Nine works of great value
In chronological order, the first work is “Don José Ruiz” (1895), a painting of the artist’s artistic beginnings. Picasso painted his father in profile, with a delicate palette of browns. The artist reflects the legendary seriousness of his father, a man who with his discipline was key for Picasso to start his career as a painter.
Then there is a “Study for a mandolin player” (1932), a mixed work, oil and charcoal.
“Boy with a lollipop sitting under a chair” (1938) was the work chosen to be unveiled before the press and the guests.
What would France be without the Spaniard Pablo Picasso?
Bruno Le Maire, French Minister of Economy
It is a work of great strength, painted in full artistic vigor by Picasso. A cubist black and white portrait that fully recalls the cornered characters of “Guernica”, which had caused a sensation a year earlier.
The 1939 “Portrait of Émilie Marguerite Walter (Mémé)” has the same style, but the character is painted with color and has a good-natured smile. It is about Maya’s grandmother, Marie-Thérèse’s Swedish mother.
A sculpture, “La Venus del Gas”, from 1945, demonstrates Picasso’s capacity to surprise. The artist took a gas burner, straightened it, put a wooden pedestal on it and by magic, transformed it into a goddess of prehistoric airs.
The influence of the great masters appears instead with “El Bobo” (1959), an oil painting that appropriates the figure of the court dwarf, which Velázquez so often portrayed. The character appears laughing, with a bottle in one hand and a frying pan with what appears to be two fried eggs in the other.
Picasso was also enormously interested in painting from his host country, and his daughter has donated to the museum a sketchbook on the painting “Lunch on the Grass” by Edouard Manet (1863).
“Cabeza de hombre” is from 1971, in the final stage of Picasso. This oil was chosen to illustrate the cover of the catalog of the last exhibition in the artist’s life.
The last piece donated to France is not a work by Picasso, but rather has accompanied him throughout his life since he bought it in the first decade of the 20th century. This is a Tiki statuette from the Marquesas Islands, a magnificent example of primitive art.
“It is a new enrichment (for the Picasso Museum) with works that my mother always kept with the intention that they would end up in a museum,” Olivier Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s grandson, told AFP.