We began our first full day in Barcelona at
Museo Picasso. The museum has the largest collection of Picasso's early works. By the age of ten, he was creating remarkable paintings. In 1895, at the age of 14,
Picasso moved to Barcelona with his family. Much of Picasso's early work is very realistic, his portraits are particularly arresting. There are landscapes, religious works, and lots of family portraits.
The museum is housed in a medieval palace complex.
No photos were allowed in the museum.
I got in trouble for taking this of the courtyard.
We particularly liked the the Las Meninas Series. Picasso was a huge fan of
Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) and was particularly taken with one of Valazquez's most famous works,
Las Meninas.
According to Wikipedia:
Las Meninas is a series of 58 paintings that
Pablo Picasso painted in 1957 by performing a comprehensive analysis, reinterpreting and recreating several times
Las Meninas by
Diego Velázquez. The suite is fully preserved at the
Museu Picasso in
Barcelona
and is the only complete series of the artist that remains together.
This is a very extensive survey work, which consists of 45 performances
of the original picture, 9 scenes of a dove,
3 landscapes and a portrait of Jacqueline.
Picasso himself understood this series as a whole, and as such gave them to the museum in Barcelona in May 1968, in memory of
Jaume Sabartés, who died the same year. Picasso's famous phrase said to Sabartés in 1950:
| “ |
If someone
want to copy Las Meninas, entirely in good faith, for example, upon
reaching a certain point and if that one was me, I would say..what if
you put them a little more to the right or left? I'll try to do it my
way, forgetting about Velázquez. The test would surely bring me to
modify or change the light because of having changed the position of a
character. So, little by little, that would be a detestable Meninas for a
traditional painter, but would be my Meninas. |
” |
—Picasso, 1950
|
We stopped at
Bar Lobo for a tapas lunch. Pierre found this in a top ten tapas list, and it did not disappoint.
We walked by and through the
Barcelona Cathedral. There was a large Christmas market in front of the Cathedral. This is the first time we saw the
caganer, a bizarre Catalonia tradition.
The name "El Caganer” literally means “the crapper” or "the shitter". Traditionally, the
figurine is depicted as a peasant, wearing the traditional Catalan red cap (the "
barretina") and with his trousers down, showing a bare backside, and defecating.
Most nativity scenes depict a whole village and a caganer is often hiding somewhere in the village. The market had anyone you can imagine depicted as a caganer--santa, soccer players...
