Meadows Museum to present Picasso-Rivera exhibit

DALLAS (SMU) - The Meadows Museum at SMU is presenting a focused exhibition exploring an element of the artistic rivalry between Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Diego Rivera (1886-1957).

Picasso/Rivera: Still Life and the Precedence of Form, which runs through Nov. 5, 2017, is a focused exhibition of paintings inspired by a work in the Meadows Museum’s collection, Picasso’s Still Life in a Landscape (1915).

When they both lived and worked in Paris in the early part of the 20th century, Diego Rivera accused Picasso of plagiarizing the foliage from one of Rivera’s own paintings. Drawing on other works in the Meadows’ collection, as well as other works such as Rivera’s Still Life with Gray Bowl (1915), on loan from the LBJ Presidential Library, the show will explore how this “borrowing” of motifs is evident in Picasso’s Still Life in a Landscape.

It also presents an opportunity to study how both artists evolved their representation of objects and people through the use of silhouette or shadow—including their early similarities and, ultimately, the divergence of their artistic approaches.

About the Meadows Museum

The Meadows Museum is the leading U.S. institution focused on the study and presentation of the art of Spain. In 1962, Dallas businessman and philanthropist Algur H. Meadows donated his

private collection of Spanish paintings, as well as funds to start a museum, to Southern Methodist University. The Museum opened to the public in 1965, marking the first step in fulfilling Meadows’s vision to create “a small Prado for Texas.”

Today, the Meadows is home to one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain. The collection spans from the 10th to the 21st centuries and includes medieval objects, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures, and major paintings by Golden Age and modern masters. Since 2010 the Museum has been engaged in a multidimensional partnership with the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, which has included the exchange of scholarship, exhibitions, works of art, and other resources.

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Media Contacts:

Carrie Sanger
Meadows Museum
csanger@smu.edu
214-768-1584

Sascha Freudenheim
PAVE Communications
sascha@paveconsult.com
917-544-6057