More than any other, Picasso had a stormy relationship with tradition. A visual bulimic, the painter was also endowed with an exceptional plastic digestion, which allowed him to experiment and adapt to his own account the various achievements of past art. It is that beyond a “swapping” dialogue with his illustrious predecessors, defying centuries and history, Picasso takes his place among the Masters by appropriating and killing their masterpieces, the better to surgically extract their substance. These “borrowings” are immediately perceived by the critics, in a commentary that follows his first important exhibition in 1901: “One can easily disentangle, in addition to the great ancestors, many probable influences, Delacroix, Manet… Degas, Forain, Rops… Each one passing, as soon flown away as captured, one sees that his enthusiasm did not leave him the leisure to forge a personal style”. Curiously, the name of El Greco is not mentioned as a probable source of inspiration. Yet the influence of El Greco is clearly visible throughout Picasso’s early years and especially during his blue period. The Basel exhibition, organized by museum director Josef Helfenstein and Carmen Gimenez, a leading expert on the Spanish artist, is convincing in its examination of these years. To support the demonstration, the articles in the beautiful catalog carefully locate the written traces where the “father” of Cubism mentions his admiration for his illustrious colleague. Already in 1897, Picasso, speaking of his visits to the Prado, evokes “the magnificent heads of El Greco”. Years later - in 1964 - he confided to Brassai that he probably owed his disproportionately elongated figures, created during his blue period, to a visit to Toledo. Moreover, in several works, the artist added the name of his “ancestor” to the title (A Man after El Greco, 1899, Figures in the Style of El Greco, 1899). However, the ambition of the Baltic event is to show that the impact of the seventeenth-century painter has profoundly marked Picasso to support this demonstration of Picasso’s work. To do this, the course offers comparisons of works of these two artists, sometimes stylistic, sometimes thematic. Unquestionably, one of the most relevant confrontations is already in 1901 between Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) and the spectacular Adoration of the Name of Jesus(1577-79). Here, Picasso’s work, a tribute to his close friend, takes up El Greco’s exploded composition and disregards the rules of perspective. The figures distributed over the entire surface of the canvas escape the laws of gravity and form a floating constellation between heaven and earth. Another dialogue is established between the portraits made by the two painters. An amusing comparison is that of a nobleman whose habit is decorated with a resplendent strawberry (An Old Gentleman, 1587-1600) and the portrait of Jaune Sabartés (1939), which Picasso adorns with a no less impressive ruff. Elsewhere, the portrait of Daniel Kahnweller (1957), uses the same position as Saint Joseph of El-Greco (1577-1580) - the figure is bent over, with his hand supporting his head. Other face-to-face works of the same type - The Man from the House of Leiva (1580- 1585) and The Musketeer (Domenico Theotocopulos van Rijn da Silva, 1967) - are disturbing, even if we notice that their poses fit without the slightest difficulty with the usual repertory of portraitists. But, as we know, the great revolution attributed to Picasso is that of Cubism. On this point, the links between the two painters, separated by more than three centuries, are more complex. Certainly, both share a radical questioning of the art of their time and do not hesitate to move from one style to another. Thus, the mannerism of El Greco gives rise to deformations of the human figure, sometimes geometric and an imaginary space, invented by the artist. According to the organizers, Picasso, for his part, follows in the footsteps of Cézanne and his Large Bathers and uses the same principles to move away from representation based on the laws of mimetics. Without doubt, this hypothesis - without forgetting the contribution of African art, which is essential - opens up interesting avenues. Nevertheless, the viewer sometimes finds it difficult to perceive a kinship between examples chosen in Basel, such as the one that juxtaposes Saint Ildefonso of Toledo by El Greco (1603-1605) with Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece, a monumental Cubist still life, Bread and Casserole on a Table, 1908-1909. The presence of a table at the heart of each of these paintings is only a weak pretext to justify this comparison The fact remains that, unquestionably, the El Greco-Picasso pairing works better than all those we have had in recent years. One more reason to see the limits of this association