Science and Charity, Harlequin, The Charnel House, Jacqueline, Self‑Portrait
Las meninas is this the best painting in history
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 Velázquez. 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, nine scenes of a dove, three landscapes and a portrait of Jacqueline.
Picasso himself understood this series as a whole and as such donated it to the museum in Barcelona in May 1968 in memory of Jaime Sabartés who died the same year. Picasso said to Sabartés in 1950:
las meninas by picasso
Exhibits
The Suite has been shown in the following exhibitions:
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:
Velázquez's Las Meninas has served as inspiration not only to Picasso. The first follower of Velázquez 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, one can see the placement of Charles II and the dwarf Mari Bárbola in a scene similar to Las Meninas by Velázquez. Here is a list of works by artists who also have versioned Las Meninas throughout art history.
