The “Picasso / Chanel” exhibition is part of the activities planned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the painter, born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881, and died in Mougins (France) in 1973. The two countries are organizing more than 40 retrospective exhibitions around the world on this occasion.
The Museum of Madrid is exhibiting up to 15 January 2023 about fifty pieces by the great French designer that are superimposed on paintings and drawings by Picasso, in an attempt to highlight the similarities between them.
Curator Paola Luingo said at a press conference that the museum’s rooms host “stimulating dialogues between Pablo Picasso’s avant-garde works and Chanel’s innovative creations”.
The exhibits are organized chronologically, with the first section featuring both the painter’s paintings and pieces from the haute couture house, with the aim of showing “Picasso’s influence on Chanel fashion models,” explains the museum’s art director. Guillermo Solana.
Note, for example, that a coat designed by Chanel between 1918 and 1919 was inspired by the black and brown tones and stripes of Head of a Man (1913) of Cubism.
As for the second section of the exhibition, which focuses on Picasso’s first Russian wife, Olga Khokhlova, “the direction of the influence is changing,” Solana said.
In the paintings in which Picasso painted his muse Olga, who was a regular customer of the French designer who constantly wore his costumes, “the painter tackles the problem of Chanel’s straight lines (…) and works to reinvent what Chanel created “, in a sort of” dialogue between creators “, according to Solana. .
This section displays a 1922 Chanel dress, gray with white fur on the collar and cuffs, very similar to the one worn by Picasso’s 1923 Clown.
The last two sections of the exhibition center on opportunities for Chanel and Picasso, who met in 1917 and had many mutual friends, to collaborate directly.
These collaborative works also show “a dialogue between fashion, painting, poetry, music, theater, dance and the arts, which was at the heart of the creative and experimental cultural scenes of the interwar period and is the subject of this exhibition”, he said Cécile Debray, president of the Picasso Museum in Paris, who loaned the Musée de la Musée.Thyssen in Madrid cut out some of the artist’s works for use in this exhibition.
Mutual influence between Picasso and Chanel
From Tuesday, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid collects the avant-garde paintings of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and the timeless fashion models of Coco Chanel (1883-1971), in an artistic dialogue between the two fashion giants and plastic art in the twentieth century.
