Picasso Museum

I'm taking one class called Great 20th Century Painters: Dalí, Miró and Picasso. This is my first real art class. I know next to nothing about art, and under the encouragement of Michelle, I decided to take this class. I really love it. I find it very interesting and I'm learning a ton of new stuff. All those art styles, periods, etc. The first half of the class is dedicated to Picasso and we're just wrapping that up. On Monday we have our midterm and it's all on him. It was neat to learn all about him. I got to understand, appreciate, and know a lot of his works and how and what influenced him.

With this knowledge, it was even cooler to go see his actual works at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. I didn't take any photos, so sorry. It'll just be another text post.

First of all, it's tucked away in a pretty cool area of Barcelona close to Las Ramblas (a main and touristy area). It's in a 15th century palace. It still has the original wood rafters and they're beautiful. However, when you walk up to it via the very narrow street (big enough for one car), it has about 3 entrances. Hmm... this is going to be hard to explain. And I couldn't find any good pictures on the Internet. Oh well.

Anyway, continuing on, there are three open entrances and areas that some have described as caves. Just open areas within stone walls. The museum itself is very small and not very impressive. You climb up some stairs and wind around the hallways of what used to be a palace. It moves in chronological order from his first years to his last. While the museum isn't that spectacular overall, there are some key art works of Picasso.

As I said, the museum goes in chronological order, and it starts out when he was very young and painting traditional paintings, the way art schools were teaching. Here one can see his first self-portrait. Moving on you can see the influences from his father, who was also a painter. The famous First Communion is here, one of his few religious paintings. Then it moves onto to when he moved to Paris where his style starts to change. Onto his blue period, which happened after a close friend of his committed suicide. All of his paintings were blue and kinda depressing (he also apparently made lots of very sexual drawings... yeah...).

The best part about this museum is it has all 57 (I think that's the right number) of Picasso's paintings of Velázquez's Las Meninas. Picasso did his own interpretation of it, and there's one big version, but many smaller version of all or only part of the whole painting.

As I said, hard to explain the museum, but it was okay. It did have a couple of his famous paintings though. However, I'm looking forward to seeing better Picasso exhibits in Madrid (and seeing more art in Italy and Greece).

And I was asking my señor if he knew of any cheap hotels that Michelle could stay at when she's out here in December. He checked and he said that he had an open room during that time. So she might stay here! That'd be very convenient. I'll have more on that later.

And I'm not doing a mini Spanish lesson. However, I do have to go study for my quiz. Adios!