A Day With Picasso in Barcelona

The first thing I did after checking into my hotel on La Rambla was to go out and buy an umbrella. That is, after I had managed to change into a set of dry clothes. It had begun raining as I was waiting outside the airport terminal for the city bus. By the time we reached Plaza Catalunya, it was pouring bucketfuls. I had to hail a taxi for the short trip to my hotel. The lady driver was clearly not pleased with me. I couldn’t make out if it was my poor Spanish that irked her more or the fact that I was a drippy mess, but she charged me what I thought was double the fare. I was not quite pleased myself.

There was another reason why I couldn’t feel cheerful – I had managed to book a free entry to Museu Picasso for that evening, but I was now obliged to give that a go-by. Barcelona was not as cold as Granada, where I was coming from that day. However, it was late-November, I had been soaked to the bone and I didn’t dare brave the rain again. A hot cup of tea and a warm blanket were what my body craved. After those needs were addressed, even a rousing game of football between Atletico Madrid and Sevilla playing on my room TV failed to keep me awake. I woke up only around three in the morning, feeling desperately hungry, also miserable: hadn’t I wasted one whole evening of a short, five-day trip?

Two days later, when I finally got around to visiting the Picasso, I realised just how wrong I had been. Because that day saw the opening of a wonderful retrospective from the work of an outstanding still photographer, David Douglas Duncan, which later became part of the museum’s permanent collection. It was one of the highlights of my tour, but I will come to that later.

Museu Picasso happens to be the first-ever museum dedicated to Picasso’s work. Opened on March 9, 1963, it was also the only one created in Picasso’s lifetime. Originally, the idea was to set it up in Malaga – where he was born and spent his childhood – but Picasso opted for Barcelona, the city he felt most drawn to in all of Spain.

It was his ‘coming-out’ place as a 13-year-old adolescent from a small town and here he struck many friendships that shaped him. Also, it was here that he returned to again and again from his sojourns in Paris till Franco’s rise to power made it impossible for Picasso, an ardent Republican, to return to Spain again.

It was the artist Jaume Sabartes, Picasso’s life-long friend and later his secretary, who conceived of and piloted the museum project with help from the Barcelona city administration. But Picasso was unwilling to allow the museum to bear his name until Spain had fought back dictatorship and was again a democracy. So it started off as the ‘Sabartes Collection’ and Sabartes’s opening donation of over 670 Picasso canvases and drawings, gifted to him by the artist, got the project off the starting block.

Over subsequent years, donations, transfers from other Spanish institutions and fresh acquisitions from different sources have enriched and significantly widened the Picasso’s permanent collection and archives. Major donors have been members of the Picasso family (his mother, sister and nephew), his painter friend Salvador Dali, his second wife Jacqueline Roque and the Barcelona city council.

Today, Museu Picasso boasts nearly 4,300 exhibits in its permanent collection – drawings, paintings, etchings, engravings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs and sketchbooks –making it one of the largest dedicated art museums in the world. The David Douglas Duncan album of 163 brilliant black-and-white photographs, documenting the Picasso family’s time at Cannes (1957-60), got added to the museum collection on the day I happened to visit the museum in 2013.

The steadily expanding collection has obliged Museu Picasso to spread out beyond its original location at Palau Aguilar, a 13th-century nobleman’s mansion on Carrer de Montcada, to four other adjacent buildings – the Castellet, the Meca, La casa Mauri and Palau Finestres, all originally built in the 14th century. There is a quaint, old-world flavour about these structures, with wide open verandahs running along the sides and broad exterior staircases winding around their cores. Some rooms are as large as a basketball court and the ceilings thrice as high as the ones in fashion today. Therefore, the first thing that strikes you about the galleries is the sense of space and light they give you and the exhibits do not crowd around you. The original/main building, Palau Aguilar, has an extensive public library which can be used for reference purposes. A documentary film on Picasso’s life and work runs at designated hours through the day in the library auditorium.

Museu Picasso is the biggest repository of the artist’s early work. There are some ink drawings and oils from 1890 even, when Picasso was not yet nine, and by the time you reach 1894-95, you are face-to-face with a full-grown, accomplished artist. It looks as though, by age 13/14, Picasso had come to terms with, indeed mastered, nearly all the different mediums and idioms that past generations of painters had worked in before he himself came along.

His portraits of his parents, sister Lola, aunt and his pet dog – done when he was not quite 15 – take your breath away not only by their absolute mastery over form, but also by how cleverly he was experimenting with his palette at an early age. While noting how Picasso always sought out writers and original thinkers, rather than other painters, for friends, the American writer Gertrude Stein, one of Picasso’s earliest patrons, made this interesting observation:

“He needed ideas….. but not ideas for painting, no, he had to know those who were interested in ideas, but as to knowing how to paint, he was born knowing all of that.”

His early work includes a fairly large number of oils on wood – not only on canvas which was later pasted on the wood slab, but painted on the wood directly – which gives a quite distinctive tone to the painting, a little darkish and craggy, not very bright or cheerful even when the subject is care-free, gay.

Even before coming to Barcelona, he had done some landscapes which look striking in tone and composition even today: I am thinking of Casa de Comp, a Catalan house standing under a spring-day sky that could well have come from Van Gogh, except that the lone human figure in it was drawn with sharper contours than we would associate with Van Gogh’s oeuvre.

Man Sitting on Barcelona Beach (1896) would not have been unworthy of Manet, or Ciutadella Park (1896) of Monet at his splendid best. There are some watercolours in the ‘Pointillist’ style (made famous by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac) also, with the difference that, unlike Seurat or Signac, Picasso always places one or more human figures within his frame that are drawn in the more common impressionistic style, without ‘points’, and somehow it is these figures that readily draw the viewer’s attention.

Increasingly in Barcelona, Picasso turned his gaze to the humdrum, dreary lives people lived around him. Poverty, loneliness and loss of hope emerge as major themes. Man in a Beret is clearly a rootless man who looks at you blankly: he has nowhere to go and he has stopped bothering about it. An even earlier work, called Head of a Man, presaged the overriding interest in the human form vis-a-vis other subjects: here was a plainly ordinary man with no distinctive features in his physiognomy whom the young Picasso had drawn with great sensitivity and care.

This same interest was driving him to a concern for the human condition which underpins much of his later work. The 1900 painting The Embrace in the Street (pastel on paper), done probably in course of Picasso’s first visit to Paris, shows a couple, a simple working man and woman, united in an embrace that seems to melt them into a single whole. ‘The expressionistic deformation of the bodies is accentuated with intense colours and the marked edges of the figures’, as the museum catalogue explains. The union is taking place as it were in a separate space isolated from the urban landscape, which appears only dimly, distantly.

Back in Barcelona, Picasso embarked on what is known as his Blue Period (1901-04), a time when his palette consisted of monochromatic shades of blue, or a variant of blue-green rarely warmed up by other, more lively colours. Many canvases of this period are on display at Museu Picasso, and they show him engaging repeatedly with the hopelessness of lives lived at society’s margins.

Motherhood (1903) captures this theme with remarkable vividness: here, a poor mother shields her child from the harsh winter weather, her disproportionately large hand contrasting sharply with the expressionless faces of both mother and child. Touches of white pastel lend great luminosity to the faces, but the round, black eyes look on resignedly.

Also read: The Uncanny Echoes of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in Kelly’s Charlottesville Photograph

To the same period, but to not the same medium, belongs the etching (on zinc) The Frugal Meal (1904), which was a recurrent motif of the period, finding expression in a number of paintings and drawings of the period displayed at different museums. (In fact, just about ten days earlier, I had seen one in Madrid’s Thyssen Bornemisza Museum.) Misery and desolation envelop a desperately poor couple seated at a pathetic meal, the man sightless, the woman melancholy despite her partner’s tender embrace around her. Both have elongated, spindly fingers that deepen the impression of raw hopelessness.

Picasso aficionados will not find many works from his cubist/analytical cubist period here, though some sculptures (mostly in bronze) done in that genre are part of the collection. In fact, there is no painting in the museum catalogue after 1917 – until the 58 paintings from the Las Maninas (1957) series make their appearance. This series has, as its point of departure, the eponymous Velazquez canvas from 1656, and goes on to interpret that famous painting from the standpoint of a 20th-century compatriot of the old master.

Picasso explores the world of Velazquez by branching out into different directions, by shifting one or more figures from their original place on the canvas, or modulating, sometimes changing, the amount or even the kind of light that illuminates the scene and/or the characters.

Unlike Velazquez, he does not paint the human figures (or even the dog) in the semi-realistic or heroic (the king in the original) style, but draws them the cubist way, or flattens or reshapes them, highlighting their gestures / bodily signals. The series evolves with its own sense of drama, and you almost get to see why Picasso makes a particular change, or what he was trying to find out.

The focus is on the child, the princess Margarita, and through a fascinating sub-series of sketches and even finished oils, Picasso finally arrives at a representation of the girl that is basically cubist but retains the original’s features with minor exaggerations. In the process, the light-and-shade of the Velazquez canvas has been transformed into a drawing room scene on a bright summer’s day, not a room in the royal palace, but rather the living room of a middle-class home in a city today with a TV and other usual bric-a-brac. There are layers of social commentary underlying this process of reinterpretation that critics have often commented upon.

The David Douglas Duncan exhibition provided a fascinating window into an extraordinary life lived, for the most part, like any ordinary human. Duncan was an ace photojournalist who had made his name covering the Second World War and the Korean War (and later, the Vietnam War). A friend of Picasso’s, he stayed with them as a guest in their home in Cannes off and on during the late 1950s.

Remarkably sensitive portraits of the great man, wife Jacqueline, their young children, their pets (including a Billy Goat with a formidable beard) adorn the collection together with outstanding pictures of their garden, living and dining rooms and Picasso’s studio. Picasso was on the wrong side of 75 then, but still manically energetic and sharp as a razor.

There are quite a few photographs of his at work in his studio, bare-bodied but for a pair of white shorts, fiddling with a sculpture or standing before an unfinished painting, scratching his head; also some showing him playing with the children in the garden, with the goat fooling around them.

There is a memorable photo of the man and the wife sitting side-by-side, examining a painting, their faces presenting a wonderful contrast. Jacqueline’s face is tender and soft, Picasso’s as leopard-like and taut as ever, his brows wrinkled in concentration, his eyes glowing with suppressed excitement.

The photo showing them leaving their house forever is a very moving one: wearing his Tyrolean hat, Picasso looks back at the house and the garden one last time before he turns the key in the lock and walks out. The exhibition was as appropriate a tribute to a great and restless man as one could imagine, and I counted myself lucky that I had not missed it.

Anjan Basu freelances as a literary critic, commentator and translator. He can be reached at basuanajn52@gmail.com.