Barcelona: The City of Picasso

Even though the room is crowded with people, dressed in everything from sweatpants to suits, it is quiet. A hush of reverence holds the crowd in stasis. They are surrounded by colorful, bright paintings, marked by a distinct signature: Picasso.

Barcelona’s Museu Picasso showcases more than a hundred of the contemporary artist’s pieces. It draws visitors from all over the world.

It is near the heart of the Gothic Quarter, just a seven minute walk away from the Barcelona Cathedral. General admission is €11, and admission is €7 for guests 30 years old and under.

A Spanish Painter, Globally Known

Paragraphs on the walls detailing the history of Pablo Picasso’s life are translated into four different languages: Spanish, Catalan, English and French. However, visitors can be heard speaking German, Chinese and Japanese as well, showcasing the global attention Picasso still draws almost 50 years after his death.

A few museum visitors admire a set of Picasso paintings from later in his contemporary period, which became a popular style in art schools in the mid 1900s.

Exploring the museum meant a lot to Erin Clark, a 27 year old visiting from the U.K. She has a Picasso print hanging up on her wall back home, the line drawing called Le Chat.

Though she likes his art, she didn’t know much about him until she came to the museum.

“I tend to like his simple stuff, his contemporary stuff,” she said. “But it’s interesting getting to see what he was like beyond his art.”

As you move from room to room, you see Picasso’s development in real time. Starting with classical styles in his early years and moving to impressionism as a student, the asymmetrical faces and haphazard lines that he is known for did not come about until he dropped out of art school.

Two of Picasso's self portraits, created more than 40 years apart-- the first at the height of his cubism period, and the other far beforehand when he was attending La Lotja School of Arts in Barcelona.

Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon marked the beginning of cubism in 1906. Cubism is the distinct, fragmented style of art that he pioneered.

It surprised his friends and his mentors because of how it depicted nudity in the context of prostitutes and sexuality.

But it also surprised them because of how he had rejected the three dimensions most artists were searching to create, and instead embraced a more two dimensional, flattened look. From that point on, Picasso’s art would become what we know it to be today: jagged and alien looking, filled with sharp contrasts and rough strokes.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and Picasso’s more famous pieces lie scattered in many other art museums around the world. However, Museu Picasso is a safehouse for much of his early art for good reason: Barcelona was where Picasso lived during his most formative years.

In fact, much of Picasso’s development of his art style happened in the city. He lived there with his family when he was 14, attending art school.

One of Picasso's first paintings to receive critical acclaim, he created Science and Charity when he was just 15 years old.

When he was 19, after dropping out, he joined a group of poets, journalists and artists who met at a tavern called Quatre Gats. This group of young men was highly influential for Picasso. They were interested in forging new, experimental paths instead of following the footsteps of the masters.

El Museu Picasso

The museum prides itself on showing off the works of an evolving Picasso in his youth. The exhibits begin with sketches and paintings from when he was as young as 9 years old.

Picasso's parents encouraged his education in the classical arts, getting him tutors and enrolling him in schools, though Picasso would eventually reject traditional training as a teenager.

The more developed works in the museum include Picasso’s quest to recreate Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas, considered one of the first completely realistic paintings in history. In a broad, white-walled room, at least 20 attempts are on display. Some focus on small portions of the painting: the young girl in the corner, the dog in the foreground.

A row of paintings focused on the three women center stage of Las Meninas hangs on the wall, and just out of view, they are surrounded by at least ten more depicting the same scene over and over again.

The final product gets its own display room. Picasso’s style is considerably different from Velasquez, a Spanish artist of the baroque period. Picasso’s interpretation of his work is different too.

He removes color from the scene, rendering it black and white, and shatters the background into triangle-shaped pieces. The fluffy dresses worn by the women of the original are reduced to boxes and rectangles.

Picasso's Las Meninas exploration was about four and half months long.

Picasso simplifies the art. He subverts the point of the original piece to be realistic and changes it entirely into his own work.

He didn’t do this out of any disrespect to Velasquez’s legacy, though his recreation was still controversial among art scholars. He was looking to understand a style that was vastly different from his. He took it apart piece by piece and put it back together, all while making it his own.

He donated the entire series to Museu Picasso in 1969, just before he died.

The museum also currently houses an exhibition showing off a strange habit of the artist.

Through X-rays and restoration efforts for his pieces, the museum curators discovered fully finished paintings beneath the art of some of their donations. In other words, Picasso would create a painting, let it dry, and then paint over it and start again on the same canvas.

One of the secret paintings is revealed on the right through a television screen, the source of the hidden work on the left: Juame Sabartes, finished in 1901.

This kind of habit wasn’t unusual for up and coming artists at the time. It was a way to save money on a canvas.

However, the curators discovered that Picasso did this in several of his later works as well. They don’t know why.

It does seem that he never intended for the multiple layers to be noticed, due to a thick white cover of paint dividing the original painting from the new painting. This made it so it couldn’t be seen when you held it up to the light.

This exhibit allows visitors to see the first painting displayed on a screen off to the side, and the actual painting hung next to it. It will be on display until September.

Picasso and Barcelona Today

It is often said that Barcelona is where Picasso felt most at home. He called it the place where he “left so many things hanging on the altar of happiness” in 1936, long after he had moved away.

The inhabitants of the city are well aware of Barcelona’s close ties to Picasso. University students majoring in the humanities make it a point to study him, given their easy access to the history of his work and life here.

However, as progressive values become more popular with newer generations, there has been greater scrutiny of Picasso.

Carla Vidal Martinez, a student at the University of Barcelona, works at the Museu Picasso. She said that she thinks the museum does not necessarily explore some of Picasso’s flaws as deeply as it should.

“His personality has some dark parts,” she said.

She might have been referring to the recent spotlight put on Picasso’s treatment of women.

He would enter a relationship with a woman (often much younger than him) and use her as his muse for his art, and then cast her aside when she did not inspire him anymore.

A piece completed in 1926 of Jaqueline Roque, one of Picasso's muses.

Picasso was chastised by his own granddaughter, Marina, for doing this.

There are seven women attributed to the seven artistic periods in Picasso’s career: Fernande Olivier, Eva Gouel, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque.

“I think it’s still possible to separate the art from the artist,” Vidal Martinez said. “It is hard, but he was important.”

Because of the women’s deep spiritual involvement in Picasso’s artistic development, some still argue that it is impossible to extract his misogyny out of his art.

Others think that his contributions to contemporary styles are invaluable.

Regardless, the Museu Picasso still displays his vibrant and intriguing development into the household name we know today. Whether you’re looking to admire or critique his art, it is worth the visit.