Saragossa,
The longest of the municipal museums of Zaragoza, the one dedicated to Pablo Gargallo, this year meets four decades while its facilities are subject to an ambitious reform that will affect both its museographic approach and the accessibility of its visitors and the sustainability of its management.
Last year the center, which has some funds from almost two hundred works by Maella’s sculptor and painter, reached a public record in its history: it exceeded 50,000 spectators, figure 11.6% higher than that of 2024. His collection, composed of a hundred sculptures, drawings, prints, cartons and jewels, is completed with extensive documentation donated by the artist’s family in 2022 Prolongation in the Google Arts & Culture platform, which already collects 195 images of its creations, about thirty videos and digital reports.
The renewal works that are currently undertaken, and that will involve an investment of 485,000 euros corresponding to Next Generation funds, began in April and will end, as planned, in the first quarter next year. The expository route will then be incorporated, new parts, accessibility improvements inspired by the room Between lights and interactive spaces that will rediscover the figure of Gargallo from a more current perspective.
We remember that the museum is based in the Palacio de Argillo, a seventeenth -century building in the Aragonese capital, declared a National Monument, and was opened in 1985 thanks to the first donation of pieces of the artist’s family. Since then, its collection has increased in a sustained way thanks to other donations and acquisitions.
In these forty years, the Pablo Gargallo Museum has hosted signs of authors such as Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle, Eduardo Chillida, Luisa Granero, Ira Torres or Joan Miró, has promoted other monographs of Gargallo at national and international level and promoted the Pablo Gargallo International Sculpture Prize, which was awarded between 1987 and 1992.
Arabesco with welding
Born in that Zaragoza town of Maella in 1881 (the same year as Picasso), Gargallo and his family soon emigrated to Barcelona in search of better economic conditions. At fourteen he worked already in a pottery workshop and soon being admitted as an apprentice without salary in the workshop of the Eusebio Arnau sculptor, while attending night classes of drawing. Later he managed to enter the Lonja School, where he taught at that time Venancio Vallmitjana sculpture, and the famous gathering of Els Quatre Gatswhere he met the aforementioned Picasso, Nonell, Ricard Canals, Jacinte Raventós or Manolo Hugué.
In 1903, by the hand of a scholarship of the Lonja, he moved to Paris, where he had contact with Max Jacob and studied Rodin’s work, which is why he arrived in Zaragoza in his museum. The following year he returned to Barcelona and two years later he made his first individual sample in the Parés Room Ladies of Avignonthat impressed him a lot. Of that year dates your Little Mask with Lock (Now in the Washington Hirshhorn), executed in cut copper sheet, starting point of subsequent works in metal sheet, enough of them masks, where he often tried to achieve concavities.
After carrying out the sculptures of the Catalan Music Palace, he returned to Paris in 1912 and resumed his already settled friendship with Picasso, Braque, Hugué, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Modigliani and Juan Gris. The latter introduced Magali Tartason, with whom he married in 1915, and the Malaga introduced him to Léonce Rosenberg and Antoine Level, who made themselves with their first metal compositions. A severe pulmonary condition later forces him to function in small and medium formats and jewelry for two years: health had to do in his procedures at this stage.
In 1920 he was appointed professor of sculpture and embossed teacher at the Technical School of Art Trades of the Commonwealth of Catalonia, but in 1923 he was dismissed from the position for his support for Professor Dwelshauvers, expelled from the center, and the Gargallo marriage with his daughter then installed in Paris definitely, now began a fundamental period for his sculpture – the second time Concave and large formats in which modernist and cubist influences are synthesized. In 1928 his famous was dated Kiki de Montparnasse (of which he left us several copies in bronze; one of them at the Pablo Gargallo Museum).
As Picasso, he learned from his friend Julio González the technique of autogenous welding and in 1929 he began his iron stage, a material in which he first elaborated in the sheet, and then in an iron, numerous sculptures, such as Greta Garbo with Lock and Greta Garbo with eyelashesboth of the thirties. In 1933 he made his best known piece in bronze, The great prophet; also Uranusone of whose specimens also retains the Pablo Gargallo Museum. In his last year of life, in 1934, he exhibited with a criticism and public support in New York, in the Brummer gallery, and in Barcelona, in the Pares Sala.
