SPAIN: The capital's two main art spaces, the Prado and Reina Sofía, offer an intriguing collection of the artist's work, writes Jane Walker in Madrid
The year 2006 marks two major landmarks in the history of Pablo Picasso's career.
It is the 125th anniversary of the Spanish master's birth while, 25 years ago, his anti-war masterpiece, Guernica, came to Spain from the Museum of Modern Art in New York where it had hung throughout the Franco dictatorship.
To mark these two important dates, as well as the 70th anniversary of Picasso's appointment as director of the Prado museum in 1936 (an office he never occupied since it coincided with the civil war), the Prado, in conjunction with the Reina Sofía centre for modern and contemporary art, is staging an "historic" commemoration of his life and work.
This unique Picasso: Tradition and Avant-garde exhibition has assembled 100 Picasso paintings and drawings spanning his entire career. It displays them alongside works from great masters of the past such as Titian, El Greco, Velázquez, Poussin and Goya, showing their influence on his work.
They form what co-curator Carmen Giménez describes as "a dialogue" between the masters, in which Picasso has "come home to his spiritual home in the Prado".
Thus, Goya's Naked Maja hangs in a room with Picasso nudes, such as his Reclining Nude; Titian's La Dolorosa is mirrored in Picasso's 1937 masterpiece, Weeping Woman with a Handkerchief; and Rubens's Rape of the Sabines hangs with Picasso's Rape of Europe.
Another room contains a juxtaposition of Velázquez's Las meninas alongside a series of 50 studies, sketches and paintings of the same scene done by Picasso during two busy months in 1957.
The Prado exhibition is laid out in chronological order, beginning with drawings by the 15-year-old artist made during his first visit to the Prado, when he was already copying works by Velázquez, and the Self-Portrait with a Palette painted 10 years later.
These are followed by works from his blue and pink periods, showing how he developed throughout his career. It ends with his final years when, in the last room of the exhibition, the El Greco painting of a Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest, is hung beside Picasso's final portrait, Musketeer, painted when he was 86.
In this painting, he acknowledges his debt to the Old Masters with the names "Domenicos Theotocopoulos [ El Greco], van Rijn [ Rembrandt] and de Silva [ Velázquez]" written on the back of the canvas.
If the Prado collection is a celebration of Picasso's work, the Reina Sofía exhibition is a condemnation of war. It centres on the sombre masterpiece Guernica, painted in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War in memory of the victims of the bombing of the Basque town by German planes fighting on the Franco side. Facing Guernica is another war painting from a different century - Goya's Executions of the Third of May, showing civilians being shot by the French troops.
Equally shocking is the juxtaposition of Manet's work The Execution of Emperor Maximilian facing another horrific scene by Picasso depicting a Massacre in Korea (1951).
These are accompanied by the "Guernica Legacy" - dozens of paintings and drawings the painter used for his work, which are on loan from the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. His anti-war campaign is also depicted in the painting of the Monument to the Spanish Who died for France and the Charnel House.
Francisco Calvo Serraller, the former Prado director and co-curator of the exhibition, says: "Goya's great contribution with his Executions of the Third of May was to demonstrate that the victims were the moral victors, a message which Picasso captured so wonderfully."
This first joint Prado-Reina Sofía exhibition runs from June 6th until September 4th. Advance booking is available on the internet at: www.museoprado.es and www.museoreinasofia.es