The Museu Picasso celebrates the 60th anniversary of its inauguration and the 50th anniversary of the death of the great artist. And he has done so by exploring, for example, the relationship between Pablo Picasso and Catalonia, an argument that last month gave rise to a brief and didactic exhibition at the Espai Mercè Sala, on loan from TMB. But this exciting, intense and eternal relationship deserves to be evoked, even if it is through a synthesis.
Pablo Picasso arrived in Barcelona when he was 13 years old. Curious and sociable, he took advantage of the bohemian atmosphere of 4 Gats more than the paternal one of Llotja. Attentive to the advice of the experienced Rusiñol and Casas, he understood that he had to make a pilgrimage to Paris, an adventure that he would not have carried out if he had continued in Malaga or A Coruña.
In Barcelona, he gained an intense and enduring relationship with his buddies, like the one he had with Pallarés or Los Reventós; and he became a sex addict, whether in the brothel or with his passionate love.
His friend Pallarés invited him in 1890 to a long healing stay in his native Horta; In a daring pictorial excursion through the ports, that older friend saved his life by preventing him from falling off a precipice. Picasso realized that in that town he discovered what life really is.
In 4 Gats he was able to show his portraits, an exhibition that received the first evaluation from a critic in La Vanguardia; it was 1900. His going to Paris convinced him that it had to be his goal, not just his artistic goal. Barcelona was in the background, but he will never forget it.
His friend Reventós and the sculptor Casanovas recommended that he go to Gósol. He did well accompanied by the love of the moment: Fernande Olivier. The place fascinated him to the point of abandoning the melancholic blues of Barcelona, varying his palette and daring with an avant-garde that led him to a transcendental, revolutionary, historical painting. Ladies and from Avignon? Go now! The obvious eroticism of the porrón and the watermelon, the medical student with the skull, the sailor and the whores revealed in the sketches another most daring inspiration that he knew: Les senyoretes del carrer d'Avinyó.
Barcelona was still present, not even because of the already established family. Always restless, Paris was well worth the pause of a parenthesis fostered by the attraction of the Mediterranean and that of artist friends, such as Manolo Hugué. In Cadaqués he delved so deeply into cubism that he almost led to abstraction, and immediately he stopped. And then Ceret, who deserved to come back.
In 1917, his collaboration in Diaghilev's ballet presented at the Liceu led him to spend half a year in his Barcelona and with his family, accompanied by his new love: the ballerina Olga. Here he does not stop painting local themes, not even the monument to Columbus. The photo with twenty colleagues and friends by way of recognition in Galeries Laietanes confirmed that the Parisian is above all a Barcelonan. Donate Harlequin to the municipal museum. And he will repeat the visits; the last one will be in 1934.
The uncivil war will then raise an insurmountable border by degenerating into a dictatorship. In the Pavilion of the Republic in Paris, with his Gernika, he strengthened ties with Miró. He helped Catalan refugees. The close professional help of his old friend Sabartés would become the daily presence that reminded him of Barcelona.
In the fifties he felt nostalgic for the sea and especially for Catalonia, and Northern Catalonia allowed him to get closer: Perpignan, Ceret, Cotlliure. He has himself photographed wearing a barretina, frequents and paints some bulls that had already attracted him so much in his youth in Barcelona, in the castle of Vauvenargues a large Catalan flag hangs at the head of his bed, which he even painted on the back of the dining room chairs. He unsuccessfully asked the daughter of Jacqueline Picasso to donate those significant seats to the museum.
He braided other friends: the Gili, Antoni Clavé and above all the Gaspares, to whom he confessed his envy before his departure: “How lucky you are to go to Barcelona; I can not!".
The relationship with his beloved and longed for Barcelona did not stop intensifying. The frieze of the Col legi d'Arquitectes. He gave away a large painting when the Vallès floods. The museum on Montcada street, the result of the generosity of Sabartés (dissuaded by Picasso from not offering his collection to Malaga, where "they don't know who I am") and the courage of Mayor Porcioles.
After having spent an entire afternoon with the painter in 1963, I wrote a two-page report for the magazine Destino that suffered five weeks of censorship as a severe warning, since it was published without a single erasure. Upon returning from a visit, my friend Palau i Fabre, his authorized biographer, entrusted me to deliver the great news that Picasso had announced to him: “Tell Barcelona that Las Meninas are for Barcelona”. The formidable donation of everything the family, the Vilatós, treasured, was able to materialize thanks to the professionalism of the notary Raimon Noguera.
I proposed dedicating eight color pages of the Sunday edition of the newspaper to its 90th anniversary, since La Vanguardia, which had published its first review of its first exhibition, deserved to commemorate such an important date. Pallarés told me his memories of him, I couldn't talk to Picasso so he could paint the cover; I then asked Miró and he confessed that he was delighted. It was the highest category congratulations that was published worldwide, and they were not few. Picasso had this work and the copy of the diary together in a highly visible place in a relevant room, and he showed it with pride, according to what his photographer Douglas Duncan revealed to me.
