1917. Picasso in Barcelona

Coinciding with the centenary of the longest visit that Picasso made to Barcelona, after having settled down definitively in Paris in 1904, the Museu Picasso has organised an exhibition that, beyond being commemorative, provides new data to the life and creative chronology of the artist.

The catalogue narrates the meeting up again of Picasso with the city – between June and November 1917, and it does so by contextualising a very significant group of works from the permanent collection of the museum, which were carried out precisely during those months, by means of documents that until now had been unpublished (the majority conserved in the Picasso Archives of Paris) and of the stylistic and thematic plurality of the numerous drawings that fill three of his sketchbooks.

The Picasso that the catalogue shows is the Picasso who started his relation with Olga Khokhlova, who strolled with her around some of the best known places of the city, visiting Barcelona friends, and going to the theatre or watching bullfights. The result is a rich and suggestive monograph that approaches us to an artist who debated between the cleansing of classicism and the survival of the Cubist language. All in all, a close and active Picasso, and in permanent transformation.