Meeting of minds

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.