Sabartés by Picasso by Sabartés

Both of them were students at La Llotja School of Fine Arts and regularly frequented the café Quatre Gats in the company of other young Barcelona-based artists. Sabartés also travelled to Paris in the autumn of 1901. Pablo Picasso and Mateu Fernández de Soto were there to meet him at Gare d'Orsay. That first journey, which lasted until 1904, the year Pablo Picasso finally settled in Paris and Jaume Sabartés left for Guatemala, resulted in a string of indelible memories: conversations, student workshops and the places they visited in Barcelona at the start of the 20th century. And, of course, their friends: Manuel Pallarès, Sebastià Junyer i Vidal, Ramon “Moni” and Cinto Reventós, Carles Casagemas, Emili Fontbona, Àngel and Mateu Fernández de Soto and Joan Vidal Ventosa, the relationship with some of who was rekindled forty years later, always against the backdrop of Barcelona and their formative years.

There he experienced the dictatorship of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the conservative government of Carlos Herrera and the coup d’état that brought General José María Orellana, a follow-on to the Estrada Cabrera regime, to power. Jaume Sabartés formed part of the country’s group of progressive intellectuals and artists and fulfilled numerous functions in several newspapers, including El Comercio and Diario de los Altos, and the magazine Juan Chapín. He went to New York in late 1911, and, upon his return in early 1913, moved to the city of Quetzaltenango. Following the overthrow of Estrada Cabrera, he returned to the capital and stayed there until 1927, when he left the country for good. Between 1928 and 1935, Sabartés lived in Montevideo, Paris and Madrid. Sabartés wrote two novels about the dictator, translated and published in France under the titles Don Julian and Son Excellence.

PHis texts were published by Paris-based publishers such as Braun, Louis Carré, Maximilien Vox, René Drouin and La Bibliothèque française. He worked with Picasso on collector’s books for publishers such as Cercle d’Art and Au Pont des Arts. One of his most celebrated publications, “Picasso, Portraits and Souvenirs”, was translated into French, English, Italian, German and Japanese. As Picasso’s biographer, Sabartés set about documenting the artist’s family, one of the most recurrent themes of his letters with Picasso.
Picasso, on his part, portrayed Sabartés continually throughout their friendship with a wide range of media: paintings, drawings, engravings, and also writings.

This epistolary relationship grew more intense after 1935, when Jaume Sabartés and his partner, Mercedes Iglesias, moved to Paris. Some of the letters from Sabartés’ initial years as Picasso’s personal secretary did not even need stamps, as Pablo Picasso would simply slot them underneath his friend’s door. Not even the telephone, which Pablo Picasso acquired early on, would replace the written dialogue they maintained over the course of their forty-year epistolary relationship.

The selection on display is a sample of the almost seven hundred letters that Pablo Picasso wrote to Jaume Sabartés, and which are now in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. As for the letters Jaume Sabartés sent to Pablo Picasso –of which there are over one thousand–, they are housed inside the Musée National Picasso in Paris.

This sexual humour, crude in some cases, became even more commonplace in the late 1950s, when Picasso and Sabartés were approaching their 80s. Picasso included in his correspondence with Sabartés the odd postcard of young, attractive ladies, or used the centre pages of the magazine “Ciné-Révelation”, or advertisements from magazines such as “Vogue”, featuring pictures of young contemporary actress like Josette Arno or the swimmer Esther Williams. Picasso would write on the printed page and redraw the photograph, depicting Sabartés in ridiculous situations or grotesque positions, as an old man begging a young beauty for sexual favours.

The term “pin-up” was first used by Jaume Sabartés in his letters to Picasso in a story about a flight from Nice to Paris, on 6 March 1956, in reference to an American passenger.

This hall also holds the complete series (seven stages) of an engraving entitled “Sabartés with two women”, completed between 4 July 1959 and 31 March 1960, as well as a caricature of Sabartés drawn a few days before he returned from his 75th birthday celebration in Brussels.

Sabartés introduced them to Picasso in Cannes in 1955, a journey that would mark the beginning of a relationship of trust, on the back of which the gallery Sala Gaspar organised its first exhibition of works by Picasso in 1956.

The friendship with the “Gaspars”, as they were affectionately called by Picasso and Sabartés, grew increasingly stronger during the gallery owners’ frequent trips to Paris, and during Sabartés’ time in Barcelona, where he spent his holidays every year until 1964. These experiences helped weave the fabric that Jaume Sabartés needed to get his most ambitious project off the ground: the creation of a Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

A difficult endeavour given Pablo Picasso’s overt political position in opposition of the Francoist dictatorship, but one made possible thanks to the institutional solutions provided by, among others, Mayor Josep M. de Porcioles and the notary public Raimon Noguera; Joan Ainaud de Lasarte, director of the Barcelona Art Museums; and Josep Selva i Vives, director of the Modern Art Museum.

The Picasso Museum in Barcelona opened to the public on 9 March 1963. This collection also came to include the collection of Pablo Picasso’s works owned by the Barcelona City Council, at that time housed within the Modern Art Museum. Pablo Picasso, however, continued to give Sabartés a sample of his entire graphic opus, and Sabartés continued to make annual donations to his museum in Barcelona.

Jaume Sabartés died on 13 February 1968 in Paris. As a tribute to his friend, Pablo Picasso gave to the city his series on "Las Meninas", in addition to a portrait of Jaume Sabartés painted in 1901. He also donated the letters he had sent to Sabartés (just under seven hundred) and took over from his friend, informing the Picasso Museum in Barcelona that, from that point forward, he would donate a copy of every engraving dedicated to Sabartés.

In 1970, Pablo Picasso gave to the city the collection of works from his formative years, which had previously been kept in his sister Lola’s flat in Barcelona.