Velazquez in Barcelona

Velázquez talks with his contemporaries of the Golden Age at CaixaForum

Velazquez Caixa Forum-2018

The CaixaForum opens the first great exhibition on Velázquez on Friday, which can be seen in Barcelona. The baroque collection of the Museo del Prado in Madrid nourishes the exhibition, which proposes a dialogue between seven masterpieces by the Sevillan painter and fifty canvases by other great artists of his time, among which Rubens, Ribera, El Greco, Zurbarán, Giordano or Van Dyck. The works of Velázquez offer a broad vision of the stylistic and thematic palette of the painter and propose a game of comparisons and correlations with some of the Spanish and international painters with whom they were related or whose production was up to date. The exhibition, which coexists with the CaixaForum with another large exhibition dedicated to Toulouse Lautrec, can be visited until March 3, 2019.

Titià, El Greco, Ribera, Antonio Moro, Rubens, Murillo, Giordano, Brueghel, Guido Reni, Van Dyck, Zurbarán, Claudio de Lorena and Stanzione are the constellation of artists whose work accompanies seven great paintings by Velázquez (Seville, 1599 – Madrid, 1660) at the exhibition ‘Velázquez and the Golden Age’ at CaixaForum. The seven masterpieces of the Sevillan painter are ‘Felipe IV’, ‘Juan Martínez Montañés’,’ Isop ‘,’ Adoration of the Three Kings’, ‘Bufó con libros’,’ Prince Baltasar Carlos on horseback ‘and’ Mart’.Les Pieces chosen by commissioner Javier Portús Pérez (head of preservation of Spanish painting of the Prado Museum) seek to give “a description as wide as possible of the author,” according to ACN. “The intention is that with these seven works we understand who was Velázquez, the eagerness of originality, the narrative singularity and the extraordinary technical virtues that make it one of the peaks of painting,” says the curator. “He was one of the most versatile Spanish artists and he cultivated a variety of topics, which he wanted to reflect on the exhibition.” The representation of knowledge, religion, reflection on art, the Court, mythology and landscape are the thematic areas proposed by the exhibition to show this thematic fan of Velázquez. For each subject, a canvas by Velázquez. And around it, works by other Spanish and international artists that allow us to compare their work with what other Spanish and European painters of the Golden Age have done, as well as the European, “which place Velázquez to the visitor in another place accurate “, says Portús. “From a very young age, Velázquez sought singularity with a desire to distinguish himself, from his first works in Seville: still lifes that do not resemble anything known until then.” Later on, he would go to work at the service of the Royal Court, “a competitive medium and where to become singular”, and from where he had access to production that was made at European level. The courts of the various European states did this function of artistic promotion and contributed to the observation, comparison and influence between the various creators of the moment. In this sense, the exhibition’s curator admits that while we are accustomed to writing the history of painting in terms of national schools (the “Golden Age” Spanish), “reality was not always so compartmentalized, because painting is a language that knows no borders “. “The game of stimuli and influences was extraordinarily varied, and one of the things that this exhibition shows is to what extent at that time painting was an international language that knew no borders,” Portús concludes. ‘Velázquez y el Siglo de Oro’ is the third exhibition organized jointly between CaixaForum and the Prado Museum, after ‘Goya. Lights and Shadows ‘, and’ The captivating beauty. Treasures of the Prado Museum ‘. In this case, the new exhibition in Barcelona adds to the acts of celebration of the bicentennial of the Madrid art gallery.

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The Picasso Museum in Barcelona shows the fascination of the Malaga painter by El Greco

The center will expose until next January 17th the ‘old gentleman’ box, a masterpiece that belongs to the collection of the Museo del Prado

Caballero-anciano-by-El-Greco

The Picasso Museum in Barcelona shows today in the exhibition of Picasso’s passion “grequiana” fascination and influence that Domenicos Theotocopoulos in the Malaga painter in different stages of their lives.

The result of an exchange of work, the Picasso Museum exhibit until next January 17th Caballero Anciano, a masterpiece of El Greco portrait, which belongs to the collection of the Prado Museum.

This work is exhibited along with 29 pieces that are part of the permanent collection of the Barcelona museum, all selected by the exhibition curator and curator of the center, Malén Gual.

As explained Malén Gual, “This admiration was evident especially in the period of contact between Picasso and Barcelona Modernism, in the Blue Period, at the beginning of Cubism and in the sixties, when he glanced toward the century Spanish gold.

The painting “caballero anciano” is an oil painting of 1587-1600 and one of the most literary and artistic interest has raised since the beginning of his exhibition at the Museo del Prado.

The painting by El Greco responds to a rare type, the short bust and austere at the same time, where the faces portrayed in a very direct way to the scrutiny of the viewer, and where are minimized rhetorical elements that accompany and contextualize the portrait in the Modern Age: clothing, stage and gestures.

Picasso’s admiration for El Greco began in his youth, he tells the commissioner, when he had the opportunity to study the work of El Greco following his visits to the Prado Museum in Madrid, during the period 1897-1898, while studying in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.

The young Picasso soon decided to train on their own, learning precisely observing the masterpieces preserved in the Prado, “although in the records of the Madrid gallery has no record of that copied a painting by El Greco, and yes, instead, works of Velázquez and Murillo, “says Gual.

From this period also comes the fascination with the work of Velázquez, observed on a sheet of drawings in Horta de Sant Joan in 1898 in which he writes a declaration of intentions. “Greco Velázquez inspire me”, exposed by the portrait “Man the style of El Greco “(1899).

In the exhibition you can see a series of drawings of characters with stylized heads, “the grequiano way,” often mixed with other drawings and caricatures of Picasso belonging to this period.

Returning to Barcelona, ​​in the circle of modernist café Els Quatre Gats, he became acquainted with Santiago Rusiñol, Miquel Utrillo and Ignacio Zuloaga, fans, collectors and supporters of El Greco at a time when he had not yet received widespread recognition and even his work was still attached to the Italian school.

In the late nineteenth century, Picasso made several drawings and paintings where the inspiration for El Greco is central: pronounced elongation of the figures and of the characters in costumes of the sixteenth century. ”

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