Picasso & Hemingway

In the organizer's words:

Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway are among the most important innovators of classical modernism in their respective artistic fields: Picasso was on a par with the avant-garde movements of his time right up until the post-war years and, as the artist of the century, made a significant contribution to the development of modern art. Hemingway is regarded as the epitome of 20th century American literature. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature a year later.

Picasso and Hemingway met in the Roaring Twenties in Paris in the salon of the American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein. While Stein became a patron of Picasso at the beginning of the century, she gave Hemingway and the Lost Generation decisive literary impulses in the 1920s. Both artists dealt intensively with the Spanish Civil War and created two of the most important works of the 20th century, the painting Guernica and the novel For Whom the Hour Strikes .

The studio exhibition traces the life and work of the two artists with around 50 exhibits in four exhibition chapters and places Picasso's paintings in a stimulating dialog with Hemingway's texts. The presentation is introduced by snapshots taken by the two important photographers Robert Capa and David Douglas Duncan, which provide intimate insights into the life stages and creative processes of Picasso and Hemingway. The exhibition then turns to Hemingway's time in Paris, which he describes vividly in "Paris - A Feast for Life", and juxtaposes Hemingway's texts with Picasso's classicist portraits of literary figures from the 1920s. The following chapter sheds light on Picasso's and Hemingway's artistic creative processes.

The exhibition ends with Picasso's and Hemingway's artistic exploration of bullfighting, which the American writer vividly describes in his texts "Fiesta" and "Death in the Afternoon" and which was a lifelong theme for Picasso.