Picasso TV

The exhibition Picasso TV, produced in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso Münster and the Bancaja Foundation (Valencia), will remain open at the Museo Picasso Málaga through November 16. Picasso TV illuminates the connections between some of the artist's late works and programs broadcast by French TV at the time. The exhibition focuses on works created by Picasso between 1966 and 1972, particularly prints from his series Suite 347 and some oils, and includes TV segments from an era when the medium popularized spectacles, sports, and news programming. Pablo Picasso always felt the appeal of popular modes of expression, and he became interested in circus performances, free-style wrestling, movies, and TV series. After seeing images of one of his exhibitions in London and the wedding of Princess Margaret of England and photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, he incorporated into his art the influence of television's speedy language, the scene-based narrative process of TV series, and the large number of black and white images of all kinds found in the so-called "small screen." The exhibition's curator, Laurence Madeline, chief conservator at Musées d'art et d'histoire de Genève, in Switzerland, has established connections between Picasso's graphic works and the televised images, clearly linking his prints dated after 1968 to the influence of television, and she asserts that action, framing, narration, and motion are exacerbated in Picasso's late works." She also tells us that in his graphic works of those years the artist revisited back and white, television's only format until 1968, and that in some works in his Suite 347 the frame changes and comes close to TV's 4:3 ratio. She notes that compared to the immobility of his circus scenes from between 1904 and 1920, the acrobats, clowns, and equestrian performers of the Suite 347 are full of motion.