Guggenheim Museum's Small Exhibition Sheds Light on Picasso's Parisian Years

New York, May 12 (EFE).- A small exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York delves into a crucial stage in Pablo Picasso’s life: the stay of the Spanish painter in Paris when he was barely 20 years old, in which he stayed captivated by the city of light and began to excel in art.

The exhibition, which opened to the public this Friday, is part of the Picasso Year celebrations and focuses on one of the jewels of the Guggenheim collection, “Le Moulin de la Galette” (1901), which the museum accompanies with nine other works, including canvases, paintings on cardboard, watercolors and charcoal drawings.

Picasso traveled from Barcelona to Paris in the autumn of 1900, in the last weeks of the Universal Exhibition, in which he was participating, and although he did not speak French, those two months he spent there were enough for him to want to return in 1901 and stay for almost a year, soaking up the culture.

“Le Moulin de la Galette” is one of the first works he painted there, a night scene in a ballroom in Montmartre, the bohemian neighborhood where he lived and frequented the “cabarets” and cafes that were open until late at night, in the that social and class differences were blurred

The Guggenheim follows the trend of other museums to focus on gender issues, and suggests looking at the subjects in the painting, most of them women dancing in the background and others in the foreground with heavy makeup, and keeping in mind that there may be “hidden in plain sight” “trans” and “queer” people.

He also alludes to race, explaining that Picasso confronted prevailing “hierarchical ideas of race and empire” that put whites above blacks, and that he came into contact with African arts, which influenced his practice, through a “colonial lens” that reduced them to artifacts.

Another of the important works is “Le quatorze juillet” (1901), in which he portrays a crowd at the French national celebration but, unlike the star painting, he uses an almost impressionist style, encapsulating the “joy” of the moment to the moment. coupled with his “melancholy for the marginality and poverty that he saw” in Paris.

Among other pieces, two of the four self-portraits that the painter is believed to have made in 1901, at the age of 20, stand out, one in which he is depicted tired, pale and with marked cheekbones, and another in which he has a “strong look”. and “Spanish” and that is attributed to his “period of introspection and counterclaim,” according to the museum.

And the portraits of two women, also from 1901, which evoke his admired Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and in which the only mention is made of Picasso’s now highly criticized “objectifying” gaze on women, pointing out that one of paintings was more of a “seductive object of consumption”.

As a curiosity, the exhibition includes a charcoal drawing that can be understood almost as a photograph of the young Picasso, since experts have identified the figures in the scene as him with his friends Ramón Pichot, Miquel Utrillo and Carles Casagemas and the models Odette and Germaine.