September 5, 2024 – January 6, 2025, Mantua, Palazzo Te
The exhibition “Picasso at Palazzo Te: Poetry and Salvation,” curated by Annie Cohen-Solal in collaboration with Johan Popelard, is the main event of Mantua’s 2024 cultural program, dedicated to the theme of Metamorphosis. The exhibition explores the connection between Giulio Romano and Ovid’s poem, which inspired the construction of Palazzo Te between 1525 and 1535.
The exhibition, held at Palazzo Te in Mantua from September 5, 2024 to January 6, 2025, is produced by the Palazzo Te Foundation in collaboration with the Musée National Picasso in Paris and the artist’s family. Around 50 works by the great 20th-century Master will be on display, including some paintings never before shown in Italy.
In 1930, four hundred years after the creation of the Sala dei Giganti in Mantua, Picasso created a series of engravings inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, offering a fascinating dialogue with the Renaissance paintings of Giulio Romano. However, behind this engagement with classical mythology lies an extraordinary personal journey.
Having emigrated to France in 1900, Picasso was labeled by the police and the Academy of Fine Arts as a foreigner, anarchist, and avant-garde artist until 1944. Initially welcomed by a small group of marginalized poets, it was in poetry and the poetic world that he found the means to overcome the challenges of his outsider status. Using metamorphosis as a strategy, Picasso skillfully navigated the many tensions of French society, becoming a mercurial artist that few critics, particularly in France, could fully decipher.