With the death of Pablo Picasso 50 years ago, the 20th century was left without its artist. With these words, the Viennese Albertina begins the note with which it presents the third exhibition dedicated to this protean artist in the museum.
It is therefore being prepared on the 50th anniversary of the death of an artist who, during his lifetime, became the archetype of a modern artist. In the past, the exhibition has already been dedicated to Picasso’s works twice – in 2006, they presented Picasso’s late works and drew attention to the artist’s tendency to date his works precisely to the day, four years later, Picasso as a politically engaged artist, and this time the exhibition takes a walk through the artist’s entire oeuvre. The core is the works that Albertina keeps in her own collection.
With a retrospective, they want to show why the artist probably deserves a central place in the visual artistic creation of the last century.
Each phase of Picasso’s activity stimulated a wider international movement, which the Spanish genius himself renounced at the very next moment and embarked on a new episode, a new style, they wrote at the exhibition. Each decade he set his creation anew – from the blue period, with which he brought symbolism into the 20th century, through cubism, which he started with Georges Braquein order to resolve the crisis of the painting, and all the way to the ceramic objects, which he raised to the level of sculptures.
The exhibition in the Albertina takes a walk through the key chapters of Picasso’s painting. Here, for example A drowsy drunkan image of melancholy that he painted after the suicide of a friend Carles Casagemas. The cubist phase is illustrated by the painting Etagère from 1911, and a later flirtation with surrealism Femme, sculpture et vase de fleurat which in 1929 the artist resolved his separation from his wife Olga Khokhlovawho cheated on her with a lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. In other works as well, the artist deals with (broken) relationships with women who played an important role in his life. He also reacts to the political events in his native Spain, which he anxiously follows from Paris – Still life with a broken mirror is thus the artist’s artistic response to the defeat of the Spanish republican government and the triumph of the Franco regime.
The exhibition takes a walk through almost all the long decades of the artist’s work and puts on display 70 paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs and ceramic works. By presenting the various techniques in which Picasso created, the Albertina also wants to show the artist’s equal appreciation of different media. Whether he created in drawing or sculpting in clay, everything has an equal place for him among the genres of fine arts.
With the exhibition, Albertina is putting a little less than half of all the works in its collection on display, and they can be seen until June 18.
Source: Rtvslo
