MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS. Saint Pius V, 9
This is the story about the friendship between two Spanish geniuses who moved ideologically at the antipodes.. It is the story of an intellectual seduction. Pablo Picasso, already older and at the peak of his artistic career, He lived in exile in Cannes, far from anything that smelled of stale Francoist Spain.. The young Camilo José Cela, renowned for having written The Hive y Pascual Duarte's family, He lived comfortably under Franco's autarchist regime and was dying to meet the Malaga artist, the most influential painter of contemporary art. Using some mediation, Cela settled in Picasso's La Californie villa looking for the meeting, but the man from Malaga turned out to be very inaccessible and it was not easy. This is attested to by the four desperate letters that the writer wrote to his wife and we can see, enlarged, at the beginning of the exhibition Picasso-Cela, the first to have studied the epistolary relationship that both maintained. You will discover the three books that they created together (with roles exchanged sometimes: Picasso writer and Cela painter), unpublished archive photos (Picasso feeding Cela from the plate), letters where they were interested in the health or professional aspects of the other, birthday greetings painted by Picasso with wax for Cela, Madoura dishes and Picasso ceramics. The Museum of Fine Arts shows us the human side of two antagonistic geniuses about whom we thought we knew everything. S.M.
