Great Art at the Movies unveils the Young Picasso: May 6, 7 and 8 only

On May 6, 7 and 8 , 2019, La Grande Arte al Cinema will unveil the Young Picasso to viewers: in fact, the new event film will be dedicated to Picasso’s youthful years, the years in which Pablo, a boy from southern Spain, became what would be considered the world’s most famous modern artist.

The docu-film will examine the fundamental role that Malaga, Barcelona and Paris played in the artist’s life, highlighting why each of these cities was so significant in the course of his formation. Malaga is his hometown, where Picasso y Ruiz was born on October 25, 1881, and became passionate about art, painting his first picture at the age of eight: a bullfight. His love of painting was a legacy he received from his father, Jose Ruiz, an artist and later professor of drawing, as well as from his grandfather Don Diego Ruiz, a glove maker with an innate instinct for drawing and music. In Barcelona Picasso began the School of Fine Arts and immediately opposed its academicism, falling in love instead with the city’s architecture and Gaudi’s eclecticism. After a few stays in the Spanish capital, Madrid, where he attended the Academia Real de San Fernando, Picasso would return to Barcelona to insert himself in the milieu of the Els Quatre Gats café, a symbol of Catalan architectural Modernism and a favorite meeting place for the city’s young artists and intellectuals. His style would evolve to touch on a symbolism that foreshadowed the Blue period. Attracted by the Pre-Raphaelites, Picasso will decide to travel to London, but he will never reach it. For the intermediate stop in Paris would become crucial: here, his encounters with artists and collectors would be fundamental to his artistic activity, nurturing the painter’s temperament, naturally aimed at experimentation.

The Young Picasso is made in close collaboration with five major European museums located in the cities pivotal to the artist’s life: the Picasso Museum and Fundación Picasso-Museo Casa Natal in Málaga; the Museu Picasso de Barcelona, where the largest collection of his early work is kept; the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya; and the Musée National Picasso in Paris. The docu-film will feature the extraordinary participation of Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, and will offer unique glimpses inside the artist’s masterpieces, interspersed with insights from art historians and curators and the reading of letters to friends and lovers of the painter.

The documentary directed by Phil Grabsky and filmed over two years, includes two essential phases of Picasso’s life-the Blue and Pink periods-and the years before. Lesser-known years, but crucial to his formation and success. Indeed, the film closes in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, where one of Picasso’s masterpieces has been on display since the 1930s: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Painted in 1907, the work is still considered pioneering today. Many contemporaries, shaken by Picasso’s violent deconstruction of the conventional rules of artistic figuration with this work, did not understand its value, and many rejected and mocked it. In fact, as the months passed, they sensed its importance and glimpsed in it the announcement of the future Cubist revolution.

Malén Gual, Senior Curator at the Museu Picasso de Barcelona, said, “This film shows Picasso’s solid artistic training and what extraordinary paintings he produced from an early age. I have worked on Picasso for decades and have always been impressed and strongly moved by seeing his work, and by his own exciting story, now revealed on the big screen.”

La Grande Arte al Cinema is an original and exclusive project of Nexo Digital in collaboration with media partners Radio Capital, Sky Arte and MYmovies.it.

Image: First Communion (1896, EOS Young Picasso) Ph.Credit Exhibition on screen

Great Art at the Movies unveils the Young Picasso: May 6, 7 and 8 only

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