Sabartés by Picasso by Sabartés

Fifty years after the death of Jaume Sabartés (Barcelona, 10 June 1881 – Paris, 13 February 1968), the founder, along with Pablo Picasso, of the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the personal archives held by the Museum have finally been made available to researchers. To mark the occasion, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona has organised an exhibition that aims to pay tribute to Jaume Sabartés, and not just as the life-long friend and confident of the 20th-century’s most decisive painter, but also due to his own personal career as a biographer, writer, translator, teacher and intellectual, politically committed to the issues of his time.

Picasso painted the first portrait of Sabartés in 1900 and, over their more than sixty-year friendship, continued to draw and caricature him regularly. Sabartés wrote more than twenty texts about Pablo Picasso, an ongoing compendium that examined and shed light on the artist’s biography and work processes, with the firm belief that Pablo Picasso was and would be, in the future, the 20th-century’s greatest and most multifaceted genius.

The title of the exhibition makes reference to the circular line drawn by the careers of the two friends: pictorial writings and literary portraits of a life lived together.