How German is Picasso? – Terra Chile

The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso is one of the most popular artists in the world. Now, an exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Malaga, explores their relationship, hitherto unknown, with Germany.

The Picasso Museum presents a new facet of the renowned Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). José Lebrero Stal, its director, opened the exhibition “Picasso: German records,” the first in exploring the relationship of the painter, sculptor, artist and ceramist with this country.

Picasso, tourist magnet

The museum opened in 2003 and is a magnet public on the Costa del Sol. About 400,000 visitors visit it annually in the Palacio de Buenavista, in the Jewish quarter of Málaga. 80 percent of them are foreign tourists. So you will see nearly 80,000 Germans who not only spend their holidays in Malaga, but chose the sun and good weather and reside there permanently.

Picasso was never in Germany

The Spanish artist ever stepped on German soil since Paris was the epicenter of the art at the time. But in Germany his work is admired and followed with great interest. This exhibition in Malaga is, inter alia, the artistic and the development of art beyond the borders forefront exchange. For example, the portrait painting, cubism reception by the public, the influence of primitivism and finding new motifs from everyday life.

Members of the Germans of The Blue Rider in Munich, expressionist movements or The Bridge, Dresden, taken as a reference to Picasso. In the exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Malaga you can be seen wonderful works of German artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Otto Mueller and Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, allowing you to discover a new language. Among those painters highlights a work of Max Beckmann: the portrait of his beloved, whom he affectionately called “Naila” (1934), whose name was Hildegard MELMS, who wears a mink stole, which resonates portrait of ex-wife Polish Picasso, Olga, whom he painted between 1922 and 1923.

While Picasso was not interested in their German contemporaries, did love the paintings of the masters of the German Renaissance. In fact, he conducted 55 studies on the “Isenheim Altar in Colmar” by Mathias Grünewald, who knew only by drawings. One wonders what the Picasso Museum in Malaga which dedicates an exhibition to the painter’s relationship with Germany, not a German museum. After all, the works of Picasso were sold and were studied in Germany rather than in France or Spain. In 1907, the Spanish artist was discovered by the German gallery owner Daniel Henry Kahnweiler in Paris, who supported him financially. A year later, the Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, bought Picasso’s first work for its permanent collection. In 1912, a special exhibition in Cologne honored him by exposing 18 of his paintings. From 1912, art historians as Carl Einstein dealt intensively Cubism of Picasso as new pictorial style. It’s why Picasso belongs, somehow, also to Germany. It is hoped that not only tourists on the Costa del Sol enjoy this show, and to migrate to a German museum to enjoy art lovers.