In the summer of 1906, a 24-year-old Pablo Ruiz Picasso traveled with Fernande Olivier to Gósol, a then remote village at the foot of the Cadí, which could only be reached after eight hours by mule up the mountain. In less than three months he managed to create more than three hundred pieces - among oils, watercolors and drawings -, some of which are seen today as direct precedents of what is perhaps the most transformative work of the 20th century : Les señoretes del carrer d'Avinyó, which he painted back in Paris and which turned him, now yes, into a highly recognized artist. What happened in this town of Berguedà so that Picasso overcame the creative block he was going through and found the solutions that would definitively boost his art?
The writer Iñaki Rubio has answered the question with a non-fiction novel: Pau de Gósol. Picasso in the Pyrenees (Comanegra), in which he narrates this stay and traces his relations with the people of the town, especially with Josep Fondevila, head of the house of Cal Tampanada, the inn where they stayed, but also with his relatives from Cal Benedict
Rubio, born in Barcelona in 1974 but Andorran by adoption, had been thinking about the subject for years, especially after wondering about the women who appear in the Picasso painting Pageses d'Andorra: it is most likely that they were from Gosola than the young painter portrayed the town. From there, the writer was immersed in documentation, but also in conversations with the inhabitants of the town, some of them relatives of people who treated the artist. But the author defends that "it is not a specialist's book", but the aim was to create a narrative work that would allow the reader to get inside Picasso's soul: "I had to transmit knowledge with the tools of the novelist, so that the story transforms the reader as Gósol transformed Picasso".
To achieve this, it is clear, he had to use his imagination, either by inventing dialogues or even by creating and writing erotic scenes. "It was impossible not to do it when dealing with Picasso, but it was one of the most difficult things in the book", explains Rubio in a meeting in this town of Berguedà. And it's not just that we see Picasso enjoying sex with Fernande, but also that he is looking for scenes between his partner's paintings. But it also holds an enigma: who was Hermínia, the woman that Picasso portrayed up to 17 times? Was there more to it than words? As the narrator, Rubio speculates that in a mountain village environment, at the beginning of the 20th century, for an outsider to talk to a woman could lead to misunderstandings and some reprimand from Josep Fondevila.
During those two and a half months, he recalls, the painter loosened the rope of jealousy over his model: "It's just that in the village, during the day there were only women, because the men were working outside, and besides Fernande only spoke French ...”. In any case, "Picasso and Fernande were happy here".
Looking for a new identity, he stopped being Pablo Ruiz Picasso to become Pau de Gósol, the name with which he signed some of the letters - some written in Catalan - that he sent from there. He felt welcome there, and was able to work a lot: "He was afraid of white space, and his way of finding artistic solutions was to paint, paint and paint". Many of these pieces, by the way, can be seen in November in the great exhibition that the Queen Sofia is dedicating to this stage of the painter and which has been in preparation for years.
The reader follows the painter in the midst of creating some works of the moment, be it The Harem, Three Nudes, the portrait of Fondevila or the Woman of Bread -which today, converted into a sculpture, presides over the town square-, in the which artist will use the "face-mask" that will later help him finish the portrait of his patron Gertrude Stein. According to legend, only in one day and without having seen her again. One more step towards the cubist revolution that was to come.
