Pablo Picasso is one of the most famous artists of the world. A new exhibition in his birth town in Spain explores how Germans played an unsuspected role in his career.
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The German Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso is one of the most famous artists of the world. A new exhibition in Málaga, his birthplace in Spain, explores how Germans played an unsuspected role in his career.
Image: DW/S. Oelze
Father of Avant-garde art
At the beginning of the 20th century, Picasso was establishing his name as an exceptional artist. He was recognized early on in Germany. No other country followed and supported his career as intensively. The artist was able to live in Paris without any financial worries thanks to German gallery owners and collectors.
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Kahnweiler and Picasso
The first man to recognize Picasso's potential was Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. While Picasso was painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in 1907, Kahnweiler supported him financially. The legendary German-born gallery owner truly believed in the genius of the artist. Kahnweiler's theoretical works on Cubism also contributed to making Picasso famous around the world.
Image: DW/S. Oelze
Special exhibition in 1912
The special exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne was made possible by Kahnweiler and Alfred Flechtheim, another art dealer. The provocative exhibition featured works of the international Avant-garde. One of the halls was dedicated to Picasso's works. Local critics did not greet the Cubist's "cube art" very enthusiastically.
A portrait of a man Picasso painted in Paris in 1908 is considered one of his earliest Cubist works. The German artist Paula Modersohn Becker was also working in Paris at the time. Her portrait of the pianist Lee Hoetger represented a new direction in her career, based on simplicity. The exhibition on Picasso shows both paintings as examples of the development of Avant-garde art.
Image: DW/S. Oelze
Fundamental influences
Picasso was inspired by early African art in 1905-1906. He was not the only one. At that time, the art group "Die Brücke" was established in Dresden. Indigenous art represented for these artists original expressions of life. While Picasso developed Cubism influenced by these works, the Dresden artists created their own style, called German Expressionism.
Image: Museo Picasso Málaga/Foto: Pablo Asenjo
Inspired by nature
People resting on a beach was one of the recurring themes painted by "Die Brücke" artists. The shapes of these naked figures give the impression they were carved out of wood. Picasso was also inspired by nature. At the beginning, he was strongly influenced by the works of Paul Cézanne. Later on, he relied on nature as a resource to experiment with new visual forms.
Image: Museo Picasso Málaga/Foto: Pablo Asenjo
Intimate portraits
Pablo Picasso painted the portrait of his wife at the time, Olga, in an elegant fur coat, in 1922-1923. They had a son together, who was then a year old. "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" was sold for 25,000 francs. Portraits underwent a revival at that time, not just because of Picasso, but also thanks to German artists. Emotional truth became more important than physical accuracy.
Image: DW/S. Oelze
Lovers and wives
Max Beckmann made portraits of all of his five wives. Pictured here is "Naila," from 1934. This work almost seems like a quotation of the painting of Picasso hanging next to it in the exhibition. With the same fur coat and inward looking gaze, the painting focuses on the essential. Wives, lovers and friends became a favorite subject for many portrait artists.
Image: DW/S. Oelze
A passion for the German Renaissance
Picasso was a strong influence on his German contemporaries, but he preferred to look back at Germany's old masters for inspiration. The German Renaissance, from Dürer to Lucas Cranach and Matthias Grunewald, stoked his creativity. He did 55 drawings of Matthias Grunewald's famous Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, simplifying it to its essence: pain as a religious experience.
Image: DW/S. Oelze
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Although some might think everything has been said and written about Pablo Picasso (1881 -1973), the Picasso Museum in Málaga keeps coming up with ways to examine his works in a new light.
After juxtaposing Picasso with Martin Kippenberger and Louise Bourgeois, museum director José Lebrero Stals decided to explore Picasso's relationship with Germany with the current exhibition "Picasso: Registros Alemanes" (Picasso: German Registers).
The Picasso Museum draws tourists from all over the Costa del Sol. Around 400,000 visitors flock to the Palacio de Buenavista in Málaga's Jewish quarter every year since it opened in 2003. Eighty percent of them are from abroad.
Many Germans are among them - not just tourists, but also expats who moved to the Costa del Sol for the sunshine and warm climate. Some 80,000 Germans are permanently based there, a fact which may have contributed to the museum's decision to research the Màlaga-born artist's affiliation with Germany.
Without even seeing Germany
Picasso never set foot in Germany: Paris was the center of arts for the Spanish artist. But Germans followed his work closely.
The exhibition shows how German artists reacted to Picasso - both positively and negatively. It also portrays the development of Avant-garde art as it crossed borders. The revival of portrait painting, the reception of Cubism, the influence of primitivism and the search for new, straightforward motives from everyday life all interacted in this international cultural exchange.
The members of the Munich "Der blaue Reiter" (Blue Rider) movement and the artists in "Die Brücke" in Dresden refer to the Spanish artist. The exhibition includes paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Otto Müller and Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, demonstrating the similarities in their visual language. For example, Max Beckmann's 1934 painting of his lover Naila, wrapped in a classy mink coat, reminds of Picasso's portrait of his Polish ex-wife Olga from 1922-1923.
"Lucretia" by Cranach, revisited by Picasso (left)Image: DW/S. Oelze
If Picasso was not interested in his German contemporaries, he loved the old masters of the German Renaissance. For example, he did 55 studies based on Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, in which he transformed the crucifixion scene into a battlefield of black lines. There is nothing left of Jesus except a skeleton and bones.
In a letter Picasso wrote when he was 16, he claimed that if ever he had a son, he would send him to Munich to study the Renaissance painters there. He praised their honesty and straightforwardness. In comparison, he found the Italian masters too decorative. He wrote this appraisal without having seen the original versions of these works of arts.
His initial supporters were Germans
Germans also recognized and started studying the works of Picasso before it became common in France or Spain.
The German-born gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, based in Paris, discovered the Spanish artist in 1907 and started supporting him financially so he didn't need to worry about making a living while he was painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."
A year later, the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal bought its first Picasso for its permanent collection. In 1912, a special exhibition in Cologne dedicated a whole room to the artist, showing 18 of his paintings. As of that same year, art historians such as Carl Einstein started analyzing Picasso's Cubism in detail.
Somehow, Picasso is a bit the artist of the Germans, too.
