Picasso mistreated women: teacher and students protest at Picasso Museum in Barcelona

Singular protest by a group of Spanish students and one of their teachers, who went to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona to protest Pablo Picasso’s machismo. Last May 27, the boys and their teacher showed up at the Catalan institute with a series of white T-shirts with black lettering and vice versa, on which they could read phrases such as “Picasso abused women,” “Picasso was Dora Maar’s shadow,” or even “Dora Maar Museum,” “Dora Maar present,” “Picasso Bluebeard,” and so on. The references mainly concern the figure of Dora Maar, a Serbian photographer and artist who was Picasso’s lover and apparently abused by the Malaga-based artist.

The idea came from the teacher, Maria Llopis, originally from Benicasim (near Valencia), a lecturer at Escola Massana (an art school in Barcelona) who staged the protest as part of one of her feminist art courses. “With the feminist art course,” Llopis wrote on Twitter, “we want to reclaim the role of the women artists who went down in history as the ’women of’ Picasso.”

The action by Llopis and her students took place in silence: the idea is to raise awareness among the museum so that it reconsiders the role of women in Picasso’s art, and among the public so that they look at the art of the Spanish genius with different eyes. “This is not an attack on Picasso,” Llopis told Reuters news agency. “I don’t believe in cancel culture at all. I believe in truth, in not hiding things.” The museum took it well: it is, after all, a place for discussion, as director Emmanuel Guigon reminded Reuters, again, who has already announced a conference on Picasso’s relationship with women for next fall, as well as exhibitions that will address the issue. “We can no longer look at Picasso’s work as we did 20, 40 or 50 years ago,” he said. “His work can always be seen with new and critical eyes, but no one will erase Picasso’s work from art history.”

Picasso mistreated women: teacher and students protest at Picasso Museum in Barcelona

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