Focusing on the work of two key figures in the development of modern art in Barcelona at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Picasso versus Rusiñol exhibition offered insights into a number of significant cultural and historical themes. To begin with it explored Picasso’s artistic formation and creative development through a study of his juvenilia, even if this term did not always seem applicable to many of the paintings displayed. Beyond tracing the trajectory of works marking Picasso’s becoming an artist, the exhibition developed a wider perspective on this theme by exploring his relationship with the painter, collector, and key figure of Barcelona’s modernisme, Santiago Rusiñol. For those unacquainted with either Rusiñol’s paintings or the exquisite museum he created in Sitges, the Cau Ferrat (its name refers to the wealth of ornate ironwork his collection comprised among a multitude of artworks of other media), this exhibition and its excellent catalogue provided a valuable introduction. Although the title, Picasso versus Rusiñol, suggests competition and rivalry between the established Rusiñol and the youthful Picasso, their relationship was more complex. The exhibition’s curator, Eduard Vallès, writes, “Picasso sometimes questioned the artistic world represented by Rusiñol but, at the same time, he assimilated whatever most caught his fancy” (348). Picasso’s depictions of Rusiñol, included in the exhibition, range from respectful portraits to savage satire; they document his shifting critical attitudes, which the exhibition examined by considering various facets of his relationship to Rusiñol, as representative of the cultural panorama of Barcelona, in the final decade of the nineteenth century and up until Picasso’s definitive departure for Paris in 1904.

A number of perspectives were offered by this survey of Barcelona’s cultural milieu, and it engaged with the spaces and publications in which these two artists created and lived the avant-garde, including Els Quatre Gats, the Cau Ferrat, and the streets of Paris, as well as journals such as Piel & Ploma and L’Esquella de la Torratxa in which the artistic imagination honed its ideological edge defining notions of vanguardia. Thus, along with providing original insights into Picasso’s development, and illustrating how this was shaped through contact and competition with Rusiñol and other artists, the exhibition provided an insightful historical topography of Barcelona at the wane of the nineteenth century and charted the intellectual dynamics that inspired its leading protagonists. Vallès has successfully woven together many themes that have the protean figure of Picasso at their center; Vallès himself states that: “Picasso’s personality, seen in hindsight, is littered with contradictions and counterbalances inevitably aimed at eluding fashions, even those started by him” (348).

The exhibition’s point of departure was a selection of what are unequivocally juvenilia, works produced by Picasso while a student at the art school, La Llotja. Study of the work of established artists was part of the academic program Picasso had to follow, yet at this early stage a sense of independence underscores his engagement with the work of other artists such as his study of the back torso of a female nude based on a painting by Mas i Fondevilla; these are the first signs of his selective assimilation of the artistic possibilities encountered in the work of other artists. In this prelude to the study of Picasso’s artistic relationship with Rusiñol, an indication of the transitions the young artist would undergo is revealed in the contrast of his contribution of The First Communion to the third Exposición de Bellas Artes e Industrias Artísticas de Barcelona in 1896. This was also Picasso’s first official encounter with Rusiñol, who exhibited the Allegory of Poetry (1894–95) among other works. Following that exhibition Picasso would display one of his early signs of resistance to modernisme‘s aesthetics by drawing what is identified as a parody of Rusiñol’s work in which he substituted the figure of Painting for Poetry.

Satirical drawing was the medium in which Picasso most explicitly expressed his antagonism toward the figure of Rusiñol and the modernistas he was seen as representing. The next section of the exhibition, devoted to Picasso and his younger peers’ encounter with and questioning of Modernisme, included a number of such satirical images. Picasso’s distance from Modernisme is also marked by his affiliation with the anti-modernista journal L’Esquella de la Torratxa, in which he published his first illustration, although it should be noted that the editors turned down a number of other works he submitted. As well as highlighting Picasso’s youthful status, this signals how cultural definitions were not clearly defined, and this is all the more evident in the light of the fact that it was Rusiñol, the arch modernista, who bought a number of the drawings, including the tavern scenes and a corrida de toros that Picasso informally auctioned in Els Quatre Gats, thereby making him one of Picasso’s earliest collectors. Rusiñol would maintain a positive perception of Picasso even when Cubism seemingly divided them. It is in the light of this support that Picasso’s non-satirical informal portrait sketches of Rusiñol indicate how Picasso’s youthful antagonism could be tempered by respect. Besides Els Quatre Gats, another point of contact was Sitges. Not only was this the home for the modernista festivals organized by Rusiñol, but it is also where Cau Ferrat was located, which Picasso is assumed to have visited while staying in Sitges with the family of his friend, Carles Casagemas. A later part of the exhibition was devoted to Rusiñol’s important role as a collector and promoter of El Greco, which further stimulated Picasso’s interest in the Toledan artist.

While the exhibition concluded with Picasso’s satirical rejection of Rusiñol in which he depicted him being sodomized by a critic in exchange for wealth handed to him by a naked feminine figure of Glory, the core of the exhibition focuses on the positive impact Rusiñol had on Picasso, and the latter’s evident willing engagement with Rusiñol the painter. Perhaps the most important facet of Rusiñol for Picasso was his connection to Paris; not only had he actually lived there, but the tendency of his Parisian subject matter, with its melancholic and unusual perspectives of all-but-empty streets and its seeking for a new sense of the city, would be developed by Picasso during his first visit in 1900 and with renewed vigor when he returned in 1904. In addition to an interest in Paris’s urban spaces and bohemian world, both artists also became close to and produced portraits of Erik Satie.

Rusiñol also informed Picasso’s interest in nature, and in particular the garden, which is one of three themes that Vallès identifies as part of a creative “dialogue” between the two artists. Picasso’s interest went beyond the study of Rusiñol’s receding perspectives, and he devoted an entire issue of the journal Arte Joven to Rusiñol, while including a number of his garden paintings. A second dialogue linked to that of the garden was the use of subdued lighting techniques to create a poetic pictorial mood; in the collection of the works shown, such as two of Rusiñol’s 1902 dusk scenes, a case was made that these works were one source for Picasso’s transition to the blue period. A final “dialogue” was an interest in the fragility of human nature, noted in their images of death and sickness, many of which were inspired by the sufferings of their friends Ramon Canudas and Carles Casagemas. Thus their mutual interests in Paris, gardens, depicting mood through subtle luminosity, and death signalled the deep concerns they shared beyond the rivalry of vanguard cultural politics.

Inherent to this subject matter was a notion of the modern artist, a theme that underscored the exhibition and which can be explicitly explored by looking at the representations of two literary works by Rusiñol to which Picasso responded. Rusiñol’s L’alegria que passa (1899) describes the alienation of the poetic artist from everyday society. In his poster for this work he represents the alienated artist as a Pierrot clown, a trope that would recur in Picasso’s work. Other more direct references to this work are identified in the much later 1968 engravings of travelling players in the Suite 368. Six years earlier Picasso had begun a series of illustrations of another of Rusiñol satires of bourgeois culture, his 1907 L’auca del Senyor Esteve. In these drawings, as the exhibition showed, Picasso clearly drew on Ramon Casas´s original illustrations. The example of these works produced long after Rusiñol’s death confirms Vallès’s account of Picasso’s avid search for inspiration, and the importance of Rusiñol as an enduring figure of reference. Picasso versus Rusiñol’s various themes, wealth of documentation, and range of artworks by both artists provided original insights into the youthful Picasso and was a valuable opportunity to study Rusiñol.