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website). A
café
with a
terrassa
in one of the palace courtyards offers refresh-
ments, and there is of course a
shop
, stuffed full of Picasso-related gifts.
Incidentally, works are due to start soon on a new main entrance to the
museum (from c/dels Flassaders, to the rear), which will reduce congestion in
the narrow c/Montcada.
The collection
The museum opened in 1963 with a collection based largely on the donations
of Jaime Sabartes, longtime friend and former secretary to the artist. On
Sabartes’ death in 1968, Picasso himself added a large number of works – above
all, the works of the Meninas series – and in 1970 he donated a further vast
number of watercolours, drawings, prints and paintings.
The works on show are extremely well laid out, as they follow the artist’s
development chronologically, with the early periods by far the best represented.
The
early drawings
, particularly, are fascinating, in which Picasso – still signing
with his full name, Pablo Ruiz Picasso – attempted to copy the nature paintings
in which his father specialized. Paintings from his art school days in
Barcelona
(1895–97) show tantalizing glimpses of the city that the young Picasso was
beginning to know well – the Gothic old town, the cloisters of Sant Paul del
Camp, Barceloneta beach – and even at the ages of 15 and 16 he was producing
serious works, including knowing self-portraits and a closely observed study of
his mother from 1896.Works in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec, like the menu
Picasso did for
Els Quatre Gats
tavern in 1900, reflect his burgeoning interest in
Parisian art at the turn of the century, while other sketches, drawings and illus-
trations (many undertaken for competitions and magazines) clearly show
Picasso’s development of his own unique personal style. His paintings from the
Picasso in Barcelona
Although born in Málaga,
Pablo Picasso
(1881–1973) spent much of his youth – from
the age of 14 to 23 – in Barcelona. He maintained close links with Barcelona and his
Catalan friends even when he left for Paris in 1904, and is said to have always
thought of himself as Catalan rather than
andaluz
. The time Picasso spent in
Barcelona encompassed the whole of his Blue Period (1901–04) and provided many
of the formative influences on his art.
Apart from the Museu Picasso, there are echoes of the great artist at various
sites throughout the old town. Not too far from the museum, you can still see many
of the buildings in which Picasso lived and worked, notably the
Escola de Belles
Arts de Llotja
(c/Consolat del Mar, near Estació de França), where his father taught
drawing and where Picasso himself absorbed an academic training. The
apart-
ments
where the family lived when they first arrived in Barcelona – Pg. d’Isabel II 4
and c/Reina Cristina 3, both near the Escola – can also be seen, though only from
the outside, while Picasso’s first real
studio
(in 1896) was located over on c/de la
Plata at no. 4. A few years later, many of his Blue Period works were finished at
a studio at c/del Comerç 28. His first
public exhibition
was in 1901 at
Els Quatre
Gats
tavern (c/Montsió 3, Barri Gòtic); you can still have a meal there today. The
other place to retain a link with Picasso is
c/d’Avinyó
in the Barri Gòtic, which
cuts south from c/Ferran to c/Ample. Large houses along here were converted
into brothels at the end of the nineteenth century, and Picasso used to haunt the
street sketching what he saw. Some accounts of his life – based on Picasso’s own
testimony, it has to be said – claim that he had his first sexual experience here at
the age of 14, but certainly the women at one of the brothels inspired his seminal
Cubist work,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
.
SANT PERE, LA RIBERA AND CIUTADELLA
|
Museu Picasso