From childhood to death: Picasso’s work shocks 50 years after his death

“Shock and grief around the world over Death of Picasso». La Voz de Galicia announced the painter’s death on its front page – April 8, 1973, 50 years ago this Saturday – along with an interesting handwritten message: «Sagasta is sick / what will we give him? / chocolate with beets / coffee with beets. (Songs in a thousand 800 90-95 / heard singing in La Coruña)».

The document is now on display in Museum of Fine Arts of the city as part of the exhibition Picasso. White, I don’t remember blue, whose background thesis argues that the years spent in A Coruña were decisive for his artistic formation and character. Picasso arrived in the city in the fall of 1891 as a child — he was born in Malaga on October 25, 1881 — and left in 1895 as an artist and transformed by the discoveries of his age and profound life events. A period which, like an embryo, contains practically his entire creative career, and which Picasso himself will carry with him, just like a rosebud from A citizen of Kaneuntil his death.

Foundations

Professor and critic Antón Castro, curator of the exhibition together with Rubén Ventureira and Maléna Gual, in collaboration with the museum’s director, Ángeles Penas, and his technical team, cites the arguments supporting these Galician foundations: the one in A Coruña was Picasso’s only complete academic education — not only as an apprenticeship, but also as an awareness of getting out of the system —; themes, iconographies and motifs appear that will always be returned to for decades; for the first time he heard talk about the war — the one in the Rif —, saw republican flags, witnessed strikes in the streets and read anarchist newspapers; platonically falls in love but also discovers eroticism; he lives his first direct experience of death: his sister Conchita dies of diphtheria and is buried in the dirt area of ​​the San Amaro cemetery…

All these episodes are present in the ten units in which the exhibition is organized. Each of them illustrates, through the dialogue of works from the A Coruña period with later works, how the seed of the artist was established. There, as soon as the tour begins, are Picasso’s visions of fauna and man with a lamb, which he first encountered in the classrooms of the Provincial School of Fine Arts and which he created again and again. for years. In these facilities, he processed large quantities such as that of Gems of art in Spainopened by playback the not to me by Velazquez pair it with a recreation of a famous painting painted in 1957. Also at this stage of learning, the original core of Cubism was already announced in its geometric decomposition of the country houses in A Coruña.

Picasso. White, I don’t remember blue It fulfills the dual task of documenting the multiple starting points that the artist developed in different directions at the time and, at the same time, of providing a coherent overview of Picasso’s trajectory. And in this selection of works, some take over the discourse for various reasons. One can marvel at the angle that a boy of barely thirteen gets in his left hand The man with the cap (1895), bearing the shadow of the fatalism of Dostoevsky’s character. This impression of helplessness is also given by the numbers an old couple (1894), with its austere interior, which highlights an object that was common to many Galician homes, but has now disappeared: the seal. In the same way, on a small plate with two washers, a few strokes and a few spots of color are enough to determine all the effort and quiet dignity of the craft in that degree of tilting the back over the water. Water from “city of amphibians”as Manuel Rivas called it in his text Picasso’s Spanish landscapes (Nórdica), a book in which Cecilia Orueta photographs places associated with the artist, will be a constant of her years in A Coruña. Antón Castro calculated that at that time it rained about two hundred days a year, which led the young Picasso to devote himself more to art and thinking.

Images

Castro explains that Picasso undertook a process of identification when it was necessary to depict and get to the essence. His first attempts take place within the family, not forgetting his dog Clipper, whom he treats as just another character. A picture of his father, with a concentrated, almost stern look, also painting himself. To his sister Lola, with her doll — just as he would portray his daughter Maya in 1935 — or alone, a couple that testifies to the speed with which the apprentice Picasso progressed in just a few months.

But the one with the biggest emotional impression is the drawing of his sister Conchita. They are no more than a few square centimeters of a notebook sheet with a few graffiti lines, precise only in the features of the face: eyes looking beyond the field, attentive, reflective. Conchita died before they could supply her with a brand new medicine ordered from Paris that could have saved her life: it arrived thirteen days after her death. It was the first intimate contact with death, which will often be repeated in his works. Picasso moved and shocked, as did the art world after his death, as well as his work during these fifty years of absence.