Extraordinary exhibition of works from the Museo Reina Sofia opens in Florence

FLORENCE.- Starting 20 September 2014 Palazzo Strozzi in Florence will once again be shining the spotlight on modern art with a major new event devoted to Pablo Picasso, one of 20th century painting's greatest masters. Picasso and Spanish Modernity has put together a broad selection of works by the great master, from the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, in an attempt to stimulate a reflection on his influence on every aspect of art in the 20th century, and on his interaction with such leading Spanish artists as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Juan Gris, María Blanchard and Julio González.

The exhibition explores the major themes developed throughout the career of a painter who had the greatest impact on the history of the 20th century: art reflecting on art and on the relationship between the real and the super-real and between nature and culture, the artist's heartfelt involvement in the tragedy of unfolding history, the emergence of the monster with a human face, and the metaphor of erotic desire as a primary source of inspiration for the artist's creativity and world vision.

The exhibition also allows visitors to explore Picasso's multi-faceted personality, the almost symbiotic bond that existed between his art and his life, between the work that he created and the time of his life in which he created it, while History with a capital "H" frequently made powerful inroads both into his pictures and into his life. Picasso and Spanish Modernity comprises some ninety works by Picasso and other artists, ranging from painting to sculpture, drawing, engraving and even a film by José Val del Omar, thanks to the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi's synergistic cooperation with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The works of art on display include such celebrated masterpieces as Woman's Head (1910), Portrait of Dora Maar (1939) and The Painter and the Model (1963) by Picasso, Siurana, the Path (1917) and Figure and Bird in the Night (1945) by Miró and Dalí's Arlequin (1927), along with Picasso's drawings, engravings and preparatory paintings for his huge masterpiece Guernica (1937), none of which have been displayed outside Spain in such vast numbers before now.

Broken down into nine sections, the exhibition brings together here – for the very first time – the styles, the aesthetic constants and the plastic principles of the creative force elaborated by Picasso and by the other Spanish painters responsible for the development of modern art, the exhibition's purpose being not simply to illustrate Picasso's influence on Spanish art but also to highlight the most decisive marks that Picasso's interaction with other Spanish artists made on the international art scene.

Curated by Eugenio Carmona (Professor of Art History at Malaga University, a member of the Patronatos del Museos Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and of the Comisión Andaluza de Museos), the exhibition covers the years 1910 to 1963, exploring the relationship between Art and Culture and establishing the elements that comprised that plastic transformation – and also subsequent plastic transformations – of artistic awareness in Spain's cultural diversity through shared styles or common, coinciding and interacting aesthetic denominators and plastic interests.

The exhibition also shows how those shared styles developed over time and were expressed by each individual artist, in relation to the social, historical and political context in which they saw the light of day.

The first section, entitled References, explores the fate of Picasso as a legend and an artist. Its theme is the metaphor of the creative process, illustrated through one of the versions of The Painter and the Model and the etchings and drawings that Picasso produced for Honoré de Balzac's Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu.

Experimentation with genres and techniques, another characteristic feature of Picasso's approach to modernity, is the theme of the second section, entitled Variations, which includes exhibits representing each one of the key phases in his artistic career. The third section, entitled Idea and Form, illustrates Spain's highly individual and little known contribution to the art of concrete and anylitical form, some important examples of this contribution being Juan Gris' Harlequin with a Violin, María Blanchard's Woman with Guitar and Pablo Palazuelo's Clear Weather. The fourth section, entitled Lyricism. Mark and Surface, refers to the lyricism defined in painting and sculpture by marks, surfaces and space. Examples of this trend can be found in Picasso's Musical Instruments on a Table or in such sculptural works as Julio González's Large Venus and Ángel Ferrant's Industrious Woman.

The fifth section is devoted to the dialogue in artistic creativity between Reality and Super-reality* in the specific way in which Spanish art approaches the styles and forms of Surrealism, as embodied not only by Picasso and Dalí but also by such artists as José Gutiérrez Solana and Antonio López. The high point of the exhibition is its sixth and seventh sections, which share the common title Towards Guernica but are divided into The Monster and The Tragedy. These sections consist of an outstanding group of preparatory drawings, engravings and paintings illustrating Picasso's inspiration and his daily work on the masterpiece that was to become Guernica in May 1937, thus allowing the visitor to reconstruct the inspiration and cross-contamination of figure and symbol in the artist's work.

Another absorbing theme is the crucial relationship between Nature and Culture which unfolds in the eighth section, with work by such artists as Alberto Sánchez, Óscar Domínguez, Eduardo Chillida, the search for identity through the relationship between country, landscape and people being a characteristic feature of the Spanish cultural experience. The ninth and final section of the exhibition, entitled Towards a Different Modernity, views the ways in which Spanish artists, including Tàpies, handled the change of direction towards a different notion of modernity in the chronological and aesthetic openness of the present. The roles of Miró and Picasso changed in the 1950s, when Miró became the most influential of the Spanish innovators while Picasso turned into a living legend, although his work began to be viewed as a reflection of his entire grandiose career to date.