In Switzerland the largest exhibition on Pablo Picasso's blue and pink period. At the Fondation Beyeler

From February 3 to May 26, 2019, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel is hosting the exhibition The Young Picasso. Blue and Pink Period: this is, to date, the exhibition considered the most prestigious of those held in the Swiss foundation’s spaces. On display are the youthful paintings and sculptures of Pablo Picasso (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, 1973) from the so-called Blue and Pink Period, which lasted from 1901 to 1906. This is the first time in Europe that masterpieces from this very important phase, so many considered milestones on the road that led Pablo Picasso to become one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, have been presented in such concentration and quality. Barely twenty years old, the emerging genius embarked on a quest for new motifs and new forms of expression, a quest he soon led to perfection. In rapid succession, styles and figural worlds change (artistic “revolutions” follow one another at a rapid pace). The exhibition focuses on the blue and pink period and thus on the six years of the young Picasso’s artistic activity considered crucial to his production. It also opens a glimpse into the birth of Cubism around 1907, an event of epochal magnitude that grafts on to the lofty earlier evidence. And with that, the exhibition links back to the Fondation Beyeler’s own collection, whose earliest Picassian work is a significant preparatory study for the Demoiselles d’Avignon, dating precisely from 1907.

The chronologically oriented exhibition looks at the beginnings of Picasso’s career through the privileged lens of the human figure. The artist, moving between Barcelona and Paris, repeatedly and stubbornly tackles the representation of this subject. Beginning in 1901, in the phase dominated by the color blue, Picasso investigates the misery and emotional abysses of society’s outcasts. Then, having settled in Paris in 1905, in the so-called pink period he gives artistic dignity to the hopes and yearnings of circus characters (acrobats, acrobats and harlequins). Seeking a new authenticity in art, in mid-1906 Picasso spent several weeks in the village of Gósol, in the Spanish Pyrenees, where he created numerous paintings and sculptures in which both archaic and classical bodily canons converge. In the progressive deformation and decomposition of the figure, visible especially in the “primitivist” depictions, especially of female nudes, executed after his return to Paris, the Cubist language that would develop from 1907 onward is finally announced. In the enchanting and touching works of the blue and pink period, completed in Spain and France, the young as well as ambitious artist creates works of universal expressive value. Absolute existential themes such as life, love, sexuality, destiny and death are embodied in young women and men of delicate beauty, as well as in children or old men marked by existence, bearing intense emotions (happiness and joy no less than loneliness and melancholy). The major exhibition brings together some 75 paintings and sculptures only rarely loaned and from major museums in Europe, the US, Canada, Russia, China and Japan. The masterpieces, among the world’s best-known, come from such prestigious institutions as the Musée national Picasso in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and many others.

Numerous works belong to important private collections and some of them are again offered to the public gaze for the first time in several decades. The exhibition project, which took several years to prepare, is so far the most challenging and expensive in the history of Fondation Beyeler and will undoubtedly represent one of the top cultural events of 2019 at the European level. All of the incoming works attract public attention already in their museums of origin. The review was created in cooperation with the Musée national Picasso and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where in a modified form the exhibition has already stopped. Curating the exhibition at Fondation Beyeler is Raphaël Bouvier, curator at Fondation Beyeler.

The exhibition at Fondation Beyeler differs from the first exhibition stop in Paris in that the perspective on the blue and pink period is broadened to include Picasso’s early proto-Cubist paintings, painted in 1907 in preparation for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is precisely a preliminary study, Femme (époque des “Demoiselles d’Avignon”), that constitutes both the dazzling early point of the Fondation Beyeler’s extensive Picasso collection and the exhibition’s concluding piece. While the Paris presentation juxtaposed completed works with numerous preparatory works and archival materials, Fondation Beyeler’s focus is on Picasso’s painting and sculpture from this period. Many of the capital works from this period are now the flagships of major international museums, while several other sublime works are still in private hands, and at Fondation Beyeler some of them will be offered for public viewing for the first time in decades. The exhibition is the first in Switzerland focusing on both the blue and pink periods and in a way complements the two retrospectives that the Kunstmuseum Bern devoted first in 1984 to the early Picasso and the blue period and then in 1992 to the pink period. In fact, the exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler and the Musée d’Orsay, held jointly, are the first in Europe to focus in such concentration and richness on the blue and pink periods.

The 75 loans, granted by 41 lenders (including 28 museums) from 13 different countries (Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom, Sweden, Principality of Liechtenstein, Russia, Czech Republic, USA, Canada, Japan) are arranged over 10 rooms, with a total of 1622 square meters of exhibition space (in addition to being the most prestigious and expensive, it is therefore also the largest of the exhibitions so far organized at Fondation Beyeler). Again, the catalog, with 304 pages and 17 contributions, is the most comprehensive publication to come out of the museum’s types.

The exhibition is supported by Beyeler-Stiftung and Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation. Main partner Swisscom. Partners and patrons: Fondation BNP Paribas Suisse, Simone & Peter Forcart-Staehelin, Eckhart & Marie-Jenny Koch-Burckhardt, L. + Th. La Roche-Stiftung, Dr. Christoph M. Müller & Sibylla M. Müller, Novartis, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Federal Office of Culture FOC, Freundeskreis der Fondation Beyeler and other private donors who ask to remain anonymous. Media partners SonntagsBlick and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Information on times and tickets can be found on the Fondation Beyeler website. On social: Instagram #BeyelerPicasso, Facebook @FondationBeyeler, Twitter @Fond_Beyeler and YouTube @FondationBeyeler.

Pictured: Pablo Picasso, La vie (1903; oil on canvas, 197 x 127.3 cm; Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Donation Hanna Fund) © Succession Picasso / ProLitteris, Zurich 2018. Ph. © The Cleveland Museum of Art

In Switzerland the largest exhibition on Pablo Picasso's blue and pink period. At the Fondation Beyeler

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