A piece of news that will keep the attention of those of us who love art was announced just recently by Spain’s Minister of Culture, Miquel Iteta, and his French counterpart, Rima Abdul Malak. It is a joint rich program of events with which Spain and France will celebrate the Year of Picasso in 2023, the 50th anniversary of his death.

Pablo Picasso, the artist that, according to Iteta, identified with the 20th century, absolutely expressing the cruelty, violence, passion, excesses and contradictions of that era. He was born in Malaga in October 1881 and died in the French city of Mougins, near Cannes, in April 1973. This date provides an opportunity for Picasso’s two birthplaces – the one that gave birth to him and the one that nourished him with their spirit – to revisit his work from a modern point of view and honor his artistic legacy, which remains alive half a century after his death. The fascination that Picasso’s personality and art still produce on us stems primarily from the strength, originality, radicalism of his work, which does not lose sight of the political dimension, which is reread in the light of modernity.

This particular initiative includes 42 exhibition events, two scientific conferences and many other events that will take place mainly in Europe but also in North America. So far, the schedule of exhibitions in Spain, France, USA, Germany, Switzerland, the Principality of Monaco, Romania and Belgium.

Dialogue with El Greco

The extensive program will begin in October with several occasional exhibitions and will continue throughout 2023. However, those in Switzerland before September 25 may get a taste of the festive year for the first time. This is an exhibition called “Picasso – El Greco” (“Picasso – El Greco”), organized by the Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel. The masterpieces of the father of Cubism meet those of the great teacher Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who was born in Crete in 1541. Their gaze and their art are juxtaposed in about 40 pictorial pairings, giving the visitor the opportunity to witness one of the most captivating dialogues. in the history of art.

The Year of Picasso will begin in October with several occasional exhibitions and will continue throughout 2023.

His unique style of painting brought Greco great fame in his time, but unfortunately it did not last long. Only around 1900 did interest in his work revive again, and the young Picasso played a key role in this. On the one hand, he himself studied his work more deeply and for a long time, on the other hand, the influence of Greco is felt in the works of Picasso in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as in earlier cubist paintings.

Encounter with sculpture

It is no coincidence that this year’s second anniversary exhibition also features works by Picasso in dialogue with the work of another artist, in this case the Barcelona-based sculptor and painter Julio González (1876-1942). The reason is not only that such special and unexpected encounters deeply illuminate the work of Picasso, placing him in the flow of art history. In addition, they give museum curators, scholars and visitors the opportunity to see with today’s eyes new dimensions of his artistic genius in and out of the context of his time.

The exhibition “Julio González, Pablo Picasso and the Dematerialization of Sculpture” (“Julio González, Pablo Picasso and the Dematerialization of Sculpture”), which opens on September 23 in Madrid (Fundación MAPFRE, until 8/1), actually refers to the description of the moment when there was “invented” iron sculpture. The meeting of these two artists is one of the milestones in the international art of the 20th century, introducing abstraction into the realm of sculpture.

Among the upcoming exhibitions, which are scheduled to open in the coming months, it is worth mentioning the exhibition prepared for October 14 by the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium (Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique) entitled “Picasso and Abstraction” (until 12/2) and from 20 October at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), dedicated to cubism and the artistic tradition of optical illusions. It is called “Cubism and Traditions of Deception” (until 22/1).