The exhibition Picasso at Palazzo Te. Poetry and Salvation, curated by Annie Cohen-Solal and in collaboration with Johan Popelard, is the main production of the 2024 cultural program dedicated to the theme of Metamorphosis and the particular relationship between Giulio Romano and Ovid’s poem that inspired the construction of Palazzo Te from 1525 to 1535.
The exhibition will be held from September 5, 2024, to January 6, 2025, and is produced by the Fondazione Palazzo Te in collaboration with the Musée National Picasso-Paris and the artist’s family. It will feature around 50 works by the iconic 20th-century master, including several paintings never exhibited in Italy before.
Pablo Picasso, Femme couchée lisant
21st January 1939
Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre
Oil on canvas, 96,5 x 130 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Dation Pablo Picasso, 1979
Inv. : MP177
© Succession Picasso by SIAE 2024
Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Adrien Didierjean/ Dist. Foto SCALA, Firenze, 2024
In 1930, four hundred years after the creation of the Hall of the Giants in Mantua, Picasso produced a series of engravings dedicated to Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a fascinating work that offers a direct dialogue with Giulio Romano and the Renaissance paintings of Palazzo Te. However, behind the artist’s engagement with mythological tradition lies an extraordinary journey.
After he emigrated to France in 1900, Picasso was branded by the police and the Academy of Fine Arts as a foreigner, anarchist, and avant-garde artist until 1944. Initially, he was welcomed by a small group of marginal poets. It was through poetry and the world of poets that he found the means to overcome the difficulties he faced as a foreigner. Picasso was able to handle the multiple tensions of French society through the process of metamorphosis, using it as a masterful strategy. Consequently, on aesthetic, personal, and professional levels, he became a mercurial artist whom very few critics, particularly in France, could decipher.
Pablo Picasso, Femme lisant
9th January 1935
Paris
Oil on canvas, 162 x 113 cm
Musée national Picasso-Paris
Dation Pablo Picasso, 1979
Inv. : MP149
© Succession Picasso by SIAE 2024
Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Adrien Didierjean/ Dist. Foto SCALA, Firenze, 2024
“Why should we dedicate ourselves to poetry today, apparently a minor aspect of Pablo Picasso’s vast oeuvre? How can we explain that, from 1935, poetry became an additional medium of expression for this genius who did not speak a single word of French upon arriving in France in 1900, if not poorly? The answer is in his vulnerability as a foreigner in France, his boundless creative energy, his empathy for the most marginalized individuals in society—namely, poets—and, above all, his extraordinary political acumen, which enabled him to adeptly navigate and surmount the numerous challenges of French society. Despite entering Paris through the back door, being treated as a pariah, and being excluded from national collections for fifty years, Picasso never ceased to forge networks of friendships throughout the country. In 1955, he chose to reside in the provinces rather than the capital, preferring artisans to the academicians of Fine Arts, adopting the Mediterranean as his homeland, and independently constructing his global reputation: a subversive response in harmony with the history of Palazzo Te.”
ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL
The exhibition is part of a collaboration between Fondazione Palazzo Te, the Civic Museums with the Municipality of Mantua, and Palazzo Reale with the Municipality of Milan, aimed at promoting two exhibitions dedicated to Pablo Picasso. In Milan, from September 20, 2024, to February 2, 2025, Palazzo Reale will host Picasso the Foreigner, an exhibition co-produced with Marsilio Arte.
Both the Mantua and Milan exhibitions—curated by Annie Cohen-Solal and accompanied by a Marsilio Arte catalog—stem from the collaboration with the Musée National Picasso-Paris. They reveal a radically unfamiliar Picasso, resonating with our contemporary times: the poet and the foreigner.
With the ticket from one exhibition, visitors can access the other at a reduced rate.
