That young Picasso looking for art in Paris – World

World – Young, disheveled, certainly contraceptive. The nineteen year old boy Pablo Picasso arrives at Paris from Barcelona in the autumn of 1898. Those were lively years Ville Lumiere and that is a fatal encounter that will change the fate of the impetuous Spanish boy who discovers the wonders of a city grappling with the last weeks of theWorld Exhibition. In those few months of stay in the transalpine capital, Picasso absorbed much of what Paris has to offer, frequenting not only the art galleries, but also the bohemian cafés, the rowdy nightclubs and the sensational ballrooms. in the hilly neighborhood of Montmartre. Those are the days of his first metamorphosis which takes shape from a first significant painting The Moulin de la Galette that Picasso created in the first months of the new century and where Pablo staged the famous Parisian ballroom, what had once been a mill for the production of wholemeal biscuits, but which then turned into a place of worship for many avant-garde had preceded him: Ramón Casas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri from Toulouse-Lautrec o Vincent van Gogh to name the most famous.

It is from this “tourning point” that the exhibition takes shape Young Picasso in Pariswhich the Guggenheim Museum in New York is presenting these days and which will remain on display – on the occasion of the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the most famous artist in the world – until next August 6th.

The New York museum builds its exhibition around this first masterpiece by a beardless artist in search of a language, which are the result of a long research work around this painting conducted in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, which allowed subtleties previously obscured in Picasso’s painting to be discovered on the canvas, including brushstroke, colorful palette and spatial definition.

The young Picasso was fascinated by the unconventional aspects of modern life, finding inspiration in social gathering places where gender and class divisions roamed, and in the people who frequented them. His first foray into Paris – the city of choice where he then settled down to live in 1904 – left a strong impression on Picasso who in those years was trying to overcome his academic training to forge an individual artistic practice that reflected his time. As indeed he managed to do magnificently in the years that followed.

Young Picasso in Paris
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York
From 12 May to 6 August 2023
https://www.guggenheim.org/