Meeting of minds
A new exhibition focuses on two of the 20th century's artistic geniuses, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí
It is hard to imagine that two geniuses, such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, would not have had some sort of relationship. It is also hard to believe that they should not be aware of and influenced by each other's artistic achievements. Although life events and political affiliations would end up creating a distance between the two men, both had a healthy appreciation for the work of the other.
It is this relationship that is the focus of the exhibition that opened last month in Barcelona's Museu Picasso. Picasso/Dalí. Dalí/Picasso. is the first joint retrospective of the painters and features 78 works, from paintings and sketches to engravings and sculptures, as well as documents, all exploring the parallels between the two.
It was a relationship that expressed itself in “specific moments”, according to the exhibition's curator, William Jeffett, from the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg in Florida. It is this institution that organised the exhibition, meaning that certain important works of Dalí that would have been difficult to put on display have been included in the exhibition. One example is Els primers dies de la primavera (1929), a painting from the crucial period in Dalí's surrealist period. The Fundació Gala-Dalí in Figueres has also contributed six oil paintings.
The first meeting between Picasso and Dalí took place in 1926, when the latter visited Picasso in his studio on his first visit to Paris. Yet, the exhibition begins with two youthful self-portraits by the artists, establishing how “both possess a theatrical aspect” in their attitudes to themselves as artists. The exhibition highlights other such crossover moments in the careers of the artists, such as the portrait of Picasso's wife, Olga Koklova, painted in 1917 and which bears a strong resemblance to Dalí's portrait of his sister, Anna Maria, painted a decade later.
Meanwhile, the personal relationship between the artists remained good until the Civil War, after which their political differences created a distance between them. Yet, the artistic influence continued and the exhibition closes with their mutual fascination for Velázquez.