Saura y Picasso, Carlos Saura Medrano

CARLOS SAURA AND GRANADA

Carlos Saura used to say that he discovered flamenco in Granada and fell in love with dance through the camera lens. It was in the city of the Generalife, in the 1950s, where Saura landed as photographer for the International Music and Dance Festival.

This experience would set the tone for his artistic trajectory, because this is where his passion for the performing arts, and especially dance, was born, and it marked him throughout his artistic career.

Granada remembers the master this way, through a work that pays homage to his way of understanding art through flamenco, the most modern artistic manifestation we have and the only one that, like Picasso, broke with the unknown and made different artistic disciplines come together and dance on the stage.

PICASSO AND DANCE

A man like Picasso, whose curiosity went well beyond painting, providing each of the disciplines with which he experimented a new vision and unforeseen solutions, was no stranger to the theatre.

He was involved with Diaghilev’s Russian ballets, and was married to ballerina Olga Khokhlova, the muse for several of his works.

This experience led him to create several set designs in which Picasso did not limit himself to following the stipulations; rather, within this defined framework, he imposed very different interpretations. Like in the rest of his works, and in line with Cubist principles, he intended to rediscover the deep reality of the shapes and objects achieving, in this case, a new way to understand the stage, with other dimensions, a different density and set of planes, whether it was with an architectural geometry suggestive of a city aesthetic, or very strictly limiting that space, underlining the theatrical artifice.