Pablo Picasso, Emili Fontbona

The main objectives of the Museu Picasso are, on the one hand, to preserve, research and disseminate Picasso’s oeuvre and, on the other, to enhance the museum’s permanent collection of artworks and documents. We are therefore pleased to present the gift of two works in bronze by sculptor Emili Fontbona, a friend of Picasso’s with whom the painter made his first sculptural work during his Barcelona period. The two works, cast in 2014, complete the set of documents and photographs related to Picasso and his oeuvre during
the years he spent in Catalonia.

Barcelona bore witness to Pablo Picasso’s formative period as an artist in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Those were the days when he joined the circles of modern artists who gathered at different venues, especially at the Quatre Gats tavern, for which he would design the cover of the menu and where his first solo exhibition was held in February 1900.

In these circles Picasso struck up friendships with other young artists and intellectuals such as Jaume Sabartés, Ramon and Cinto Raventós, Vidal Ventosa, Carles Casagemas, the Junyer brothers, the Hernández de Soto brothers or Emili Fontbona, along with other renowned artists like Ramon Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, Isidre Nonell, Anglada Camarasa, Ricard Canals and Miquel Utrillo.

Picasso, always attentive to innovations in artistic disciplines and techniques, benefited from the knowledge and skills of his friends and decided to try his hand at printmaking and sculpture. Just as Ricard Canals helped him create his first etching, in 1902 Emili Fontbona supervised his first sculptural work, Seated Woman, of which the museum has a bronze cast.