Picasso On The Beach

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents the exhibition Picasso On The Beach curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. The exhibition will be installed in the museum’s Project Rooms.

The exhibition is a collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris, and focuses on one of Peggy Guggenheim’s favorite works of art, Picasso’s On the Beach (La Baignade), now part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The show gathers a selection of ten drawings, three paintings and a sculpture, made by Picasso between February and December 1937, and is a part of the initiative of the Musée national Picasso-Paris Picasso-Méditerranée, an international cultural event, from Spring 2017 through Spring 2019. Over sixty cultural institutions have come together to develop a programme around the work “obstinément méditerranéenne” of Pablo Picasso. Initiated by the Musée national Picasso-Paris, this journey into the creation of the artist and across the places which inspired him, aims at strengthening ties between all the shores that touched his career.

With his numerous depictions of beaches and bathers – a subject matter that tends to cling to each new formal and iconographic departure - Picasso certainly did not discover a new subject, but rather identified and revealed the only real outdoor theme of his entire work. Like the majority of his motifs, the concept of the beach is approached in both a traditional and modern manner. Giorgione, Titian, Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir are all artists to whom Picasso turned for inspiration for his figures and structural compositions. The nude in motion is recurrent and of primary importance for all figurative artists. Picasso’s novelty here, however, is not a function of his subject matter but rather, as was characteristic of the Spanish genius, by uniting individual experience with tradition, he created something not only new but absolutely revolutionary.

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero