An exhibition dedicated for the first time to the relationship between Picasso and the Spanish Exodus. Spanning three floors of Les Abattoirs, it explores how the historical and personal upheaval of the Exodus affected Picasso and many other artists of his generation.
Does a specific literary and pictorial culture exist for an artist who emigrated by choice and who became an exile despite himself?
In 1937, a year after the start of the Spanish Civil War, while he was working on a painting commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris, Picasso learned of the bombing of Guernica and radically altered his initial theme.
In 1939, after three years of war, 500,000 Spaniards crossed the French-Spanish border before transferring to refugee camps with abominable living conditions. Following La Retirada, many Spaniards were living abroad, like Picasso, who had been living in Paris since 1900, thus becoming political exiles.
The Spanish situation strengthened Picasso’s political engagement against Francoism and for peace, both in his art and in his support for the Spanish exiles, particularly artists.
About Exhibition
From the monumental curtain created in 1936 for a theatrical set and entitled La Dépouille du Minotaure in costume d'Arlequin, donated by the artist in 1965 to the city of Toulouse, then the French capital of Spanish exile, the exhibition takes place in three spaces of Les Abattoirs that occupy from the basement to the first floor.
Firstly, there are some thirty works by Picasso (paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures and books), to which are added more than a hundred unpublished photographs and archives, in particular personal archives of Pablo Picasso preserved in the Picasso Museum from Paris.
The exhibition also includes more than sixty works by exiled Picasso artists or witnesses of life in the refugee camps. A selection of films, photographs and archives help to contextualize this history that extends from 1936 to the present.
Here, their works are exhibited alongside his, by the likes of Óscar Domínguez, Apel.les Fenosa, Luis Fernández, Pedro Flores, Carles Fontserè, Julio González, Roberta González, Hans Hartung, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Joan Miró, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, and Remedios Varo, among others. Also evoked are those who created while living in refugee camps, as was the case for Antoni Clavé or artists J.Fín (Josefin Vilató) and Javier Vilató, Picasso’s nephew; or while working as a nurse, like photographer Friedel Bohny-Reiter.
The exhibition then deals with the theme of the cultural, artistic, and humanist resistance that continued into the post-WWII period, while militant exhibitions were organised by artists in exile from Paris to Prague, via Toulouse, and support committees continued to battle Franco’s regime.
A contemporary art section, inviting over twenty artists, completes this exhibition at the Abattoirs. The works bear testament to Picas- so's importance in the message of artistic and individual freedom while others address the theme of exile today.