belonged to the personal collection of the sculptor Frederic Marès, there are two different styles: a hand, sculpture, and secondly, what is known as a museum or sentimental memories.

The first three floors of the museum are devoted to sculpture, from the time of ancient Greece and Rome to the nineteenth century, through Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque. There are a total of 4,000 different pieces, many of which religious reference.

The rest of the museum comprises 50,000 objects spread over different rooms: the living room feminine male, a smoker or photo. There are fans, gloves or jewelry that women wore in the late nineteenth century, or belts, swords and matchbox carrying men. “Visit the halls of the memories is like a journey,” adds Trullén.

One of the most curious objects in the museum is the case Marès used on countless trips around the world and made what they say, led to many of Barcelona exhibits.

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