Pablo Picasso: Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Dora)

During the course of 2017 a number of exhibitions and associated activities have been held to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the creation of Guernica by Picasso. Among them was the exhibition 1937. On Gernika. War and "civitas", held at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum as one of the events devised to mark San Sebastián as European Cultural Capital 2016.

With the same aim of highlighting the importance of Guernica, one of the key works of 20th-century art, over the next few months and with the sponsorship of Fundación Santander the Guest Work programme will be presenting a major painting by Pablo Ruiz Picasso. This is an exceptional loan as the painting is one of the most important works in the collection of the prestigious Beyeler Foundation (Riehen, Basel, Switzerland), founded in 1982 by the art dealer Ernst Beyeler and his wife, who had close links with Picasso in the 1950s.

Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Dora) (1938) has been selected for its connections with Guernica and with other works associated with the painting's creation in 1937, as well as to the Charnel House cycle of the mid-1940s.

The year 1938, when this portrait was painted, is inevitably associated with the Spanish Civil War and with a climate of imminent war in Europe, making Picasso's work an expression of the historical drama of those years. It was at this point that Picasso acquired political awareness and when his art consequently became a vehicle for an intellectual denunciation of oppression and war: Guernica is a denunciation of savagery that would very quickly become a universal symbol of peace.