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Picasso looking at the ceramic necklace he made, which Jacqueline Roque is wearing. David Douglas Duncan archive.
A necklace from the Ivory Coast, one of the pieces that can be found in the exhibit of the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món

Picasso's most intimate art

The museum bearing the name of Málaga's genius Picasso is dedicating, for the first time, an exhibition to the jewelry he designed.

Taking into account that jewelry is an object we often gift the people closest to our heart, the exhibition that the Picasso Museum in Barcelona will inaugurate on May 21st can be considered one of the most intimate displays of the artist yet. For the first time, the museum will dedicate a monographic exhibition to this artistic side of the Andalusian artist. Visitors will find the jewelry Pablo Picasso created for Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, or Jaqueline Roque, three of his romantic partners. The exhibition, curated by Emmanuel Guigon and Manon Lecaplain and titled Picasso and the artist's jewelry, will be open to the public until September 26th

Necklaces, brooches, medallions, or rings are some of the pieces to which Picasso gave his personal and valuable touch. He sometimes liked to added motifs or engraving, making the objects small works of art. Usually, those motifs were faun heads, bulls, suns, fish, or masks. Side by side with the goldsmith François Hugo and his dentist R. Chataignier, the Málaga native worked with gold and silver, often taking part in the whole elaboration process of the jewelry. For the Montcada street museum, the exhibition Picasso and the artist's jewelry also works to demonstrate the artist's relationship with the decorative arts, "which have to do with the many works that have yet to be discovered, such as tapestry, goldsmithing, glassware or metalwork, including engravings on concrete like the ones in the Architects' College of Barcelona." 

More information through this link.

A dialogue with the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món

On the other side of Montcada's street, in the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món, during the same dates, you will be able to visit Joyas baule y kafir. Diálogos con Picasso. The exhibition, commissioned by Salvador García Arnillas y Ainize González García, introduces a collection of jewelry from the Baule culture of West Africa and a small group of Afghan jewelry from the museum's Kafir culture collection. The selected pieces, while still carrying their original meaning, are meant to start a dialogue with those pieces exposed at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. This dialogue, as expressed by the organizers, “is established through a subtle, evocative thread of the omnipresence of the so-called 'primitivism' in the European avant-garde artists of the 20th century, especially the surrealists, which still conditions our perspective today.”

Further details about the exhibition at the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món can be found through this link.

Publication date: Thursday, 20 May 2021
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