Dalí's Freudian universe and other art exhibitions in Spain and Europe

One summer afternoon in 1938, Salvador Dalí arrived in the distinguished London neighborhood of Hampstead carrying under his arm the oil painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) and a poem about paranoia that he had been wanting to put in the hands of Sigmund Freud for years. Stefan Zweig, who had organized the meeting, acted as host. Old Freud, already exiled from Vienna, listened to the painter with an imperturbable face and, when he left, he confessed to Zweig that he had never met such a complete specimen of Spanish and with such admirable technical mastery. It was not, of course, the recognition that Dalí expected. It was, in essence, a ruling.

That friendly disagreement returns to the Thyssen Museum on October 20 in Dalí's Freudian Universe, a compilation of paintings, drawings, letters and preparatory sketches that illustrate a bond with the father of psychoanalysis that is as lasting as it is unrequited. Freud, who always distrusted the surrealists, sought to excavate the strata of consciousness to find the bedrock of the founding images of painting, poetry, religion or dreams, older than reason; the same archeology of the unconscious that Dalí transferred to the canvas. The exhibition serves as a porch to an autumn that, rather than exhibiting, questions: it crosses works and biographies as pieces of the same file.

Picasso is another example. His work unfolds in three cities. In Paris, the city's Picasso Museum is reconstructing, starting on September 20, the 1973 dialogue between André Malraux and Jacqueline Roque, when the writer, organizing the painter's legacy in his Notre-Dame-de-Vie studio, stumbled upon the wild agglomeration of fetishes and African masks, the germ of his idea of the musée imaginaire that would later crystallize in his essay The Obsidian Head (The Black Stone that the Mesoamerican peoples used as a magical means). That fictionalized dialogue reminds us that Picasso's political commitment, now documented in unpublished manuscripts, was never an abstract gesture: it was born from a war that he lived from exile and painted from rage.

Weeks later, on October 30, the Picasso of Malaga sees the artist face to face with Edvard Munch, in a combat between Nordic agoraphobia and the stage libido of the Mediterranean. For its part, the Museu Picasso of Barcelona places it in architecture from November 20, from Guernica to the 1962 friezes for the Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya: cubism introduced fragmentation, collage and transparency as tools that modern architecture would later adopt, with Le Corbusier in the front row. In the same city, Charlotte Perriand, who shared a decade of study with the French-Swiss architect before the history of design erased her from the firm, arrives on October 9 at the Fundació Miró claiming design as domestic emancipation.

Meanwhile, the Prado Museum will trace in Rilke, from November 17, the traces left by Spanish art. In Toledo, the Austrian poet discovered that the Cretan's painting could reflect the same existential anguish of his verses: the origin of his spiritual crisis. In adjoining rooms, the crudeness of Hans Baldung Grien, an unruly disciple of Dürer, will remind at the end of the same month that all beauty coexists with its shadow. Peninsular mysticism also surrenders at the Louvre Museum, which has dedicated a major retrospective of Zurbarán since October 7, an opportunity to gauge the modernity of his Carthusians and their porcelain cups suspended in a sacred void that preludes minimalism, in tune with an era that seems to begin to seek silence and slowness of images. Also in October, the Musée d'Orsay will free Mary Cassatt from the restraints of historiography. And in London, in November, the National Gallery will examine the deep human psychology reflected in Van Eyck's portraits.

The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum reopens on October 5 after an expansion that leads it to rethink the collection from scratch, paying tribute to the patronage of Plácido Arango, who acquired pieces ranging from the old masters to the most elusive modernity. Not far away, the north of the peninsula has become the new prestigious territory of private collecting, with the strategic landing of new institutions, such as the Cantabrian Faro Santander, Lafuente. Material Culture and the Alkar Foundation in Bilbao. All of them form a financial axis that begins to curate, with the same weapons of the market, the posterity of art.

In the programming dedicated to contemporary art there are also more descents into the confusing underworld of labyrinths, with the reinstallation of La Menesunda by the Argentine Marta Minujín, at the Reina Sofía on November 18. A few weeks before, the Guggenheim Bilbao brings the political gravity and documentary pulse of the British filmmaker and video artist Steve McQueen. La Pedrera will dedicate an exhibition to Anselm Kiefer starting on October 2. Meanwhile, the Macba concludes that same month the program of its Thirtieth Year - and, it would be desirable, also the crisis of its last two periods - to inaugurate a new one under the direction of Valentín Roma. In the neighboring La Virreina, David Wojnarowicz and Marion Scemama will remember that the past of photography is also written from fragility and courage.

In Madrid, on October 16, the Juan March Foundation presents The Aesthetic Transition, a review of 60 years of Spanish art that decides whether that moment of change was a pact of silence or a repressed modernity that finally implodes. On September 24, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid weaves the mystical lyricism of Pre-Raphaelism with the historical justice of its Feminine Itineraries (1850-1914), rescuing the singularity of a group of women artists condemned to the role of languid muses, thus breaking the brutal axiom of Robert Graves, for whom "there is only one story, that of the Muse."