Monday to Friday from 9h to 19h.
Exhibition curated by Emmanuel Guigon Casa de Velázquez - Museo Picasso de Barcelona
"Basically, what is a painter? A collector who wants to put together a collection by making his own paintings of others that he likes".
Picasso discovered Las Meninas in the Prado Museum at the age of 14, in 1895. He approached the work again in 1957, reaffirming his admiration for the genius of Velázquez and gave him the opportunity to copy several works by the master of the Golden Age. This confrontation with Velázquez's work became a constant throughout his life, a thread with which he reconnected especially at the age of 75, when he rediscovered the Spain of his childhood through an old black-and-white photograph of Las Meninas, from the time of the Civil War. He then rediscovered his original impressions and confronted them with his own artistic development, creating a set of more than fifty paintings, as many variations on the same theme, between inheritance and re-reading.
The exhibition Diego Velázquez invites Pablo Picasso draws on this filiation, the echoes and the play of mirrors between the work of the two painters. Curated by Emmanuel Guigon, director of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and a former member of the Casa de Velázquez, the exhibition takes the form of a "poetic-aesthetic" journey that focuses on the question of creation and its variations.
Picasso's graphic work dialogues with archive photographs, letters, audiovisual documents and other pieces created especially for the occasion by contemporary artists.
The exhibition, which can be seen at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, is intended to be a sounding board for the permanent exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, which, among the more than 4,200 pieces it houses, includes the 58 paintings that make up the Las Meninas series.
Although the Casa de Velázquez, despite its name, has never hosted the "painter of painters", its action in favour of contemporary creation and scientific research has made it an important place for the most innovative experimentation, both on an artistic and academic level. The French institution, which has been established in Madrid for almost a hundred years, is the perfect setting for this multifaceted exhibition. Plural and resolutely transdisciplinary, the exhibition Diego Velázquez invites Pablo Picasso will lead to the publication of a book and an international seminar.