They are two of the greatest painters of the Modern age and they also share strikingly similar life stories. Pablo Ruiz Picasso and Joan Miró were born just 12 years apart in 19th-century Spain. Both followed their love of art to Paris, where they met in 1920.
They shared a lifelong friendship, with the younger artist looking at Picasso in awe and admiration and learning a lot from his then radical techniques – some even attribute Miró’s departure into surrealism as a direct result of his time spent in Picasso’s studio.
Towards the end of their lives, their paths diverged, with Picasso living out his days in France and Miró returning to Spain, to Majorca, where he died in 1983.
Now the two are to be reunited in spirit in Dubai with an exhibition of 267 lithographs, sketches, ceramics and graphic drawings. Picasso and Miró, Passion and Poetry will be one of the biggest exhibitions of works by the two artists in the Middle East.
In an enormous coup, which took more than 18 months to plan and was achieved with the help of Fundación Picasso and Fundació Joan Miró in Spain, fledgling Dubai art and cultural development company Alpha Soul is hosting the exhibition, which opens in the Burj Khalifa tomorrow.
Alpha Soul was founded in 2014 by Dilyara Kamenova, a Kazakh art professional, and Khalid Al Halyan, an Emirati who is chief audit executive at Dubai Aviation City Corporation and was also involved in establishing Emaar Properties, the Department of Economic Development and the UAE Internal Audit Association.
The duo have many ambitious projects in mind for their company, and Al Halyan believes the Picasso-Miró show is ideal for Dubai’s multinational population.
“Art is a language that everyone talks and it speaks to your inner feelings and human emotions,” says Al Halyan. “Dubai as a city has a fantastic global fabric and this is a fabulous exhibition that will open people’s minds to other ways of viewing the world.”
All the artworks have been borrowed from private collectors in Europe and America. Kamenova, who enlisted the help of Sergio Gaddi, a prominent Italian curator and former administrator for the council of Como, has worked constantly over the last year and a half securing each piece, having it verified by the Picasso and Miró Foundations and organising delivery to Dubai, which requires hefty insurance premiums as well as maintaining the proper temperature, humidity, lighting and security.
“Most of the collectors have their preferences on companies that they have already worked with,” she says. “This was only one of the obstacles. The whole project itself has been very challenging and complicated. Other than gathering the pieces and making the exhibition plan, it was also hard to find a business partner, to find the right venue, to secure the art works, get all approvals from the foundations, and deal with all transportation requirements.”
The works will be displayed both chronologically and thematically, with Gaddi having worked hard to draw out the “fil rouge”, or red thread, that links the two.
“Miró and Picasso are linked with the same Mediterranean soul and they also both lived and worked during the most important period of the history of art in Europe. They are similar and opposite at the same time; they are different sides of the same coin,” he says.
In order to best illustrate this, the works were divided into five sections during months of meticulous planning.
The first, titled Creators of the Myth, begins what Gaddi calls the dialogue between the two artists and features one of Miró's Le Lézard aux Plumes d'Or (The Lizard with Golden Feathers) series. These are seminal works, which the curator describes as "the starting point of abstraction in the 20th century". The section introduces the viewer to the visual language of the two artists and Gaddi says it is his intention to let the audience "be immersed and inspired in the simplest and most natural way."
The second section, Inventors of New Languages, maps out the differences between the two.
“Picasso was aggressive in his work,” says Gaddi. He was a strong and passionate painter and he knew very well his talent. He was well-known to have claimed that by the age of 12 he was able to paint like Rafael. Miró, on the other hand, was more sensitive and delicate. He found art in objects around him from the sea to stones, in everything he saw. He put this together and got inspiration for his abstract art.”
The third focuses on form. It features Picasso's Carmen illustrations – an almost sketch-like form of a woman with an oval face and sparse details – as well as some of his Harlequins, a character so often featured in his work it became known as his alter ego. The section is called Jugglers of Form and tries to summarise both artists' mastery.
“Year after year, throughout the stages of an unparalleled career, Picasso pushed the horizons of art to ever new heights,” says Gaddi. “And Miro expressed pure poetry. These were men who participated intensely in their own time and in their own world, having the power to change it according to their wishes,” he says.
The fourth section is dedicated to colour and takes the viewer from the malaise and melancholy of Picasso’s blue period, between 1901 and 1904, to the more optimistic harmony of his pink period and finally the stark absence of colour, in the black and white he used to describe the tragedy of Guernica. In this section, Miró’s use of strong primary colours becomes clear as a key component of his artistic practice.
The final section of the show offers a kind of summary. Titled Alchemists of Art, Gaddi explains that "Picasso and Mirò were the alchemists of life; they were able to play with symbol, light and colour to change the logic of existence, to surprise and amaze, to feed the power of imagination until achieving a perfect meeting point between art and life".
• Picasso and Miró, Passion and Poetry opens tomorrow (noon to 10pm daily) and runs until May 17 in Annexe One, Burj Khalifa, Dubai. Tickets cost Dh125 for adults and Dh65 for children ages 6 to 18 on www.platinumlist.net or www.ticketmaster.ae
aseaman@thenational.ae
