Picasso from Cultural Studies. The Dream and Lie of Spain (1898–1922)
International Congress
Held on 01, 02 Dec 2022
This international congress is the first event to be held inside the framework of the Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s Death. Its title alludes to Picasso’s renowned prints under the title Sueño y mentira de Franco (The Dream and Lie of Franco, 1937), and investigates, from the field of Cultural Studies, Picasso’s relationship with the challenges, crises and transformations that shook Spain in the period stretching from the 1898 Disaster to the end of the Rif War in the 1920s.
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In early twentieth-century Spain, the crossroads of modernity was expressed with remarkable intensity and the art forms of the time initiated a genuine revolution of sensibility. After the independence of the final transatlantic assets in 1898, the country wrestled with the panic of foreign occupation, collective mourning, mass despair, new African colonial undertakings and the reinvention — as the eternal nation — of an East-West syncretism of Iberian art. Country and city, nature and industry, big city and territory, contradictions that would invoke collective reactions oscillating between despair and utopia — a rich context of solidarity networks, spaces of autonomy and dreams of worlds to come. The fight against hunger and repression, a nascent class and artistic bohemia forged the country’s own image while its bodies were processed inside a dense lattice of modern institutions. Working women were also the subject of new, specific forms of violence and trade in the home, in the brothel and in the psychiatric hospital, three spaces belonging to an institutional complex which repressed and subjugated the feminine condition as the nineteenth century made way for the twentieth.
Picasso at the turn of the twentieth century, the focal point of this congress, is at once a product and producer of this historical juncture. Inhabiting the interstices of the time, his living environment and aesthetic sensibility arose from the conflicts and desires that built the industrial city and the ways of imagining alternatives that materialised from it, for instance anarchism. Lifestyles which bohemia took to cabarets and workshops, visionary pharmacology and the forms of sociability that characterised that era’s artistic milieu plotted the coordinates of a new style that dubbed Picasso avant-garde. It was in a complex network of travel — Madrid, Barcelona, Gósol, Paris — in a grid, where the imagery of a nation and its ghosts was articulated and looked to replace a mixed-race transatlantic identity in an expansive North African mission.
This congress contends that Picasso’s Spanish identity does not lie in references to the painting of El Greco, Velázquez and Murillo, or in the influence of Iberian sculpture, or even in the traces of Spain’s popular culture, as previously upheld. These references are instead symptoms of the deep-seated redefinition of Spanishness that occurred from 1898 to 1922, between the independence of nations from the Americas and the Picasso File, a report signed by the soldier Juan Picasso — the painter’s great uncle — condemning the Disaster of Annual in the Rif War and marking the start of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. It sets out, through the prism of Cultural Studies, to assert that Picasso was not only aware of these historical processes and transformations, but also that his work played a determining role in them. Bohemia, nationalism-colonialism, anarchism, and repressive institutional policies in relation women are the ideas that run along the four elements articulating the congress and look to shed more light on this period.
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Carlos Alberdi (1956) is a commissioner for the Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of Picasso’s Death
Josep Casals (1955) is a lecturer in Aesthetics and Art History at the University of Barcelona. His publications most notably include El expresionismo. Orígenes y desarrollo de una nueva sensibilidad (Montesinos, 1982), Constelación de pasaje. Imagen, experiencia, locura (Anagrama, 2015) and Crónica crítica. Periodismo, universidad, burocracia, política, nación, (Anagrama, 2020). He was awarded the 31st Anagrama Essay Prize for his work Afinidades vienesas. Sujeto, lenguaje, arte (Anagrama, 2003).
Chris Ealham (1965) is a British historian and hispanist who currently lectures in History at Saint Louis University in Madrid. He has published numerous articles in different languages on the history of anarcho-syndicalism and social protest and is the author of Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937 (Routledge, 2004) and Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-syndicalist Movement (AK Press, 2016) and the co-editor, with Mike Richards, of The Splintering of Spain. Cultural History and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Pura Fernández (1964) is a research professor at the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology from the CSIC Centre of Human and Social Science, director of Editorial CSIC, and head of the Scientific Culture and Citizen Science Area and joint vice-president of Scientific Culture in the same institution. Her recent publications most notably include Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (18th Century to the Present) (with E. Delgado and Jo Labanyi; Vanderbilt Press, 2015) and 365 relojes. La Baronesa de Wilson (Taurus, 2022).
Chema González (1979) is head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Cultural and Audiovisual Activities.
Rafael Jackson-Martín is a lecturer in Art History at the University of Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras. He has published a number of works linked to the realm of Pablo Picasso, for instance Picasso y las poéticas surrealistas (Alianza Forma, 2003), “Tres hombres líricos: Picasso, Breton, la sombra de Apollinaire y el surrealismo en 1925” (in La balsa de la medusa, No. 33, 1995) and the translation of Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme by André Breton and Paul Eluard (Siruela, 2003).
Jèssica Jaques Pi (1967) is a lecturer in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and joint director of the Picasso PhD (Museo Picasso de Barcelona). She is the author of Picasso en Gósol, 1906: un verano para la modernidad (Antonio Machado, 2007) and head researcher on the project Los escritos de Picasso: textos teatrales, 2016-2018 from Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Raquel Jimeno (1985) is coordinator of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Cultural Activities.
Germán Labrador (1980) is director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department.
Dolors Marín (1957) is a historian and researcher specialised in contemporary European social movements. Her publications most notably include Anarquismo: una introducción (Ariel, 2014) and Espiritistes i lliurepensadores: dones pioneres en la lluita pels drets civils (Angle, 2018).
Eloy Martín Corrales (1949) is the head lecturer of Modern History in the Humanities Department of Universidad Pompeu Fabra, and specialises in Euro-Islamic relations, with a particular interest in economic, political and cultural spheres between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. He has most notably written the books Comercio de Cataluña con el Mediterráneo musulmán (Siglos XVI-XVIII). El comercio con los “enemigos de la fe” (Bellaterra, 2001) and La imagen del magrebí en España. Una perspectiva histórica, siglos XVI-XX (Bellaterra, 2002), and has edited Marruecos y el colonialismo español (1859-1912). De la guerra de África a la penetración pacífica (Bellaterra, 2002) and La Conferencia de Algeciras en 1906: un banquete colonial (Bellaterra, 2007).
Julia Mirabal (1950) is a journalist and producer. She lectures at the Universidad de Medios Audiovisuales Veritas (Costa Rica) and the Universidad de La Habana, and works in cultural journalism on Cuban television. She directed the documentary Picasso en blanco y negro (2000), among other works.
Rosario Peiró (1968) is head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area.
Elsa Plaza (1950) holds a PhD in Art History and is a teacher and writer. She has published the novels Rojiza penumbra (Barataria, 2006); El cielo bajo los pies (Marlow, 2009); Jacqueline o el eco del tiempo (Mecenix, 2012); and El magnetismo del viento nocturno (Ediciones B, 2014), and the research essays Desmontando el caso de la vampira del Raval. Misoginia y clasismo en la Barcelona modernista (Antrazyt, 2014) La calle olvidada. Sant Antoni de Pàdua en el Raval (El Lokal, 2017) and La vieja cárcel de la calle Amalia. Historia y vida cotidiana (El Lokal, 2020).
Julia Ramírez-Blanco (1985) is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Barcelona. She works at the crossroads between art, utopia and activism and has published Artistic Utopias of Revolt. Claremont Road, Reclaim the Streets, and the City of Sol (Palgrave, 2018), 15M. El tiempo de las plazas (Alianza, 2021) and Amigos, disfraces y comunas. Las hermandades de artistas del siglo XIX (Cátedra, 2022).
Servando Rocha (1974) is a writer and the editor of La Felguera Ediciones and the magazine Agente Provocador. Notable among his publications is Historia de un Incendio. Arte y revolución en los tiempos salvajes: de la Comuna de París al advenimiento del punk (La, 2006) and Agotados de esperar el fin. Subculturas, estéticas y políticas del desecho (Virus Editorial, 2008). In 2021, he curated the exhibition The Mask Never Lies (CCCB, Barcelona).
Conxa Rodríguez (1958) is a journalist specialised in the art market and the author of numerous articles for El País and Público. She has published Los Thyssen. Por amor al arte (Ediciones B, 1997) and El ángel de Picasso. Historia de un bebedor de absenta (Parsifal, 2003), among other works.
José María Rodríguez García (1964) is head lecturer in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University, where he gives courses and seminars on the political-intellectual history of Mexico and Cuba, and on Iberian Cultural Studies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His book The City of Translation: Poetry and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Springer, 2010) received the PROSE Award in 2010 from the Association of American Publishers.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1948) is a professor emeritus in the department of Art History at the University of California Santa Bárbara. She is the author of Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic Histories, Institutions and Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (Thames & Hudson, 1997); Chair à Canons: Photographie, discours, féminisme (Textuel, 2015); and Photography After Photography: Gender, Genre and History(Duke University Press, 2017). Her essays on photography, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, and feminism and contemporary art have been broadly compiled and translated.
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Thursday, 1 December 2022
Session 1. Bohemian Glass: Picasso and New Lifestyles
11am Presentation
―Conducted by Chema González, Germán Labrador and Rosario Peiró
11:10am ¿Picasso, Noir? Bohemian Madrid at the Turn of the Century
―Conducted by Servando Rocha
11:30am The Catalan Window Open to Europe
―Conducted by Conxa Rodríguez
12pm Bohemia and Modernity: Poets, Artists and Critics in Montmartre and Montparnasse
―Conducted by Josep Casals
12:30pm Picasso “dit Pau de Gósol”: Matriarchy and Revolution
―Conducted by Jèssica Jaques Pi
1pm Round-table Discussion and Talk
―Moderated by: Raquel Jimeno
Session 2. Iberian-Colonial Picasso: From Cuba to Rif
5pm The Past as Future: Iberian Atavism in Modern Picassian Imagery
―Conducted by Rafael Jackson-Martín
5:30pm Was Picasso’s Work Influenced by the Colonial Wars? From the War of Melilla (1893) to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), via Annual (1921)
―Conducted by Eloy Martín Corrales
6pm Screening of Picasso en blanco y negro by Julia Mirabal
Cuba and Spain 2000, colour and b/w, original version in Spanish, DA, 40’. Documentary on the Afro-Cuban Relations of the Picasso family
7pm Round-table Discussion and Talk
―Moderated by: Germán Labrador
Friday, 2 December 2022
Session 1. Anarchism and Body Politics
11am The Social, Anarchist and Intellectual Pathways of a Young Picasso (Barcelona, 1895–1906): “Let the Orators Fall Silent and the Chemists Speak”
―Conducted by Dolors Marín
11:30am The Anarcho-Syndicalist Public Sphere and the Creation of a Workers’ City in Picasso’s Barcelona (1902–1917)
―Conducted by Chris Ealham
12pm Picasso and Libertarian Naturism
―Conducted by Julia Ramírez-Blanco
12:30pm The Circus Represented by Picasso as a Model for an Anarchist Society
―Conducted by José María Rodríguez García
1pm Round-table Discussion and Talk
―Moderated by: Chema González
Session 2. Picasso Inside the Framework of the Denouncement of Institutional Policies Against Women
5pm Presentation to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death
―Presentation by Carlos Alberdi, commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death
17:10 h The Case of the “Vampire of El Raval” and Sexual Violence in Modernist Barcelona
―Conducted by Elsa Plaza
5:30pm The Literary Genealogy of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Cultural Discourses on Sex Work Between Centuries
―Conducted by Pura Fernández
6:15pm Closing Lecture. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon through the Feminist Prism
―Conducted by Abigail Solomon-Godeau
7:15pm Round-table Discussion and Talk
―Moderated by: Rosario Peiró
Academic coordination
Chema González, Germán Labrador and Rosario Peiró
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Inside the official programme Celebrating Picasso 1973–2023
The National Commission to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s Death
Organised by
With the support of
Participating company in Spain
Participants
Participants
Más actividades
![Tracey Rose, The Black Sun Black Star and Moon [La luna estrella negro y negro sol], 2014.](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Obra/AD07091_2.jpg.webp)
On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25th March, 2026 – 7.00pm
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Feni’s work. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela addresses the trauma of apartheid from both aesthetic and oneiric perspectives. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museum’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24th March, 2026 – 6.30pm
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museum from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Remedios Zafra
Thursday March 19, 2026 - 19:00 h
The José Luis Brea Chair, dedicated to reflecting on the image and the epistemology of visuality in contemporary culture, opens its program with an inaugural lecture by essayist and thinker Remedios Zafra.
“That the contemporary antifeminist upsurge is constructed as an anti-intellectual drive is no coincidence; the two feed into one another. To advance a reactionary discourse that defends inequality, it is necessary to challenge gender studies and gender-equality policies, but also to devalue the very foundations of knowledge in which these have been most intensely developed over recent decades—while also undermining their institutional support: universities, art and research centers, and academic culture.
Feminism has been deeply linked to the affirmation of the most committed humanist thought. Periods of enlightenment and moments of transition toward more just social forms—sustained by education—have been when feminist demands have emerged most strongly. Awareness and achievements in equality increase when education plays a leading social role; thus, devaluing intellectual work also contributes to harming feminism, and vice versa, insofar as the bond between knowledge and feminism is not only conceptual and historical, but also intimate and political.
Today, antifeminism is used globally as the symbolic adhesive of far-right movements, in parallel with the devaluation of forms of knowledge emerging from the university and from science—mistreated by hoaxes and disinformation on social networks and through the spectacularization of life mediated by screens. These are consequences bound up with the primacy of a scopic value that for some time has been denigrating thought and positioning what is most seen as what is most valuable within the normalized mediation of technology. This inertia coexists with techno-libertarian proclamations that reactivate a patriarchy that uses the resentment of many men as a seductive and cohesive force to preserve and inflame privileges in the new world as techno-scenario.
This lecture will address this epochal context, delving into the synchronicity of these upsurges through an additional parallel between forms of patriarchal domination and techno-labor domination. A parallel in which feminism and intellectual work are both being harmed, while also sending signals that in both lie emancipatory responses to today’s reactionary turns and the neutralization of critique. This consonance would also speak to how the perverse patriarchal basis that turns women into sustainers of their own subordination finds its equivalent in the encouraged self-exploitation of cultural workers; in the legitimation of affective capital and symbolic capital as sufficient forms of payment; in the blurring of boundaries between life and work and in domestic isolation; or in the pressure to please and comply as an extended patriarchal form—today linked to the feigned enthusiasm of precarious workers, but also to technological adulation. In response to possible resistance and intellectual action, patriarchy has associated feminists with a future foretold as unhappy for them, equating “thought and consciousness” with unhappiness—where these have in fact been (and continue to be) levers of autonomy and emancipation.”
— Remedios Zafra