Hall 24, Kvadrat 500
Opening on Wednesday, 8 January 2025, at 6 p. m.
The gallery collection includes twenty-one graphic works by Picasso (1881–1973), thematically linked to his, and other authors’, literary texts, and with personal experiences and insights. They reveal the great artist’s passion for and virtuosity in drawing, achieved through the possibilities of lithography, etching, engraving and aquatint in a free expression of the material, of black and white areas, and strokes.
Between January 1957 and August 1959, adopting the method of automatic writing, Picasso composed the poem, ‘The Burial of the Count of Orgaz’ (El entierro del conde de Orgaz). The title refers to the eponymous painting by the Spanish artist El Greco (1541–1614). At his estate in Mougins, France, in 1966 and 1967, Picasso produced twelve copper plates for etchings to accompany the lyrics. The anthology, with an introduction by Rafael Alberti, was published in 1969 in a limited edition of 263 copies, with 220 containing the original etchings, of which the current exhibition presents seven.
The ‘Sable mouvant’ (Quicksand) Series (1965) includes ten works illustrating a poem of the same title by the poet Pierre Reverdy (1889–1960), of which the gallery possesses four. By participating in this project, Picasso expressed his tribute in memoriam to his great friend and figure in modern literature of the 20th century. The artist destroyed the plates after the print run was completed.
According to Picasso’s biographers, he received an invitation from the poet Louis Aragon to produce a poster for the upcoming World Peace Congress in Paris in April 1949. Thus was born the emblematic dove—one of the brightest symbols of the international peace movement in post-war Europe. This popular colour lithograph, created in 1952, is also exhibited.
The National Gallery is launching a series of exhibitions at Kvadrat 500, with the aim of introducing the public to the richly diverse museum depository for foreign graphics, housing works by Francisco Goya, Eugène Carrière, Auguste Rodin, Henri Fantin-Latour, Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, and Roy Lichtenstein, among many others.
