Small drawings of bulls, bullfighters, picadors or other scenes of the arena, the love for the Mediterranean, the love and the nostalgia for the homeland, the solidarity for the fellow fighter and (co)exiled compatriot, important political interventions and artistic gestures of great spontaneity, all seen through the long-time correspondence of two very good friends, Pablo Picasso and Eugenio Arias, are the main axes of the new, international exhibition of the MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection entitled "Pablo Picasso: Exile and Nostalgia".

The exhibition, coproduced by the Museo Casa Natal Picasso in Málaga, will be presented from 12 July to 10 November 2024 at the MOMus-Museum of Modern Art, in the Moni Lazariston in Thessaloniki, and focuses on Pablo Picasso's long-standing and multi-dimensional friendship with the barber and friend of Eugenio Arias, exiled resistance fighter. Through the correspondence of the two men, the turbulent period of the civil war in Spain and the period after that (1936-1952), such as the ties with the French Resistance and the illegal Communist Party of Spain, is illuminated in an extremely special way.

The exhibition “Pablo Picasso: Exile and Nostalgia” features drawings, prints and ceramics from the collections of the Museo Casa Natal de Picasso in Malaga, many of which are being exhibited for the first time outside of Spain. The specific works are in dialogue with works from the Costakis collection and archive from the period of the Russian Avant-Garde that are parallelly presented in parallel at the MOMus-Museum of Modern Art, thus broadening the perspective on modernism, bringing together the European historical avant-garde art movements.

Curated by: Carlos Ferrer Barrera 

Coordination: Maria Tsantsanoglou 

The exhibition is part of the international collaboration that stands between MOMus and the Agencia Pública Para la Gestión de la Casa Natal de Pablo R. Picasso y Otros Equipamientos Museísticos y Culturales Ayuntamiento de Málaga. In this frame, more than 450 artworks are shown in Malaga, in the exhibition under the title «Utopía y Vanguardia. Arte ruso en la Colección Costakis – MOMus Museo de Arte Moderno de Salónica” (4.07.2024-31.03.2025, Colección del Museo Ruso). This is MOMus-Museum of Modern Art major collaboration for 2024, as part of its effort to network with international museums and institutions holding collections of seminal European avant-garde art movements.  

The story of a friendship – A museum’s collection. 

Pablo Picasso met Eugenio Arias in Vallauris, Southern France where Arias had fled as a left-wing political exile from Franco's regime and was working as a barber. Shortly after Eugenio Arias died, his family found a bundle of pages from the Spanish right-winged and monarchic ABC newspaper where Picasso left signs on the fringes of bullfighting chronicles together with drawings alluding to the toros and with the surname "Arias" handwritten, a call to the recipient of such a particular correspondence. It is a group of more than 60 pages of a friendly correspondence between two aficionados, made between 1962 and 1968. 

This collection was kept in the family home of the barber's heirs until, in 2016, Madeleine and Pauline Arias visited the Documentation Centre of the Picasso’s Birthplace Museum (Museo Casa Natal Picasso) in Malaga and, the following year, they decided to deposit an important collection of drawings, engravings, illustrated books and other materials.

This collection was kept in the family home of the barber's heirs until, in 2016, Madeleine and Pauline Arias visited the Documentation Centre of the Museo Casa Natal Picasso in Malaga and, the following year, they decided to deposit an important collection of drawings, engravings, illustrated books and other materials.

The collection was accompanied by a copy of the book Dibujos y escritos, written by Picasso and published in 1961 by Camilo José Cela, a Spanish writer awarded in 1989 with the Nobel Prize of Literature. This copy was personalized by the painter in 1966 as a birthday gift for his friend Eugenio. Among its pages there are two inscriptions and 35 pages enhanced with drawings, arabesques and decorative strokes with felt-tip pen. Featuring the impressive Bearded man, a classic-looking male face painted by the the artist with circular coloured strokes as if they were beard hairs. A very suitable gift for the barber friend. These drawings are presented for the first time outside of Spain.

In the set there are also important illustrated books like Sueño y mentira de Franco (1937), that is complemented in this exhibition with other publications that reflect the artist's involvement and solidarity with the Spanish people, as he used his poems and illustrations to fight against Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. With his resistance literature and his illustrations he helped well known resistants and antinazi poets and writers, like Paul Eluard or Robert Desnos to spread the cause. For the first time, two surrealistic poems by Picasso are published in Greek, translated by Androula Michael.

The collection is completed with photographs, engravings and lithographs from the Museo Casa Natal Picasso collection, that contextualise and give an image of the artist's love for bulls and the Mediterranean world, a paradise that he was able to recover in Vallauris, on the Côte d'Azur, after the end of the Second World War. Exile and Νostalgia is an excellent opportunity to see, for the first time outside of Spain, these intimate works of the painter who broke down the borders of art and expanded its limits at the beginning of the 20th century.