50 Years of the Death of Pablo Ruiz Picasso

Correos issues a stamp 50 years after the death of Pablo Ruiz Picasso choosing a photograph by Juan Gyenes.

In his study, Picasso has time to rest and play a violin. An instrument that through the genre of the verdiales formed part of the folklore of his native Malaga and of the musical and even sensorial memory of the artist, who has already become the most famous in the world. The image is taken in Cannes on June 16, 1958 by the Spanish-Hungarian Juan Gyenes on what was his second visit to the painter. Entitled by the photographer "...with his violin by Ingres", the scene also refers us to the leisure necessary for all creators, since it recalls how the great master of nineteenth-century classicism Ingres practiced on the violin. In this case, Picasso's way of holding the instrument leads to play and evocations from Málaga in which the verdiales violin is often held in non-traditional ways.

The presence in the background of paintings on the back of which Picasso notes the dates on which he has been working on them serves to enhance the dichotomy between fun and work, like the very moments that Picasso stopped his frantic work in his villa La Californie to attend to a photographer in which he could see a reflection of himself: someone who had left his homeland to seek a future in a foreign country: the Spanish Picasso portrayed in France by a Hungarian who had made Spain his adopted nation. The confidence that arose from Gyenes' previous visit led to this fleeting moment in which Picasso allowed himself to be someone else, a chimerical violinist or perhaps Ingres himself. In any case, the image serves to show us a Picasso in his fullness, capable of always being different and surprising those who observe. A merit shared on this occasion with Juan Gyenes.