Picasso. Territory and Catalan Popular Arts and Traditions is the new exhibition organized and produced by the Museu de Solsona with exceptional loans from the Picasso Museum of Barcelona. The exhibition, which can be seen from March 14 to July 15, inaugurates the new temporary exhibition hall of the Solsona museum and highlights a transformation period of the facility, following an important renovation in terms of access, improvement, and modernization of much of the premises.
Curated by Claustre Rafart i Planas, curator of the Picasso Museum until 2022, the exhibition specifically addresses for the first time the connection between Pablo Picasso and Catalan popular art and traditions, a theme that expands the study of the artist’s relationship with popular arts and traditions. On this occasion, the term “popular arts and traditions” is borrowed as conceived by Picasso’s friend, Georges Henri Rivière, anthropologist and ideologist of a new museology aimed especially at ethnographic museums. Thus, the exhibition Picasso. Territory and Catalan Popular Arts and Traditions, on one hand, invites us to discover how the artist assimilates and treasures the traditional popular corpus of the Catalan territory. On the other, it promotes dialogue between paintings, drawings, graphic works, photographs, and bibliographic materials by the Málaga-born artist and the art and ethnographic collections of the Solsona Museum.
The exhibition proposal consists of a total of seventy-six works, about fifty of which come from the Picasso Museum of Barcelona, eleven are artworks from the Solsona Museum collection, and twelve belong to the ethnographic collection of Solsonès, which is deposited at the Museum and owned by the Solsona City Council. Regarding the itinerary, the exhibition is structured in four areas, which broadly address the connection of young Picasso with the countryside, the city, and domestic space. In this exhibition triad we can see how the artist assumes the popular art and traditions of the Catalan territory and stores them in his prodigious memory, making them emerge throughout his life in agreed episodes. A fourth area alludes to the municipality of Gósol, where Picasso stayed in the spring and summer of 1906.
Beyond the innovative character in the conceptual motif —Picasso’s gaze toward Catalan arts and customs— the innovative ingredient of the exhibition also responds to a geographical dimension, given that it highlights an unprecedented collaboration: this is the first occasion in which the Museu de Solsona joins with the Picasso Museum Foundation of Barcelona. Both museum institutions cooperate to articulate in inland Catalonia a particular reading of Catalan customs and popular traditions and, consequently, of our most recent history. Likewise, Picasso. Territory and Catalan Popular Arts and Traditions includes lenders such as the Museu de Montserrat, the Palau Foundation, the CRAI Library of the Pavilion of the Republic, the Museu Comarcal de Berga, the Arxiu Comarcal del Solsonès, and the Santuari del Miracle.
Solsona is not a Picassian city. Nevertheless, it has a first-rate museum, suitable for hosting Picasso, guest of the world, and at the same time fostering the double reading that enriches his legacy and that of the collections of the Solsona museum. In this case, a bidimensional and bilateral approach to the treated theme is proposed, that is, the capacity of both Picassian work and the art and ethnographic collections of the Museu de Solsona to dialogue with each other.