Introduction

Why not start at the beginning?

This exhibition opens in 1926, the year Dalí claims he first met Picasso, and goes back in time. Why? This exhibition asks how Dalí and Miró were shaped by Picasso's evolutionary invention of Cubism in 1907, a stor y which can only be understood by beginning when they were themselves young artists. Dalí was twenty-four when he met Picasso in 1926, Miró, twenty-five when they met in 1920.
For the young Dalí and Miró, Picasso was already a mature ar tist, and both Picasso and Cubism were already par t of the past. Like a film with flashbacks, to understand Dalí and Miró, we have to return to when the world was new for Picasso. When the nineteen year-old Picasso arrived in Paris in 1900, he too was a struggling young ar tist. But unlike Dalí and Miró, it was up to Picasso to invent the art of the new century, just as Einstein was to invent its science.