Around sixty paintings from the juvenile work of the three great Spanish artists and over one hundred sketches by Picasso - coming from the most important Spanish museums, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York and from private collections - will be on show at Palazzo Strozzi until the 17th July 2011, allowing visitors to discover the birth of modernity in figurative arts in the early Twentieth century, in search of the extraordinary creative adventure of the three Catalan artists –young, rebels and unwilling to submit to the worn out rules of that time. The youngest of the tree, Salvador Dalì, born in Figueras in 1904, was expelled from the Academia in 1926 shortly before his final exams when he stated that no one on the faculty was competent enough to examine him.

Promoted and organized by the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze (The Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze Bank Foundation) and by the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation with the help of the Soprintendenza per il Polo Museale of Florence, the exhibition was curated by Eugenio Carmona and Christoph Vitali and is divided into 5 sections, going backwards through thirty years. The ‘journey back in time’ starts from a group of works recalling  the presumed visit of 22-year-old Dalì to Picasso in Paris in 1926 (hence the famous sentence “Master, I just arrived in Paris and have come to see you before going to the Louvre”), then it goes through the documented encounter between Picasso and Mirò (1917) up to the early twentieth century, with young Picasso arriving in the French capital. Thanks to an agreement between Firenze Fiera and the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, during the ART (The International Handicrafts Trade Fair of Florence) at the Fortezza da Basso (April, 30 – May, 8 2011), visitors will have the chance to visit both exhibitions at a reduced overall price of 9 Euros, even on different days.   

INFO: +39 055 2645155 – www.palazzostrozzi.it