A Study of the Figure of Jaume Sabartés
The exhibition Sabartés by Picasso by Sabartés (Museu Picasso, 23/11/2018-30/03/2019) was the presentation of a research project on the figure of Jaume Sabartés i Gual (Barcelona, 1881-Paris, 1968), founder of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona together with Pablo Picasso. In 2004, the Museum Library began a project to compile all the texts published by Jaume Sabartés on the work of Picasso. The aim was to highlight his facet as a scholar and disseminator of Picasso's work and to vindicate his position in the bibliography on the artist. The research brought together twenty-seven texts written between 1936 and 1963, revealing an even more unknown side of Jaume Sabartés' work: that of a writer.
The purchase of Jaume Sabartés' archive by the Museu Picasso in 2008 –which had been in the hands of the person who looked after it during his last years, Pilar Solano–meant the incorporation of precious documentation on his work as a writer and biographer and disseminator of Picasso's work.
For all these reasons, the library of the Centre for Knowledge and Research is pursuing three lines of work around the personal collection of Jaume Sabartés at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, intending to provide quality information tools for future research projects on both the figure of Pablo Picasso and Jaume Sabartés himself.
For all these reasons, the library of the Centre for Knowledge and Research is pursuing three lines of work around the personal collection of Jaume Sabartés at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, intending to provide quality information tools for future research projects on both the figure of Pablo Picasso and Jaume Sabartés himself.
In 2017, once the correspondence kept at the Centre for Knowledge and Research sent by Picasso to Sabartés, and donated by Picasso himself when his friend died in February 1968, had been inventoried, work began on transcribing, summarising and editing it. At the same time, work also began transcribing the letters sent by Sabartés to Picasso, which are kept in the Pablo Picasso personal archive at the Musée Picasso in Paris.
It is a collection of nearly two thousand items: letters, envelopes, postcards, press cuttings, drawings and other objects they sent each other.
The publication aims to produce a cross-publication to enhance the content of both personal collections and ensure that the publication is as complete and exhaustive a source of information as possible
This project involves the publication of a monograph that will bring together the twenty-seven original texts by Jaume Sabartés in a critical edition that will include studies by specialists in Picasso's work. It should be borne in mind that many of these texts are unpublished in the language in which they were written, Spanish, and that most of them have only been published in French translation. The research includes the localisation of the original texts.
On the other hand, translating these texts into Catalan will represent a rehabilitation of the dissemination work on Picasso's life and work carried out by Jaume Sabartés in his mother tongue and common language.
In the catalogue of the exhibition Sabartés by Picasso by Sabartés, the first issue of the collection "Archives Museu Picasso Barcelona", most of these texts were presented.
