Hailed as one of the must-see exhibitions of the year for art lovers, a traveling exhibition featuring some of Pablo Picasso’s greatest works will open in Taipei today.
The exhibition, titled “Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris,” will be on view in the National Museum of History until Sept. 18.
The 62 pieces featured in the exhibition — paintings, sculptures, prints and more than 40 photographs — are on loan from the Musee National Picasso, Paris, which is closed for renovation.
The museum opened in 1985 in the Marais district of Paris. It contains thousands of works that were in the artist’s personal collection and that were passed to the French government following his death.
The exhibition is part of a world tour that began three years ago and has made stops in Seattle, San Francisco, Helsinki, Madrid, Moscow and various other cities.
Anne Baldassari, one of the world’s preeminent Picasso experts and a director at the Paris museum, said yesterday that the exhibition allows viewers to see some of the most representative works of one of the most outstanding artists of the 20th century.
The exhibition, which takes up seven halls, has creations from every phase of Picasso’s extraordinary career, which spanned about 80 years, including masterpieces from his Blue, Cubist, Neoclassical and Surrealist periods, she said.
Along with his innovative styles, the painter is also known for his relationship with many women — wives, mistresses and muses — and visitors will be able to see many portraits of the women with whom Picasso shared his affections.
Having worked at the museum for 18 years, Baldassari said the portraits, for her, are not just representations of an individual, but have deeper meaning.
“Each painting is inspiring and [it] plays an irreplaceable role in Picasso’s prolific career,” Baldassari said, adding that what made Picasso a great artist was his courage to go beyond himself, to constantly break old styles and create new ones.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods