Picasso and Dalí take over

I recently asked a person closely linked to the commemoration of 50 years since Picasso's death – a 2023 packed with events – what new perspectives the celebration had brought. He did not doubt it: he had reinforced Picasso's connection with Spain by underlining his lesser-known ties to the everyday, from A Coruña to walks through the Prado. The answer made me think. Picasso, despite the little sympathy among the Franco authorities, has been one of the greatest representatives of “Spanishness.” Gertrude Stein spoke in 1938 of an “orientalist” Picasso, who embodied the well-known Spanish temperament, which before Manet had already fascinated French writers and artists. In other words, Picasso was “exotic”, ma non tropposimilar to the Spain built by the Royal Tourist Board in its 1929 campaigns for France: “The comfort of Europe / the exuberance of Africa / awaits you in Spain.”

That combination has haunted the cliché image of the “Spanish Picasso.” From the bulls to the passion, emphasized in the long report on the artist, associated with Spanish poetry and art, in the magazine Life, in 1968, Picasso has embodied a certain desire expressed in the reopening of the Picasso Museum in Paris, in 2014, by the then president of the French Republic, François Hollande: “Pablo Picasso, the Spanish, the republican, the communist, is the pride of France.” And yet, France got Picasso back at the last minute, Annie Cohen-Solal reflected in A foreigner named Picasso (Paidós, 2023). The text—one of the most innovative along with Picasso with the exiles (Muñeca Infinita, 2023), by Mercedes Guillén—documents the artist's difficulties in gaining acceptance in France. Persecuted as an anarchist, excluded from public collections for decades, with several failed attempts to obtain French nationality… Cohen-Solal's Picasso supports the thesis of the dazzling Rise and fall of Picasso (1965) by John Berger: upon his arrival in Paris, the man from Malaga was a foreigner as declassed as his circus characters or the bohemians in his stamp Frugal food.

Despite everything, someone could argue that from Spain Picasso is perceived as “very French”, a character of the new wave with his mariniere, sailor uniform that Chanel turns into fashion. What is interesting is Picasso's handling of these ambivalences, the deliberate adoption of each stereotype in her person, just like her work, plagued by mixtures and erasures. In this sense, the numerous photographs for which Picasso posed throughout his life are eloquent. Through them the idea of ​​an artist absorbed in creation, disdainful towards his public image, breaks down; the one that the canonical narrative opposes to Dalí and not only because of the political ideas of both. Dalí is the celebrity and Picasso the creator; Dalí is the character and Picasso the seamless artist. Thus, Picasso's defenders despise those of Dalí, appealing to the perfect excuse: Picasso was a republican hero and Dalí a conservative worldly man, fascinated by money and fame.

However, this polarization – the buzzword – is another kind of scenery and perhaps both share more than what canonical history – from both sides – wants us to think. Both excellent painters and performers, were media characters by choice, since the one who poses in front of the camera controls the narrative. That has been missing, perhaps, among the numerous exhibitions of the Picasso year: an in-depth look at Picasso performer that would reveal its relationship with the power of images and mass media; a Picasso instagramer who exhibited his interest in the construction of the “Picasso character”, similar to that of Dalí despite appearances, although often denied to give prominence to the conventional image of the great master that suits the canonical discourse. A shame because it would have offered a contemporary rereading of this artist, who has been put into dialogue with the old masters, has confronted living artists with greater or lesser success and has interacted with his friends, Stein in Paris, wonderful exhibition, or Kahnweiler in Barcelona.

In this era of cancellations, Me Too and the LGTBQ+ community have become entangled above all in Picasso's relationships with gender —It's Pablo-matic, at the Brooklyn Museum—and even with homosexualizing overtones, suggested in a subtle way although endorsed by photographs by Von Gloeden in the beautiful exhibition Picasso 1906, of the Reina Sofía. Or perhaps this year Picasso, a State project between France and Spain, has opted first for the great artist Picasso to settle the historical debt that both countries, it seems, had with him for different reasons. In catharses there was no place for performative.

But if the Picasso year ended, just as the bell rang, Picasso and Dalí took over for the 120th anniversary of the birth, in 1904, of Catalan. A Picasso has told me that the figure is not round at all and will not be a catharsis of two States for obvious reasons, but there will undoubtedly be revisions and I wonder what they will be, in addition to the old political reproaches. It will be interesting to rethink Dalí from the Me Too and LGTBQ+ perspectives, which have permeated so many conversations about Picasso, because at this point the Catalan's resume is impeccable, between García Lorca, the androgynous Amanda Lear and his great love, Gala, whom He didn't just paint. He shared with her authorship of her “his best works,” building the caper queer of what queer, a certain liquid identity in a signature signed by a single person: Gala Salvador Dalí. What's more, in this territory, no one like Dalí announced that in the future things would never be the same again.

Perhaps it was his fascination with the future that led him to become interested in DNA very early. I remember seeing him on television from my childhood, a single channel, with his mustache, talking about molecular structures. Most of them took him as a joke: another eccentricity of the artist. In that black and white Spain, Dalí was talking about the future and I wonder now if it was his form of rebellion against the establishment. In matters relating to science, Dalí was well ahead of television viewers, including Picasso, almost certainly.

As a preview of the celebration, the Salvador Dalí Gala Foundation has invited from Scotland the well-known Christ painted in 1951. The exhibition, which presents the process of execution of the work, reproduces the scenography designed by Dalí himself, and the lighting returns a new image of the impressive painting from the eyes of the present, those that correspond to the 120th anniversary. What if the painting was much more than a religious image? Between Christ and the Cap de Creus, a recurring landscape for the painter, an amalgam of apparent clouds reinforces the separation between sky and earth. But no, they are not clouds. They are rather reminiscent of the first images of our planet taken from outer space at the end of the 1940s and published in the early 1950s. Suddenly, the perspective of the painting reveals a premonition of the world seen from the outside: the well-known image of the Earth from the Moon, published years later.

If it is true that the Picasso year has served to talk about gender and to return Picasso to his daily life in Spain – among other things -, perhaps the commemoration of Dalí will serve to rethink his extraordinary relevance; how in that television interview he was talking about something fundamental that he sensed before anyone else, that would later fill general conversations and the work of so many artists. Who we are now: the passion for science.

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