Sixty-eight rare ceramics and drawings by Picasso, featuring birds, animals, sea creatures, humans, and mythological beasts (centaurs, the Minotaur) or inspired by ancient drama and comedies, converse thematically for the first time with sixty seven ancient works, creating another Divine Dialogue between Greek antiquity and modern art.
The Museum of Cycladic Art is organizing a rare and original exhibition entitled Picasso and Antiquity. Line and Clay where ceramics and drawings by Picasso interact with ancient artefacts, as part of its Divine Dialogues exhibition series. Curated by Professor Nikolaos C. Stampolidis, Director of the Museum of Cycladic Art, and art historian Olivier Berggruen, the exhibition will last from 20 June to 20 October 2019.
Unlike his unique paintings, the great twentieth-century artist’s drawings and ceramics are little known to the wider public. These are closely related to antiquity, inspired by the Creto-Mycenaean, Greek, and ancient Mediterranean civilizations in general. This exhibition reveals a world the artist carried within himself. It showcases antiquities that he might have seen in the ancient lands of the Mediterranean, but also in European museums, in the books he read, or during his encounters with Christian Zervos and Jean Cocteau.
Picasso’s compositions—ceramics and drawings created between the 1920s and 1960s—come from foreign foundations, museums, and collections, including Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte (FABA), Musée National Picasso – Paris, Musée Picasso Antibes, Museo Picasso Μálaga, Museum Berggruen (Berlin) and private collections.
Picasso and Antiquity. Line and clay, 20/6/2019 – 20/10/2019
Museum of Cycladic Art, Neophytou Douka 4, Athens
source-info: cycladic.gr/en