Tàpies's Homage to Picasso
Why is it significant?
In a shallow pool on Passeig de Picasso stands a big glass cube, and water runs down its walls like rain on a window. Lean closer. Inside, old furniture is jammed together with cloth and rope, all skewered by heavy steel beams, as if a house had been crushed and then put on display.
Key Facts
| Place | Tàpies's Homage to Picasso |
|---|---|
| Address | Passeig de Picasso, 08003 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.38660, 2.18480 |
| Part of Walk | Young Picasso's Barcelona: Els Quatre Gats, La Llotja & the Merchant Streets of La Ribera |
| Generated | Generated |
In a shallow pool on Passeig de Picasso stands a big glass cube, and water runs down its walls like rain on a window. Lean closer. Inside, old furniture is jammed together with cloth and rope, all skewered by heavy steel beams, as if a house had been crushed and then put on display.
A monument to Picasso, and not a single face, not one dove, no guitar. This is the Homenatge a Picasso by Antoni Tàpies, unveiled in 1983, about a decade after Picasso's death. Tàpies, born in Barcelona in 1923, was the great Catalan painter of the next generation, famous for canvases of earth, sand, scratches and found objects. When the city asked him to honour the most famous artist it had ever raised, he refused to make a statue.
Instead, he took Picasso at his word. In 1945 Picasso had declared that painting is not done to decorate apartments, that it is an instrument of war against the enemy. So Tàpies took the furniture of a comfortable apartment, the very things art is supposed to sit politely above, and pierced it, wrapped it, and locked it in glass under a constant stream of water. Domestic comfort, washed and caged.
People argue about it, of course. Some walk past thinking it is a delivery that nobody collected. Others stop and stay a long time. That double reaction is very Picasso: when Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was first seen by his friends in Paris, even some of them thought he had gone mad. Behind you runs the long arcade of the passeig, and in front of you the gates of the Ciutadella park, built on the ground of a hated eighteenth-century fortress.
Notice too where the monument stands, on the street that carries Picasso's name, a few minutes' walk from the museum and from the merchant quarter where he lived as a teenager. Now turn back into La Ribera: walk down Passeig de Picasso and turn right towards the great iron market hall, then follow the long promenade of the Passeig del Born.