Picasso and Dalí: The relationship between two great artistic geniuses

Personajes famosos Picasso Dalí

The works of these two great geniuses of art are of such value and plasticity that owning a sample of them has become the pride of museums, collectors, exhibition halls, art auctions, online art auctions, and art buying and selling businesses. Something similar happens with Miró or Tàpies, for example.

Many rumors have circulated over these last few years about the discrepancies between the two, but little has been said about the many points of connection and similarities that united them.

The first meeting between the two took place in Paris back in 1926. Dalí, at 22 years old, like every artist of the era, set out to visit the city and presented himself at Picasso's studio, to whom he addressed these terms: "Before visiting the Louvre, I decided to come and see you." Picasso spent two hours showing him the works he was preparing for the exhibition that was going to take place at the Galerie Rosenberg.

Despite political differences, both remained in contact, with several postcards—specifically, twenty—three letters, two invitation cards, two telegrams, and one manifesto being sent by Dalí to Picasso. The reverse correspondence is non-existent due to Picasso's disaffection for the epistolary genre. However, Picasso had no problem financing the trip for the Dalí-Gala couple to the United States aboard the Champlain on November 8, 1934.

But that's not all. There is also great similarity in some of their paintings as Dalí reinvented, recreated, and reinterpreted several of Picasso's works. This is the case with the pointillist style, which is unusual, used both by Picasso in 1921 when painting the group of women by the sea and the bather of Es Llaner that Dalí painted in 1923. Another example can be found in the still lifes that serve as a prelude to the figures in Picasso's Guernica sketches and Dalí's Premonition of the Civil War (1935). Equally significant is the fondness of both for Velázquez and his Las Meninas, updated and reinvented through the Cubism and Surrealism of each.

The parallelism between the works of both is the subject of the exhibition organized by the Dalí Museum in Saint Petersburg (Florida) and the Picasso Museum in Barcelona in collaboration with the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation of Figueras, featuring 78 engravings, sculptures, collages, drawings, and paintings by both authors, which can be visited until next June 28, 2015.

A complex relationship, in short, marked by rivalry, support, and admiration reflected in the plastic richness of two great icons of 20th-century art.

Signed: María Luisa Sánchez Vinader