VISIONARIES
THE VISIONARIES OF THE 20th CENTURY
Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí
The bond between Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí is complex and fascinating, made up of convergences, contrasts, and indirect exchanges spanning the entire 20th century of European art.
Although the three artists took different paths, both stylistically and ideologically, their trajectories intersected several times, offering a rich picture of tensions, contaminations, and reflections on the role of art and the artist in modernity.
Paris was the nerve center where the paths of these three giants most closely brushed against each other where in the early decades of the twentieth century, the French capital represented a crossroads of cultures and movements.
Chagall, of Jewish and Russian descent, carried with him a fairy-tale imagery, populated by floating figures, fantastic animals and symbols of his childhood; in contrast, Picasso, a Spaniard from Malaga, went through a series of different stylistic phases, always with an eye toward deconstructing form and analyzing visual structure.
What a genius that Picasso was … a pity he painted nothing.”
Marc Chagall
Between Chagall and Picasso there was a relationship marked by respect, but also by profound differences. Picasso admired the poetry of Chagall’s works, but was distant from his spiritual and symbolic vision. Picasso said:
“When Chagall paints, you can smell the onion.”
Pablo Picasso
An ambiguous phrase, somewhere between sarcasm and recognition of an art deeply rooted in everyday life and popular memory. Chagall, for his part, looked at Picasso with a certain diffidence: he recognized his greatness, but was distant from his nihilistic vision and formal experimentation.
Dalí enters the painting as a disruptive element. Unlike Chagall, who remains tied to an idea of art as an expression of the dream and collective memory, and Picasso, who analyzes reality in order to shatter and reconstruct it, Dalí proposed a totally self-referential universe, where the unconscious becomes spectacle, the body is deconstructed, and the psyche materializes in disturbing images.
With Picasso, Dalí had a relationship of ambiguous rivalry: he considered him a master but challenged his authority and ideals. He wrote him obsequious letters, but provoked him publicly.
“Picasso is a genius. So am I. Picasso is a communist. Not me.”
Salvador Dalí
Between Dalí and Chagall, however, the relationship was more detached: their art moved on very different emotional frequencies.
All three were different, but they were three, VISIONARIES: they reinvented the language of art, each according to his or her own expressive urgency; they were essential to understanding the complexity and richness of modern art.
PAST EXHIBITIONES
POMPEYA EL ÚLTIMO GLADIADOR
Pompeya, el último gladiador, is a unique and unrepeatable opportunity to immerse oneself in the Pompeii of two thousand years ago, left intact under a blanket of volcanic ash and unveiled in one of the most important and visited archaeological sites in the world.
More than one hundred artifacts from the Museo Mann (National Archaeological Museum of Naples) the archaeological site’s most important landmark museum, allow visitors to enter the heart of daily life in the city buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, A refined narrative, multimedia exhibits produced with the most advanced technology, and a large section dedicated to virtual reality, will offer a highly immersive experience, a multisensory journey of the highest visual impact along the streets of the past, with the suggestions and memory of a civilization fundamental to the development of human progress.
GUERNICA MASTERPIECE GENESYS
What is Guernica?
Guernica is the name of the Basque town that was bombed on the 26th of April 1937 by the German and Italian Condor Legion air force, in support of dictator Francisco Franco. Hundreds of people died in the attack, all civilians. Picasso learned about the news from international newspapers and decided that Guernica would become the theme of his entry to the 1937 Paris Universal Exhibition.
He began working on the monumental artwork only five days after the bombing, and ultimately created a manifesto denouncing the absurd atrocity of war.
The preparatory studies
It took Picasso about 40 days to create Guernica. He made dozens of sketches and preparatory studies to define the composition, the characters, the lights, the colors. He changed his mind multiple times and – since he dated all the drawings – we can clearly follow all the phases of his creative process.
The 42 works displayed in the exhibition are part of an edition made in 1990 by UNESCO and the European Council, with the authorization of the Picasso Foundation.