If we do not know our past, we will not understand our present and we will hardly know how to look to the future. The migratory processes have always been constant. Our recent past is a good example, now that in the election period some parties propose absurd and aberrant proposals with the children of the female immigrants.

In this context, the museum Les Abattoirs de Toulouse presents the exhibition, Picasso and exile. A history of Spanish art in the resistance, with the sponsorship of the Picasso Museum in Paris and with the support of Acción Cultural Española, AC / E, which can be seen from March 15 to August 25, 2019. It is a great exhibition that, on the 80th anniversary of the Republican exile, La Retirada, explores in depth how the historical and personal agitation of exile affected Picasso and other contemporary artists.
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thirty works by Picasso (paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures and books), to which are added more than a hundred unpublished photographs and archives, in particular personal archives of Pablo Picasso preserved in the Picasso Museum from Paris.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.

More information

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Curators
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Annabelle Ténèze, conservadora jefe y directora de Les Abattoirs; Emilie Bouvard, conservadora del Museo Picasso de París; Géraldine Mercier, historiadora del arte; y Valentín Rodríguez, conservador y director de colecciones en Les Abattoirs.
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Location
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Museo Les Abattoirs de Toulouse, 76 allées Charles de Fitte
31300 Toulouse, France
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Dates
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From March 15 to August 25, 2019. Hours.- Open from Wednesday to Sunday from 12.00 to 18.00.
Open Thursdays at night, until 8:00 pm (except for school holidays)
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Artists
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Friedel Bohny-Reiter, Xavier Bueno, Luis Buñuel, Robert Capa, Ubaldo Izquierdo Carvajal, Antoni Clavé, Mercedes Comaposada Guillén, Honorio Garciá Condoy, Pere Créixams, Óscar Domínguez, Equipo Crónica, Apel•les Fenosa, Luis Fernández, J.Fín (Josefin Vilató), Robert Flaherty, Pedro Flores, Carles Fontserè, Julio González,Roberta González, Goya, Emilio Grau Sala, Hans Hartung, Robert Hessens & Alain Resnais, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Baltasar Lobo, Dora Maar, Josep Marti, Blasco Mentor, Francois Miro, Joan Miró, Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, Gines Parra, José Palmeiro, Joaquin Peinado, Pablo Picasso, Josep Ponti, Joan Rebull,Roa, Antonio Saura, Antoni Tàpies, Bonaventura Trepat, Remedios Varo, Javier Vilató, Hernando Viñes.
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Guest artists
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Pilar Albarracín, Carlos Aires, Daniel Andújar, Babi Badalov, Eduardo Basualdo, Jordi Colomer, Hélène Delprat, Democracia, Damien Deroubaix, Esther Ferrer, Dora García, Núria Güell, Amjad Ghannam & Khaled Hourani, Joan Jordà, Robert Longo, Eugenio Merino, Chiara Mulas & Serge Pey, Daniela Ortiz, Pedro G. Romero, Nissrine Seffar, Oriol Vilanova.
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Pablo Picasso / Pablo Ruiz Picasso. (Malaga, Spain, October 25, 1881 - Mougins, France, April 8, 1973). Spanish painter and sculptor, considered as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, exercising with his long career a transcental influence on other great artists since then. His works are present in museums and collections around the world.

Son of the also artist José Ruiz Blasco, at the age of fourteen, in 1895, his family moved to Barcelona, ​​where he spent his youth with a group of artists, among whom were painters such as Ramón Casas and Santiago Rusiñol, with whom he met at the Els Quatre Gats bar. At the beginning of the 20th century, between 1901 and 1904, Pablo Picasso would change residence between Madrid, Barcelona and Paris, a period in which his painting was framed in the period called the blue period, strongly influenced by symbolism. In the spring of 1904, Picasso decided to move permanently to Paris and settle in a studio in the city of the Seine.

Shortly after arriving in Paris, he established friendship with poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, with the playwright André Salmon or with peripheral personalities from the artistic and bohemian scene, such as the American brothers Leo and Gertrude Stein, or the one who would forever be his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

A turning point in his career will be marked in 1906 by a large-format work that changed the course of 20th-century art: Les demoiselles d'Avignon. A fundamental work in which numerous influences can be discovered, among which African and Spanish art or elements taken from El Greco and Cézanne stand out. The latter's influence and his relationship with Georges Braque, from Malaga, carried out a profound critical review of the plastic tradition that emerged from the Renaissance. A period in which Picasso and Braque developed a first phase called analytics (1909-1912). In 1912 they introduced a new technique with cutouts of paper and other materials applied to the canvas, which they called collage. The arrival to the cubism group of the Spanish painter Juan Gris generated a change towards what is known as the synthetic stage of this style, marked by a richer color range and greater complexity in the references.

Since 1915 until the mid-1920s, Picasso's work left cubism and entered a new figurative stage, generated by a greater attention to classicism mixed with the influence of what the artist called his "Mediterranean origins ». In 1919 he married the Russian dancer Olga Koklova with whom he would have a son, Paulo. As a result of his meeting in 1928 with the sculptor Julio González, Pablo Picasso became interested in sculpture, and between them they introduced important innovations, such as the use of wrought iron. In 1935 his daughter Maya was born, in a new romantic relationship with Marie-Therèse Walter, with whom Pablo Picasso lived openly despite being married to Olga Koklova; Starting in 1936, he had a third relationship with photographer Dora Maar.

Spanish Civil War and the Second World War reflected in his work an even greater political commitment than one of his most universally admired works, the Guernica (1937). The reduction to a minimum of chromaticism, the dislocation of the figures and their heartbreaking symbolism make up an impressive denunciation of the bombing of German aviation, which on April 26, 1937 devastated this Basque population in an action in support of the troops of the coup general Francisco Frank.

In 1943 he met Françoise Gilot, with whom he would have two children, Claude and Paloma. Three years later, Pablo Picasso left Paris to settle in Antibes, where he incorporated ceramics into his favorite supports. In the 1950s he made numerous series on great classical works of painting, which he reinterpreted as a tribute. In 1961 Pablo Picasso remarried with Jacqueline Roque; it would be his last significant relationship. Already a living legend and the epitome of the avant-garde, the artist and Jacqueline retired to Vouvenargues castle, where the creator continued to work tirelessly until the day of his death.

Politically, Picasso declared himself a pacifist and a communist. He was a member of the Spanish Communist Party and the French Communist Party until his death, at the age of ninety-one, in his home called "Notre-Dame-de-Vie" in the French town of Mougins. It is buried in the park of the castle of Vauvenargues (Bouches-du-Rhone).
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Published on: March 14, 2019
Cite: "Picasso and the Exodus. A Spanish History of Art in Resistance" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/picasso-and-exodus-a-spanish-history-art-resistance> ISSN 1139-6415
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