Picasso Museum marks 50th anniversary

The exhibition will feature artworks from the painter's early years in Malaga

Barcelona: Barcelona’s Picasso Museum celebrated the 50th anniversary of the famed Spanish painter’s donation of over a thousand works from his youth to the city in 1970.

Between May 20 and September 26, the museum will host an exhibition entitled “Picasso and Artist’s Jewellery”.

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“It’s been 50 years since he gifted all the artworks that had remained in the house where his sister and mother lived on Passeig de Gracia in Barcelona: more than 1,400 pieces. It was a gesture of huge generosity towards the city he loved. This museum is one of Picasso’s creations,” Emmanuel Guigon, director of Barcelona’s Picasso Museum.

The exhibition features many of the donated artworks, which date from Picasso’s early years and which trace back his roots in Barcelona and his hometown of Malaga.

Between December 2020 and April 2021, the Picasso Museum already exhibited 17 sketchbooks that were part of the painter’s donation.

Following a few months of pandemic shutdown, the museum reopened in June 2020 and has hosted exhibitions and events despite the absence of foreign tourists.

In a “normal” year, the Picasso Museum attracts a million visitors, but the pandemic has reduced their number by 89 per cent.

Now that the pandemic is easing, the museum is preparing for the “new normal” as it plans to keep the 50th anniversary exhibition open for the rest of this year.

Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Picasso is known for co-founding the Cubist movement.

Some of his most well-known works include ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907), and ‘Guernica’ (1937).