After visiting the Cathedral, Jim and I took a velotaxi (bike taxi) to the Museu Picasso. The line seemed long, so we went into the Museu Textil i d'Indumentaria. The museum had a very odd modern art clothing exhibit intermixed with their more interesting permanent display of women's clothing in Europe from the 17th century to the mid-1900s. I also enjoyed seeing 4th-century Coptic Egyptian textiles and other weavings. This sculpture was on display in the atrium of the museum.
The line at the Museu Picasso was just as long as earlier, so we decided to join the crowd. One nice thing about the siesta and the late dinner schedule is that many of the museums and sites are open until 8 or 9 at night. Later in the trip we would discover that there were lines at ALL the tourist destinations. I cannot imagine high season. The museum was well worth the wait. They had an excellent chronology of his life. One thing was obvious - you wouldn't have wanted to be married to him; he seemed to leave each wife for the next mistress, except the last one, I suppose.
Picasso spent his formative years in Barcelona, knocking about with the young upstarts who helped create Modernisme. The collection has a good number of his early works as a teenager. In the late 1890s, he was producing grand portraits, which the museum had quite a few. The collection had some interesting works from his Blue Period and one major work from the Rose Period and Cubism (for which Picasso is best known). The museum had a good collecdtion of pottery donated by Picasso and Jacqueline.
In the 1950s, he worked on a personal project to study and redo perspectives of Velazquez' Las Meninas: Maids of Honor (1656). This is an amazing exhibit - a real highlight for me. He took Velazquez' painting and basically repainted the scene and each individual part in varying styles, colors, and detail. A museum slide show presented many of these works overlayed on the original painting.
posted by Whitney @ 4:53 AM
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