Honoring three legendary Pablos at Kennedy Center festival
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Artists from around the world converge on the Kennedy Center this month for a “global arts remix” honoring creative expression influenced by Spain and Portugal. Mexican diva Eugenia Leon, the Argentine multimedia tango ensemble Piazzología, Portugal’s Fado music, and other music, dance and theater groups from Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Cape Verde, and the United Kingdom, and Pablo Picasso’s ceramics are all in the “Iberian Suites” that wraps up March 24. Here’s our review of last weekend’s tribute to three soaring figures of the Hispanic cultural world.
Poet Pablo Neruda. Painter Pablo Picasso. Cellist Pablo Casals. Three geniuses each in their own art forms mirroring and revolutionizing the 20th century as we know it. Brothers through their identical names and year of death (1973), and their desires to change the societies in which they lived. The Kennedy Center’s Feb. 13 multimedia celebration of these three masters was an eye-opening and refreshing reminder of why these men are still frontrunners in the Hispanic art world.
An evening in three parts—with segments dedicated to each artist—was punctuated with moderated discussions about each artist’s life and the trajectory of their careers. The presentations were as individual as the artists themselves. The legacy of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, for instance, was summed up in the trailer of an upcoming documentary, “Pablo Neruda: The Poet’s Calling,” as well as a reading (in Neruda’s own voice) of poem, in which he describes his love of poetry.
Novelist Julia Alvarez took the stage to share how Neruda shaped her life as a Dominican American. She discovered him, she related, through the bad translations in one of her college textbooks, leading to her avid efforts to correct professional translators, which deepened her understanding of the man and his commitment to political change and progress for youth. While the movements he was involved in may have waned, she argued that his continued popularity lies in the fact that his ideals of peace and pure love for life are ones that transcend time.
Next came Pablo Picasso—one of the most renown painters in the modern world, known for his constant, (r)evolutionary changes in artistic style. Picasso’s life was also told, in part, through an excerpt of a documentary. More striking, however, was the old film reel of Picasso painting a masterpiece representing war and peace on a plain white wall. The simple image of a dove holding an olive branch in its mouth has since become internationally recognized as the dove of peace. Marilyn McCully, a professor, author and Picasso expert, discussed how the artist’s life revolved around his artwork.
Though his artistic legacy has been seen traditionally as intertwined with his politics, her research and interviews with people who knew him suggest that politics hardly (if ever) weighed on his mind. In fact he rather disliked politics, and was altogether bored by it. Another little known fact, McCully shared, is while Picasso wanted to be remembered after his death, he wanted to be seen not as a painter, but as a poet who could paint.
The tribute to Pablo Casals followed, starting with a short video created with footage, photos and other archival material provided by his widow and former student, Marta Casals Istomin, an accomplished musician in her own right. Casals knew how to play the violin and piano superbly by the age of six, but later taught himself how to play the instrument for which he is best known, the cello, because there were no teachers in his hometown in Catalonia. In fact his first cello was crudely handcrafted by his teacher, who also happened to be his father. Given his self-motivated beginnings with the instrument it’s hard to say if it’s surprising or natural that he created a technique for playing the cello that’s still used today. It involves embracing the instrument with the bow instead of the more traditional approach involving holding stiff the shoulders and arms.
Casals, like the other two Pablos, felt disillusioned by the war-torn 20th century, and even more so when his native Spain erupted into civil war followed by decades of dictatorship. All three of the artists reacted differently to the horrors of war, but Casals decided to stop giving concerts. He continued to work any way he could, receiving a United Nations peace medal at the age of 94 for his commitment to peace. The famous “Hymn of the United Nations” is one of his last compositions.
The night ended with short concert by cellist Amit Peled and three of his students. Peled played Casals’ own cello lent to him by Casals’s widow, who continues to play it herself instead of locking it away in a glass case after the maestro’s death.
—Lucia Jimenez
(Photos left to right: Pablo Casals, courtesy of the Casals Foundation and Museum; Pablo Picasso by David Douglas Duncan, ©Ars-Succession; Pablo Neruda, courtesy of the Library of Congress)
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