PiQasso Sharing a musketeer

The purchase was made by the QoQa.ch website community, which was founded in Switzerland in 2005; today the community has about 600,000 members.
For this project, the website offered 40,000 shares of the painting at CHF 50 (around £40 or €45), which were acquired by 25,000 people in less than 48 hours. Since that day, a platform has been created, on which the contributors decide on the future of the painting, with many dedicated offers: special evenings, a live webcam to watch the work, etc. A trip to Antibes, following an invitation made by the Picasso Museum, was widely acclaimed by the community.

Although this acquisition process is far removed from those at stake in museums, it is nevertheless reminiscent of a historic Swiss precedent in 1967. That year, the people of Basel’s love of art and culture was brought to light when two paintings by Picasso, Arlequin assis (Seated Harlequin) and Les deux frères (The Two Brothers), which had been at the Kunstmuseum Basel for years, were put on sale by their owner to settle a sudden debt. The citizens of Basel then rallied and with the support of public authorities, namely a governmental decision and a popular vote, they acquired the two paintings in order to keep them in the collection of the museum.
Moved by the commitment and investment of the inhabitants of this city, Pablo Picasso then offered four more of his works to the «Basel Youth», in his own words, to enrich the museum’s collections.

The rare periods when the artist stopped painting were followed by periods that were extremely fruitful in artistic terms. In 1935, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, he hardly touched his brushes for two years. He took them back in 1937 to deliver Guernica. In the mid-1960s, health problems took him away from painting. When he came out of convalescence in 1967, the figure of the musketeer appeared in his work and never left. Fed by many references and the fact that he had rediscovered the old masters - El Greco, Velasquez, Delacroix, Manet, and more particularly Rembrandt - he started using the figure of the musketeer, a real alter-ego of the painter. This character was reminiscent of the world of childhood and chivalry. He explored it against the dominant trends in the artistic world of that time. Picasso thus showed that he was, as his biographer John Richardson wrote, «free to do whatever he wanted, in whatever way he wanted, regardless of correctness, political, social or artistic».