The Spanish Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, and the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, presented the program of activities with which Spain and France will commemorate the Picasso Year in 2023.
The Picasso Festival 1973-2023 was announced at the 26th Franco-Spanish Summit on March 15, 2021 in Montauban by the President of the French Republic and the President of the Spanish Government.
The Spanish and French governments have drawn up a joint program that will include 42 exhibition projects, two academic congresses and events that will take place mainly in Europe and North America.
Culture and Sports Minister Miquel Iceta has claimed Picasso’s artistic legacy and the validity of his work. “If there is an artist who defines the 20th century, who represents it with all its cruelty, its violence, its passion, its excesses and its contradictions, it is undoubtedly Pablo Picasso,” he said. .
In the hall of the Reina Sofía Museum which houses the Guernica, the Minister underlined the celebration of the Picasso Year: “I am sure that this will allow us to once again enjoy an art that is still alive; or maybe for the first time. It will also allow us to look at him from a contemporary perspective, helping us to understand an artist who is still alive 50 years after his death with today’s eyes”.
For her part, the French Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, considers that “Picasso’s work continues to exert a real fascination throughout the world, abundant, inventive and often radical. For his artistic force, of course. But also for its political strength. It is constantly being reread, revisited and reinterpreted. This formidable posterity, this dual culture and this work, still as topical today, is what the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023 proposes to explore, question and share with a new generation born in the 21st century. century, and to enable it to discover and understand in the light of our time”.
The extensive program will begin next October, with temporary exhibitions on the figure of the painter that will take place in different museums in the country, and will continue throughout 2023, the year in which the anniversary will be commemorated, when 50 years will would have passed. since Picasso’s death. He died in the French town of Mougins on April 8, 1973. This date marks the celebration of his work and his artistic heritage in Spain and France, as well as internationally.
Forty-two exhibitions to date
About fifty activities are planned in different countries. Two congresses and 42 exhibitions are scheduled to date: Sixteen in Spain, twelve in France, seven in the United States, two in Germany, two in Switzerland, one in the Principality of Monaco, one in Romania and one in Belgium.
The official program in Spain will take place at Casa de Velázquez, Fundació Joan Miró, Fundación MAPFRE, La Casa Encendida, Museo Casa Natal Picasso, Museo de Belas Artes da Coruña, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museo Nacional del Prado, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Museo Picasso de Málaga, Museu del Disseny de Barcelona, Museu Picasso Barcelona and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
In France, exhibitions will take place at the Museum of Montmartre, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon, Museum of Man-National Museum of Natural History, National Museum Picasso-Paris, Picasso Museum (Antibes), Magnelli Museum, Museum of ceramics-Vallauris, Goya museum; Hispanic Art Museum (Castres); Lambert Fund (Avignon); National Picasso-Paris Museum; Luxembourg Museum (Paris); Petit Palais and Center Pompidou.
Two academic conferences
In addition, two academic conferences will also be organized; essential meeting points for scientific exchanges between researchers and experts on the artist’s work and an opportunity to carry out a historiographical study of Picasso’s work.
One of the conferences will take place at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid this fall, followed by a major international symposium to be held in Paris from December 6 to 8, 2023 at UNESCO Headquarters.
The Madrid conference will open the reflection from the context of the first avant-garde Picasso, while the Paris conference will serve as a meeting point for all the places and agents involved in the Celebration (museums, research centers and researchers) around the theme “Picasso in the 21st century: historiographical and cultural issues”, opening up to the participation of art historians, curators of recognized exhibitions in the field of Picasso, artists, writers and collectors.
A dissemination and education program will also be developed in close collaboration with the regional governments of Malaga, La Coruña, Madrid and Barcelona, cities with special ties to the life of the artist.
Together, these events will offer a historiographical overview of the approaches that make Picasso’s unique work so rich, while allowing the artist
is discovered, understood and questioned by a new generation of audiences, including pupils, students, cultural professionals and historians. This is an opportunity to rethink a broader work and the artist’s relationship with his contemporaries, from Madrid to Paris, from Manhattan to Bucharest, from Brooklyn to Luxembourg.
The Executive Committee of the National Commission for the Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Death of Pablo Picasso, chaired by Carlos Alberdi, is a space for collaboration between ministerial departments, public and private entities, as well as people linked to the work of Picasso.
Spain-France Binational Committee
The French and Spanish governments have agreed to work together on a program of international scope through this binational committee which brings together the cultural and diplomatic administrations of the two countries. In close collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris, whose generosity has facilitated the wide dissemination of the artist’s works, the binational committee coordinates the joint actions of the French and Spanish Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs.
The official program of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023 reflects the validity of the artist’s work, delving into previously unseen aspects of his work.
This binational committee lays claim to the career of an essentially European artist who, from a deep knowledge of the heritage and principles of European cultural tradition, designed universal symbols such as Guernica, today the collective emblem of defense of human rights.