Picasso, alive in Barcelona

Like any Barcelona res­i­dent, Pi­casso loved a stroll dur­ing the years he lived in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal, from 1895 (when he ar­rived aged 13) to 1904. Let’s fol­low him, then, on one of his strolls.

It’s night and he is to meet his friends to go to the Eden Con­cert music hall on car­rer Nou de la Ram­bla. Later, they will fin­ish the night off with a visit to the brothel next door. Be­fore that, how­ever, he has to visit the Pitx­ots, on car­rer Mont­cada. Along the way he meets up with Manolo Hugué, who lives on car­rer As­saon­adors. He makes a note that the next day he has an ap­point­ment at the sum­mer res­i­dence of Emili Font­bona, on car­rer Pàdua, which is a lit­tle far, but worth it be­cause he has promised him that he will show him how to do his first sculp­ture.

Pi­casso and Barcelona. Barcelona and Pi­casso. City and artist each left in­deli­ble marks on the other. Pi­casso vis­ited Barcelona for a final time in 1934. In a way, he never left. “Wher­ever he could not go phys­i­cally, he went in his imag­i­na­tion,” says Ed­uard Vallès, Pi­casso ex­pert and mod­ern art con­ser­va­tor at the MNAC na­tional gallery.

Nor has Barcelona es­caped Pi­casso. It keeps him alive, and not only in the mu­seum with his name. There are streets and places where he lived, had fun, made friends, where he had stu­dios and where he showed his work. These places have mostly been con­served, and they evoke what the city meant for this young man from Malaga.

Barcelona is like a huge open-air Pi­casso mu­seum. It is a con­stel­la­tion of spaces im­preg­nated with his ex­pe­ri­ences where the artist posed ques­tions never be­fore asked and which ac­ti­vated his cre­ative po­ten­tial. Pi­casso knew he could paint as well as any­one, but it was not enough. In Barcelona he de­cided he wanted to paint dif­fer­ently. And Barcelona showed him the way.

It is a path that any res­i­dent or vis­i­tor can fol­low today. “Few cities in the world show such a pow­er­ful link be­tween artist and city, be­cause many places from that time re­main,” says Vallès.

One thing that spurred Pi­casso on dur­ing his time in Barcelona were his ac­quain­tances with artists and writ­ers with the same rest­less­ness to cre­ate. Barcelona breathed cre­ativ­ity. And Pi­casso had a good pair of lungs. He was as mo­ti­vated by being along­side the likes of poet Rafael Nogueras (Max Jacob, Guil­laume Apol­li­naire and Paul Éluard were not Pi­casso’s first lit­er­ary friends) as he was by the sa­cred cows of mod­ernism (Van Gogh’s in­flu­ence came later). Here is Ramon Casas. An­other might be in­tim­i­dated, but not Pi­casso, who de­spite his in­ex­pe­ri­ence won over the artist. They were in Paris to­gether. Casas painted him. He even in­vited him to share an ex­hi­bi­tion in Sala Parés. “The gen­tle­men of Cata­lan art saw his tal­ent straight away,” says Vallès.

That makes Els Qua­tre Gats a good place to start. It is the place that best ex­plains the awak­en­ing of his ge­nius. “It an­tic­i­pated the moder­nity of Paris,” Vallès points out.

This is where he had his first ex­hi­bi­tion, in Feb­ru­ary 1900, with more than a hun­dred por­traits. It was im­pro­vised and there was no cat­a­logue, so the list of what was dis­played is un­known. The works were not even framed and were pinned to the walls. Was it a suc­cess? Those who vis­ited it were “few and not well-cho­sen” says Jaume Sabartés in his mem­oirs.

Pi­casso’s first stu­dio, in 1896 and 1897, was rented from Manuel Pal­larès and was an attic in a build­ing that still ex­ists, on car­rer de la Plata. It’s ac­tu­ally im­por­tant, as it was here that he painted one of his first mas­ter­pieces, Sci­ence and Char­ity. Today, it is a hotel. Two plaques mark the pres­ence of the ge­nius. From the rooftop the view is mag­nif­i­cent. Pi­casso must have thought the same when he painted La Barceloneta here. The land­scape has changed and now you can hardly see the shore, but the ar­chi­tec­ture of the small houses in the fish­ing neigh­bour­hood and the ma­rina nearby are still recog­nis­able.

By Feb­ru­ary 1900 Pi­casso had an­other stu­dio, which he shared with Car­les Casage­mas. It was on car­rer Riera de Sant Joan but was de­mol­ished when Via Lai­etana was built. “The ideal route through Pi­casso’s Barcelona must in­clude the city’s his­tory. Be­cause Pi­casso and Barcelona evolved side-by-side,” says Vallès.

An ex­am­ple would be the sec­ond-floor flat on car­rer de la Mercè, which was knocked down in the 1980s to make room for the Mercé square, which was the home of the Pi­casso fam­ily until 1935, when they moved to pas­seig de Gràcia, 48.

By then Pi­casso was far away, even if emo­tion­ally he re­mained linked to Barcelona. When in the 1960s his bi­og­ra­pher John Richard­son told him he was going there for re­search, Pi­casso gave him the ad­dress of a brothel on car­rer Nou de la Ram­bla and told him to ask for the madame, Car­lota Val­divia, who had one eye. He had im­mor­talised her in his paint­ing, Ce­lestina.

The Pi­casso itin­er­ary takes time. But it has to end some­where, and we will end where he did in 1904, his work­shop on car­rer del Comerç, 28. A mod­est plaque re­calls that three artists worked here. Apart from Pi­casso, Pau Gar­gallo and Isidre Nonell. But be­fore clos­ing the door be­hind him, Pi­casso must have taken a final look at a re­cently fin­ished paint­ing, his vi­sion in blue of the Palau de Belles Arts. The Barcelona gallery was a short walk from his stu­dio, and he had a spe­cial link with it be­cause it was where his first work was dis­played in 1896: First Com­mu­nion, one of many works he would end up gift­ing to the gallery, part of his legacy of the time he spent in Barcelona.

Art