Picasso Museum: don’t miss it during your trip to Barcelona

Pablo Picasso is considered as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. His canvases are in the world famous museums. His talent and lots of new ideas have contributed to changing attitudes of former art and modernity has introduced a new concept in art, which means a victory of form over the content.
With the development of modernism, Barcelona became a major center of intellectual, political and cultural activities in Spain. Internationally recognized artists including Picasso, Miro, Dali and the famous architect Gaudi gave their imprints to Barcelona and so Catalan culture flourished.

City of Inspiration:

Picasso drew his first inspiration in Barcelona, where he spent ten years. This Mediterranean city full of light and positive energy was host to many avant-garde Spanish artists. They exchanged ideas between themselves and hence created the conditions for breaking with the traditional view of the world.

One of the most important movements that developed between 1905 and 1914 is certainly cubism. The main pillar of this movement was collaboration between Picasso and French painter George. In addition to painting, Picasso worked on sculptures, ceramics and designing costumes for plays.

Picasso Museum:

Picasso Museum in Barcelona is the largest and most complete museum in the world that is dedicated to a single artist. The permanent exhibition includes around 3,500 of his works. Among them are drawings, sketches, oils, sculptures and particularly interesting, the rooms with exposed ceramic works. There is also a whole series of studies of the famous “Las Meninas”.

This is the most visited museum in Barcelona. Every year there are about million visitors. The museum is located in a patrician palace Berenguer de Aguilar in the picturesque part of the town – La Ribera. The museum opened in 1963 with a collection of paintings donated by Jaume Sabater, Picasso’s friend.

The permanent exhibition is presented in an interesting way because he invented a kind of Time Machine through Picasso’s life, from birth in the Andalusian city of Malaga until his death in France in 1973. It also has periods that are clearly defined in his work.Each period is specific in its way.

“Blue Period” (1901-1904) is characterized by shades of blue – the motives of prostitutes, beggars and dark mood while the “pink period” (1905-1907) is dominated by livelier tones, with pink and orange hues and themes and characters from the circus. From 1907 till 1909 Picasso worked on artifacts of African culture inspired by African art, particularly masks.

The last period was Cubism (analytic and synthetic), the direction which Picasso developed in reducing the form to basic geometric shapes and colors that are monochrome pictures in the background.

A very interesting walk “Picasso’s trace through Barcelona” is organized along with visiting the museum. During this walk you can see the main places that Picasso loved.