PICASSO (2023) FULL COLLECTIONID92937019
On the occasion of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Ruiz Picasso, the National Mint and Stamp Factory dedicates a collection of commemorative coins to the Spanish painter, the inimitable creator of the various currents that revolutionized the visual arts of the 20th century.
The collection is made up of 2 square silver coins with a face value of €50, which represent the works:
Harlequin with mirror and Woman with raised arms.
And for 6 square silver coins with a face value of €10, which represent the works:
The Wait (Margot), Head of a Crying Woman with a Handkerchief (III), Jacqueline Seated, Woman in Blue, Harlequin and Bullfight.
| Series | Picasso Fiftieth Anniversary |
| Year | 2023 |
| Colour | Yes |
| Quality | Proof |
| Alloy (‰) | 999 |
| Metal | Silver |
COMPLETE PICASSO COLLECTION (2023)
The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso not only starred together with Georges Braque in the invention of Cubism, one of the first avant-garde movements, but he was also the initiator of the image of the modern artist. His name will be written in the history books as the most relevant artistic personality of the 20th century.
From 1895 to 1900 he lived in Barcelona, studied at La Llotja and was associated with the group Els Quatre Gats. After a first trip to Paris, he moved to Madrid to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, and in 1904 he settled permanently in the French capital. From that date on, and although he never lost his Spanish identity, the neighboring country was his habitual place of residence. Installed in the legendary Bateau-Lavoir, in the heart of the Montmartre neighborhood, he met Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob and André Salmon. His figurative beginnings from the blue and pink periods evolved under the influence of the Iberian sculpture present in the Musée du Louvre and the African art of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. In 1907, his work Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (New York, The Museum of Modern Art) paved the way for avant-garde movements.
From his close collaboration with Georges Braque, cubism emerged, a revolutionary style that put an end to the traditional system of illusionistic representation of space, whose consequences have survived to this day. Both artists, starting from the teachings of Cézanne, invented a new language based on the fragmentation and simultaneity of the representation of form, on the reinterpretation of objects, with great austerity in color (analytical cubism) that gradually became more abstract (synthetic cubism).
In the postwar period, Picasso, after a trip to Italy, returned to figuration and developed a type of painting with monumental figures, which was called "classical" and which corresponded to a general trend of returning to order that manifested itself in Europe after the years of avant-garde boiling. In the second half of the 1920s, infected by the surrealist atmosphere, the characters in his works became distorted and his themes gradually became more dramatic. Although he participated in the Surrealist exhibition of 1925, he never became formally involved with this group. After the aerial bombardment of the Basque town of Guernica, he made a large mural painting (Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) that he presented in the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1937.
In the fifties, he began to make recreations of paintings by great masters, such as Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix or Diego Velázquez. In his final period he dealt with themes related to death, suffering and love, giving great importance to gestural and emotional subjectivity, with very loose and expressionist brushstrokes.
Picasso simultaneously developed important work as a sculptor, ceramist and engraver, demonstrating in each of these fields the same creative force that is evident in his paintings.