Las Meninas is a series of 58 paintings that Pablo Picasso painted in 1957 by performing a comprehensive analysis, reinterpreting and recreating several times Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez. The suite is fully preserved at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona and is the only complete series of the artist that remains together. This is a very extensive survey work, which consists of 45 performances of the original picture, 9 scenes of a dove, 3 landscapes and a portrait of Jacqueline.
Picasso himself understood this series as a whole, and as such gave them to the museum in Barcelona in May 1968, in memory of Jaume Sabartés, who died the same year. Picasso's famous phrase said to Sabartés in 1950:
The suite
Exhibits
The Suite has been shown in the following exhibitions: 1959 - Les Menines, Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris. 1960 - Picasso, Tate Gallery, London. 1964 - Pablo Picasso. Exhibition Japan 1964, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan. 1964 - Pablo Picasso. Exhibition Japan 1964, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan. 1964 - Pablo Picasso. Exhibition Japan 1964, Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan. 1966 - 1967 - Hommage à Pablo Picasso, Grand Palais, Paris. 1967 - Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 1968 - Museu Picasso, Barcelona. 2008 - Forgetting Velázquez: Between 16 May and 28 September 2008, an exhibition at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, which explains the influence of Velázquez and Picasso's work in other contemporary artists, having as central to Las Meninas.The exhibition, divided into two sections, we could see one side works of the seventeenth century Spanish painters such as Velázquez, Juan Carreño de Miranda or Juan Bautista del Mazo, and some of the Las Meninas by Picasso next to more contemporary productions, with works by artists such as Francisco Goya, Michael Craig-Martin, Josep Maria Sert, Richard Hamilton or Thomas Struth, among others. It was curated by Gertje Utley and Malén Gual.
However, there are several works from theSuitethat have been part of other exhibitions. Here you will find the most relevant:
1980 - Picasso: A Retrospective, MoMA, Nova York. 1981 - Picasso 1881-1973. Exposición Antológica, Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid. 1985 - La peinture après 1940. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1988 - Picasso in the Soviet Union. Pushkin Museum, Moscou 2006 - Picasso. Tradición y vanguardia. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid 2008 - Picasso et les Maîtres. Grand Palais, Paris 2009 - Picasso: Challenging the past. National Gallery of London 2010 - Picasso: Peace and Freedom. Tate Liverpool
Other versions
Velázquez's Las Meninas have served as inspiration not only to Picasso. The first follower of Velazquez was certainly his son-in-law Juan Bautista del Mazo, court painter to Philip IVin 1661. In the portrait of the Infanta Margarita of Spain, 1666, in the backplane, man can see the placement of Charles II and the dwarf Mari Bárbola in a scene similar to Las Meninas by Velazquez. There is a list of some works of artists who also have versioned Las Meninas throughout art history.