A lot has been said, written, and photographed about the art and life of Pablo Picasso. But, after seeing the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, it becomes apparent that he made living and loving part of his oeuvre as well. What we thought we knew about him shifted dramatically, after visiting the structure dedicated to him by his friend and personal secretary, Jaume Sabartés. Picasso lived the key years of his apprenticeship as an artist in Barcelona. He established and maintained strong links to the city throughout his life. It was here that he wanted a museum. Picasso left no will; his heirs paid the estate taxes owed to France with works from his collection. These form the core of the immense and representative collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 2003, relatives of Picasso inaugurated a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace, Málaga, Spain. But, Picasso’s true wish was the creation of a museum in Barcelona, proposed by Sabartés to the City Council of Barcelona. In 1963, the museum became a reality and opened its doors in the gothic Palace Aguilar, located at number 15 Carrer de Montcada.

The Museu Picasso of Barcelona currently occupies five grand houses or palaces dating from the 13th through 14th centuries. These structures have undergone renovations over the years, with the most important ones taking place in the 18th century. From the first opening of the Museu Picasso in 1963 to the present day, the facility has grown from using one of the palaces on Montcada to the five that house the collection today. The palaces are a good example of Catalan civic gothic style. They have a common structure surrounding a courtyard with access to the main floor via an outdoor open stairway, strikingly reminiscent of Spanish Colonial achitecture we photographed in Pueblo, Mexico.

The Museu Picasso in Barcelona features many of Picasso’s early works, created while he was living in Spain, including many rarely seen works which reveal Picasso’s firm grounding in classical techniques. The museum also holds many precise and detailed figure studies done in his youth under his father’s tutelage, as well as the extensive collection of Jaume Sabartés, Picasso’s close friend and personal secretary. Though this museum contains very little of the work that we have grown know as a “Picasso,” it does a great deal to inform us about the tradtional art training that he experienced in his formative years.

The art housed here is interesting, but it’s the stories we discover within the staggering variety of media and the insight it gives us into how Picasso directs his own growth as an artist that elevate our experience in this museum. His attractions and relationships guide the direction he takes. Chance meetings at the Café Quatre Gats with the Catalan avant garde influenced by Catalan Modernism create an interest in landscapes and poster painting. Immediately following this encounter, he founds the magazine Arte Joven. He meets El Greco and is drawn to elongation and melancholy, which we see in his later work, when he exhibits in Toledo, Spain. Upon moving to Paris in early 1900, he meets up with the Bohemians, where the city and artists in many ways are the center of the world. The Exposition in 1900 is a reflection of Paris’ cultural and political importance at the end of the 19th century. The many traveling performers at the exhibition fascinate Picasso and we see in his art many of the scenes he observes. This is also the first time that Picasso is exposed to the works of Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, and Gaugin. His friend from Sitges, Josep Sunyer, is already living in Montmartre at the time, as are other Catalan artists. Picasso soon moves into the same area with Carles Casagemas. The suicide of his friend, Casagemas, moves Picasso from intense swaths of color to monochrome blue, as he begins to feel that art springs from suffering, sadness, mystery, sincerity, and the world of outcasts.

In later years another chance meeting, with a couple making pottery in the south of France, he shifts his interest to ceramics. In the final rooms of these quarters, we see the beginning of his transformation into what we now know as cubism and a clear break from the way everyone else is painting at the time. There are clues in the paintings as to what emerges as one of modern art’s greatest painters. But, we are far more riveted by our realization that relationships drive many artists to take meandering walks with people they meet in order to discover who they are and how they need to tell us what they see and feel. Far from being just a civic building in which to hang art, these ancient apartments provide doors and windows into the process of becoming an artist…Picasso selected his secretary and confidante wisely. It’s clear that Jaume Sabartés understood his employer and friend, Pablo. We leave satisfied, having made his acquaintance.

(Photograph credits: Stephanie Chambers) The gallery, below, consists of photos of the architecture of the courtyard and entrance to the palaces that comprise the Museu Picasso of Barcelona. We were not allowed to photograph the collection. That the renovation of these apartments is sensitive is seen most vividly in the cisterns that once held water, now beneath the glass floor on which we walked in the museum (third row, first photo on left).