A New Show on Picasso’s Religious Roots Opens in a Spanish Cathedral

In the summer of 1934, Pablo Picasso traveled through Spain with his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and their teenage son Paulo. They visited the historic city of Burgos, the medieval capital of Castile, stopping in at the cathedral to admire its Gothic bombast and dark depiction of Christ on the Cross. It would be Picasso’s last trip to the country of his birth.

Nine decades on, Picasso’s paintings have made the journey to the cathedral in Burgos for an exhibition that looks at how Christian values and iconography influenced the artist. “Picasso: Biblical Roots,” which runs through June 29, bills itself as the first major show to explore such influences on Picasso.

At first glance, this curatorial oversight is hardly surprising. After all, Picasso was an atheist and Communist supporter whose ever-shifting practice seemed to chafe against centuries of religious art. Indeed, in a well-known episode from the 1940s, Picasso personally confronted Henri Matisse for accepting the Vence chapel commission. Why, Picasso asked, would an artist work for an idea he didn’t believe in?

Look a little close, however—as “Biblical Roots” does, courtesy of 44 works loaned from the likes of Madrid’s Reina Sofia and Thyssen-Bornemisza—and the lingering influence of Christian imagery emerges. There are doves, pious families, devotional mothers, and even a sheet metal sculpture of a man lugging a lamb over his shoulder.

Picasso’s turn to atheism was, in one sense, a classic adolescent rejection of his upbringing. As a child, he had attended mass with his mother at the church near the family home in Malaga. In the mid-1890s, the Picassos moved to Barcelona, enrolling their son in the School of Arts and Crafts. His father, a painter and art teacher himself, hoped the teenager would become a religious painter and the ground was laid with Picasso studying in the studio of the devotional painter José Garnelo Alda.

As (1896) shows, he certainly had the aptitude for it, lowering the vantage point to the boy’s level and carefully offering the red-and-white folds of his vestments. Indeed, an earlier painting, (1896), had drawn attention in the local press after its showing at Barcelona’s Exposition of Fine Arts and Crafts. But Picasso, of course, had other ideas.

After moving to Paris and seeming to leave behind his parent’s Catholicism, Picasso continued to create works connected to the church. (1920) is one, which shows a gathering outside a church on Christmas Day. Another is (1932), a howling ink on paper work whose central figure is all bone and smoke—a far cry from (1897) that Picasso had painting while still in Barcelona and attempting to strengthen his position in the Spanish art world by excelling in the realist mode.

As argues, even when working far away from the traditions of religious art, Christian motifs and concerns endured. His Cubist still lives, for instance, such as (1914) and (1914), introduce the wine glass suggestive of the Last Supper. Elsewhere, post-war works, including as (1946) and (1947), deploy the skull to play with the 17th-century tradition of vanitas paintings in which artists reminded the viewer of their own mortality and the supremacy of god.

Equally convincing is the recurrence of the Madonna figure. As the exhibition materials note, “he admired the Romanesque Virgins of Gósol and the Holy Families of Alonso Cano and Murillo” in his youth, and this admiration persisted. First comes (1899 to 1900); next (1921) that offers Olga holding a newborn Paulo in the archetypical pose; last is the image in that casts mother and child amid the chaos of violence.

It’s a treatment that shows Picasso leaning into the visual vocabulary he had been raised and schooled on so as to reveal the horrors of the 20th century. As the show’s curator, Paloma Alarcó, put it: “The secularizing impulse of the modern era did not prevent him from reclaiming the sacred within a modern, secular environment.”