Picasso looks at Degas

The Museu Picasso of Barcelona has a unique and very special exhibit going on until January 16. The idea of Picasso davant Degas is this. Paintings of the two great icons are hung side by side. So we can see similar themes and obsessions as well as similarities and differences in style.
Picasso used to say: "When there is anything to steal, I steal". Throughout his work he adapted and commented on many of his great predecessors's works. (Check out for example his cubist "remakes" of Velaquez's Las Meninas at the museum's permanent exhibit.) And Degas was no exception. When Picasso moved to Paris in 1904 he lived in the same neighborhood as Degas.
Although they apparently never met the two revolutionary icons shared many of the same obsessions and were always experimenting with new forms and media which this exhibit explores.
A couple of us from the hotel checked it out yesterday, and we really enjoyed it. Degas of course had his fixation with ballerinas; Picasso picked up theme even before his relationship with Olga Khokhlova, the ballet dancer. Side by side are two glassy-eyed bar scenes and paintings featuring women's hair being brushed. They are eerily similar in some ways, but reveal key differences in style. In fact Picasso based many of his later pieces on works for Degas from his own collection. Interestingly enough Picasso was convinced that Degas resembled his own father and he often painted Degas/father into some of his paintings, especially the voyeuristic ones concerning women. A little strange, maybe. But very interesting.
In any case this is the "first full-scale exploration of Picasso's lifelong fascination with Degas's art and personality" and was organized by Francine Art Museum of Williamstown, Massachusetts and the Picasso Museum of Barcelona. It's definitely worth the visit and is in within easy walking distance from the Hotel Principal.

Picasso and Erotic Prints from Japan: yet another side to Picasso

“Art and sexuality are the same thing.”--Picasso

You have just two more weeks to go to check out “Secret Images: Picasso and Erotic Prints from Japan” at the Picasso Museum of Barcelona. The official publicity talks about the life-long dialog between the great painter and the erotic tradition in Japan and the exhibit contains 61 major Japanese erotic prints, some of which date back to the 17th century, and Picasso drawings which show their influence. These drawings span the years from when a hungry, young Picasso sold his erotic drawings “on the clandestine market”, as the exhibit puts it, to when he was an established multi-millionaire with the same sexual obsessions.

This is billed as a collection of Japanese prints from Picasso´s private collection but he acquired most of them in 1934 and there is no hard evidence of his owning more than one in his quiet days in Clichy, Paris. But Japan had been introduced into Europe at the end of the 20th century and was certainly in the avant-garde air.

This museum goer was especially interested in the long Japanese tradition of depicting women in compromising positions with octopuses and fish, themes which fascinated both Picasso and Toulouse Lautrec as well as others. So, the exhibit is a little spicy, but Picasso says that “Art is never chaste and should be forbidden to innocents.”

We learn that, unlike in the West, erotica was not at all marginal in Japan. Shungo, as these erotic prints were called were in wide and respectable circulation and were used in sex education dating from 1764. Much of the exhibit is not pornographic; there is an official Picasso poster of Madame Sadayakko, a geisha-trained Japanese artist who was all the rage at the time, and a learned discussion of Japanese print techniques.

Picasso says, “Everything about the East seduces me. The West and its civilization are merely the leftovers from the gigantic loaf that is the East.” You will certainly find something to be seduced by in this exhibit which can be seen alone or together with the permanent museum collection. In any case it shows yet another side of the multi-faceted Spanish genius.

by Michael Oudyn