The exhibition Face to Face. Picasso and the Old Masters is an outstanding chance to see great works by Pablo Picasso side by side with others by El Greco, Francisco Pacheco, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, Francisco de Zurbarán, Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Bernardo Lorente Germán and Diego Bejarano. The show can be seen at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla from 7th October 2021 to 6th February 2022, and at Museo Picasso Málaga from 22nd February to 26th June 2022. The exhibition will feature seven works from the Seville museum hung alongside nine works from the Fundación Almine y Bernard Picasso (FABA). These dialogue exchanges between works by Picasso and the Spanish Golden Age masters, aim to show the undeniable importance of these painters in terms of the development of the Málaga-born artist’s own revolutionary art.

The exhibition highlights the fundamental importance of Picasso’s relationship with the past: by juxtaposing these 16th- 17th- and 18th-century paintings with a selection of works by Picasso, the viewer can sense Picasso’s admiration of traditional painting and appreciate the major role the work of the Spanish Old Masters played in devising the radical departures from tradition that were to define 20th-century modernism.

By confronting the present and the past, the exhibition, which is curated by Michael FitzGerald, professor of modern and contemporary art at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and director of the Pablo Picasso research programme initiated by the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso (FABA), will highlight the fact that the art of the Old Masters was not only worthy of Picasso’s admiration, but also drove his ambition to surpass his predecessors.