On the occasion of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is organizing the exhibition "Picasso 1906. The Great Transformation", between November 15, 2023 and March 4, 2024.
The exhibition, which has the important collaboration of the Musée Picasso Paris, wants to look, from the contemporary aesthetic conscience, at the first contribution of the artist to the definition of «modern art». Until now, Picasso's production in 1906 has been understood as an epilogue to the rose period or as a prologue to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. But today it can be said that 1906 was a "period" with its own entity in the evolution of Picasso's creativity.
At barely 25 years old, in 1906, Picasso is still a young artist, but already mature in his aesthetic criteria. Leaving bohemia and pessimism behind, he is vital and expansive, even sensual; he approaches libertarian approaches and yearns for the refoundation of the artistic experience. With the support of dealers and collectors, and related to a powerful group of contemporary creators, he lives dedicated to the "processual" sense of his work, searches for "the primordial" and develops his work in three registers: the body, the form and interculturality. .
Picasso approaches the representation of Arcadian adolescence as a symbol of a new beginning. The painted body assumes its own emancipation from it. The artist unambiguously addresses the power of the scopic drive in its relationship with the unveiled feminine intimacy. The vernacular is posed as a mythology of origin. The figurative imprint of Fernande Olivier, his partner at the moment, is used as a support for the experimentation of plastic languages. The artist from Malaga is capable of generating generic physiognomies and leading them to the quality of a synthetic ideogram. At the same time, he redefines the framework between background and figure, proposes a new sense of mimesis, and develops material and tactile concepts in the modeling of sculpture. The accelerated rhythm of his transformations will culminate in the first two months of 1907 and, in all his overflowing activity, for him, the dialogue with Gertrude Stein was crucial.
