Lecture – 2023 Annual Lecture: Picasso-the Spaniard

Our annual lecture will be held on the evening of 5 June. Our guest speaker will be art historian, food critic and Hispanist Gijs van Hensbergen who recently led an informative tour of the Royal Academy of Arts (see the tour review here).

Even today many art lovers and art historians discuss Picasso in terms of the School of Paris.  Despite many years in exile Picasso continued to engage profoundly with his Spanish pictorial heritage and inspire the younger generation of Spanish artists that include Antonio Saura and Antoni Tapies.  Perhaps his greatest encounter came in 1957 where his months long mano a mano confrontation with Velazquez’s Las Meninas revealed Picasso’s irreverent gift for deconstruction. 

Our in person allocation is SOLD OUT but you can still access the lecture on line, sign up via this link to Instituto Cervantes. 

About the speaker:
Gijs van Hensbergen is a Dutch art historian, food critic and Hispanist. After training at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London for a BA Hons and Postgraduate research in History of Art he worked for the Knoedler Gallery, in London and New York. Following this, he made the rather eccentric decision to devote 5 years of his life to the art of the Master Chef of the Chaine des Rotisseurs as a suckling pig specialist in Segovia, Spain. Gijs van Hensbergen is now the Grand Knight of the Noble Order of the Silver Whisk. Van Hensbergen’s projects and TV work include his collaboration with John Richardson on A Life of Picasso 2010-12.