MALAGA.- Between September 1939 and August 1940, Picasso produced eight sketchbooks of pencil and ink drawings while he was living in the French town of Royan, to where he moved with Dora Maar and accompanied by Jaime Sabartés following the outbreak of World War II. Marie-Thérèse Walter and Maya, Walter’s daughter with Picasso, had already been living in the town for a couple of months. Far from the French capital, this seaside town with its 19th-century architecture seemed a safe place at the time. Disturbed and restless due to the war, during those eight months Picasso made the 500-kilometre journey between Royan and Paris on several occasions in order to ensure that, as a foreigner, his documents were in order and also to check on the safety and storage of his works and even to participate in preparations for an exhibition of his drawings.
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Marilyn McCully, the exhibition’s curator, considers that the nature of Picasso's artistic activity changed, largely as a result of the limited availability of materials: “Thus, in order to develop his ideas in sequence, a characteristic of his working method, he devoted much of his creative energies to drawing.” Possibly due to the difficulty of finding art materials in Royan, Picasso purchased several sketchbooks and notebooks of ordinary paper, both lined and graph paper, at the local Hachette bookstore. Their small size meant that he was able to take them with him to his hotel room, to the villa and even to outdoor café tables. This was habitual with Picasso who, like many artists, used sketchbooks throughout his career to jot down visual ideas, either references to previous works or new ideas for future compositions.
The themes of the Royan sketchbooks range from still life, a genre that Picasso employed during the war with particular drama, to formal studies of female figures that evoke Dora Marr, his companion at the time and a source of artistic inspiration during their stay in the town. The almost complete absence of portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter and her daughter Maya, whom he saw daily, is striking. Among the sketchbooks exhibited at the Museo Picasso Málaga is one that also includes poetic writings by Picasso, a form of expression with which he experimented for the first time in 1935.
Another factor that could have influenced this preference for drawing is the artist’s work space. Having initially installed himself in a dining room of the Villa Gerbier de Jonc where Marie-Thérèse and Maya were also living, in early 1940 Picasso rented a third floor with sea views in the building Les Voiliers. Although there is no certainty regarding exactly how many canvases the artist painted during his time in Royan, four works included in the exhibition reflect his pictorial activity and creative drive during that period: Bust of a Woman with her Arms crossed behind her Head (1939) from the collection of the Museo Picasso Málaga; Three Lambs’ Heads (1939) loaned by the Museo Nacional Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Woman dressing her Hair (1940) from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; and Café in Royan (August 1940) loaned by the Musée Picasso in Paris. For the exhibition’s curator Michael Raeburn: “Where previously he had drawn on the simplification of tribal art to escape from an outworn tradition of objective imitation, he now tried to harness the inner power of these same models to penetrate the subjective identity of heads and figures.”
On 14 June 1940 Paris was occupied by the German forces and on 24 August that year Picasso returned permanently to the city, recovering a few months later the work he had left in Royan. In 1945 the building in Royan where he had installed his second studio was destroyed in a bombing raid.
Picasso: The Royan sketchbooks, organised in collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and with an installation design by Cécile Degos, contextualises these sketchbooks by presenting them alongside other works created by the artist in Royan, in addition to documentation relating to that period. Drawings, gouaches, paintings, photographs and poems by Picasso together reveal a prolific stage in his life and artistic career.
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