KING JUAN CARLOS of Spain opened yesterday what is arguably the most spectacular art exhibition in Europe this summer, a double show of Picasso’s work marking the 125th anniversary of the artist’s birth in Málaga.

More than a million visitors are expected to view the exhibition, Tradition and the Avant-Garde, which is being staged in Madrid this summer at both the Prado, where Picasso studied the Old Masters, and the nearby Reina Sofia Modern Art Museum, where Guernica, his indictment of a Spanish Civil War atrocity, hangs.

At least 100 of Picasso’s works have been brought together from collections around the world, and insured for more than €2,000 million (£1,380 million). It took the organisers several years of cajoling to persuade many galleries to lend their most valuable Picassos.

“It is a demanding retrospective of the most important 20th-century artist, giving an exceptional perspective that has seldom been seen and would be difficult to organise again,” says Miguel Zugaza, director of the Prado.

The Prado juxtaposes paintings from Picasso’s blue, pink and Cubist periods with works of the Prado Old Masters that influenced him.

The Reina Sofia exhibition, a pleasant, tree-shaded walk away, focuses primarily on Guernica, which was shipped around the world for more than 40 years until it came home when democracy was restored in Spain in 1981.

Picasso was already a prodigy in 1897-98 when he came to study at Madrid’s Academy of Fine Arts. He spent a lot of time in the Prado copying the techniques and subject matter of Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Zurbarán and Poussin.

The most stunning double-take here is achieved by locating three 1957 versions by Picasso of the Meninas, one of which is directly opposite the enormous Velázquez original which can be seen in an adjoining chamber. Or Goya’s La Maja Desnuda, the famous seductive nude, is alongside Picasso’s naked La Alborada (1942) from the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Picasso’s fondness for the erotic, the playful, disguises and caricatures are all represented in the Prado’s great long hall. The exuberant musketeers painted by Picasso in the late 1960s end the Prado tour and are in direct contrast to the sombre anti-war exhibit in the Reina Sofia.

Goya’s El 3 de Mayo 1808, the French firing squad in action in Madrid during the Napoleonic Wars, hangs opposite Guernica.Between the two are Picasso’s copy of 3 de Mayo, The Massacre in Korea (1951), and Manet’s Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867).

Francisco Calvo Serraller, an exhibition organiser, claims: “The exhibitions are exclusive and unique. Picasso made his artistic concept universal.”


RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSTON
CHIEF ART CRITIC

THE turnstiles are bound to be spinning as the Prado and the Reina Sofía team up to stage a retrospective of this greatest of Spanish masters.

Picasso can certainly provide enough paintings. Among his most remarkable qualities was the rapidity with which he moved from one artistic style to the next, from the melancholy Blue period of the impoverished young painter, through a rose-tinted time of circus performers towards Cubism, with which he altered our perception of reality for ever.

But, though he has probably produced more masterpieces than most great painters, he has probably produced more second-rate experiments, too.

The problem for curators is persuading museums to lend the best works.

Canvases by Picasso are the crowd-pullers on which collections the world over depend, but Madrid not only has Guernica, the sombre masterpiece painted at the height of the Spanish Civil War, but also the credibility that Picasso served as a director of its museum, doing some of his earliest drawings in the Prado.

Curators have capitalised on this. They have managed to wheedle such momentous pieces as Boy with Horse or Self-Portrait with Palette from overseas collections. Such works alone ensure the success of this show.

But throw a handful of some of the Prado’s most iconic canvases into the mix — Titian, Velázquez and Goya among them — and you are sure of a blockbusting hit.

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