St. Petersburg Florida's Dali Museum has another great exhibit running through May 22, 2022, called "Picasso and the Allure of the South." Not the American South, the southern Mediterranean coast of Spain and France, where Pablo Picasso spent a great deal of his life. This is an exclusive exhibit for the Dali, organized in collaboration with the Musée national Picasso-Paris, which holds the most significant collection of the artist’s works, the exhibit presents 79 paintings, drawings and collages – approximately half of which have never been seen in the U.S. There's also a variety of techniques and media on display.
The exhibit is well curated, allowing visitors to see a glimpse of beginning of Picasso's cubist phase. One of the interesting parts to me was the side-by-side comparison of Picasso's realistic sketch of a man at a bar and his cubist version of the same man.
It's interesting that there are two subjects dominating the works on exhibit: guitars and bullfighting. Guitars and bullfighting figure prominently in Picasso's Spanish heritage. Spanish style guitar and flamenco music would have been his personal soundtrack, and, as a Spanish man of that time, Picasso was the embodiment of Spanish machismo, with his hard drinking and womanizing reputation. And what "sport" is more macho than bullfighting?
Guitars and guitar players
Bullfighting
It really is a fascinating exhibit, whether or not you are a Picasso fan. At the end, there's a really fun touch. Visitors can sit for a self-portrait photo and see it transformed into a cubist portrait before their eyes, and it then can be texted or emailed to them.
