A Compilation of Sketches in "Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks"

Over nine months, Picasso produced eight notebooks of drawings and poetry, and a handful of canvases, including the masterpiece Woman Dressing Her Hair. That painting, along with five other canvases and the sketchbooks, constitute the singular exhibition, Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks, now at the Museo Picasso Málaga through May 3rd.

“At the end of the summer, 1939, there was a sense of panic among Picasso and his circle,” notes Marilyn McCully who co-curated the show with her partner Michael Raeburn. Since 1981, the pair have mounted numerous shows on the artist for museums in Paris, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Monte Carlo, and Antibes. “He went to Paris, checked out everything, got the closest people to him, his lover, his secretary, his mistress he’d already installed in Royan with their daughter, and took off for Royan. He focused on the female figure pretty much the whole time.”

Although they remained married, Picasso’s relationship with Olga Khokhlova ended in 1935 after the birth of Maya, his daughter with Marie-Thérèse, who was frequently the subject of his work in the early 1930s, but is absent from the sketchbooks which instead focus on Dora Maar, whom he met in Paris in 1935.

“Not only was he limited in terms of materials, he was very focused on certain ideas he was developing in his sketchbook and small sized drawings and a couple of large works. I was interested in where he got the canvases. He did two large paintings in the summer of 1940 before he left,” says McCully. “It was a big coup to get Woman Dressing Her Hair from MoMA. It pulls together the whole exhibition. Everything is leading up to that picture. And you find it so strongly in the sketchbook. And it’s big.” (130.1 x 97.1 cm)

Documentation indicates he and his secretary went to Paris in summer of 1939 where he bought canvases and easels. He started Woman Dressing Her Hair in March 1940, then went to Paris and returned to complete the painting. 

The other notable canvas from this sojourn is called Café at Royan, painted the week before his departure from the town. His only landscape from the period, it’s an outlier rendered in bright pastels including the sea and a boat, but no people. The artist left Royan in August of 1940, just two months after the Nazis arrived and well before the town was leveled by the Allies in 1945.

It’s doubtful Maar posed for Picasso in Royan, not with Marie-Thérèse and Maya in the other room. Instead, he probably worked from memory. “There are times when he used photographs, but he had an extraordinary visual memory,” notes McCully. “Picasso would have known very well that Goya spent his last years in nearby Bordeaux and did these extraordinary still lifes using sheep’s heads. He (Picasso) bought the sheep's head to feed his dogs, and the abattoir was on the same street as the villa with Marie-Thérèse. One of the paintings is very like a Goya painting in the Louvre.” 

Raeburn notes references to numerous figures from art history no doubt painted by Picasso from memory, including Delacroix’s Femmes d'Alger (Women of Algiers), as well as the series he did in the 1950s while living in Cannes, Las Meninas, based on the Velázquez masterpiece of the same name.

Already in the forefront of modern art in 1939, Picasso’s reputation was further cemented by Alfred Barr’s massive retrospective at MoMA that same year. Despite his worries, the Germans were not interested in persecuting Picasso, but instead, cultivated relationships with Paris’ cognoscenti. 

“Some of the artists, Derain and others, went on a goodwill trip to Germany. Picasso did not,” notes Raeburn. “Picasso was visited by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. And Breker seems to have helped him over certain things, getting materials and such. The situation was not highly antagonistic, even later on."

Aside from Guernica, Picasso’s work has few political references. There’s the famous Dove of Peace, as well as Head of a Woman (For the Greek People), part of the Málaga show, painted in response to a request by the Deputy Director of the French Institute in Athens for some kind of homage to the Greek revolutionaries and resistance. 

A member of the Communist Party, Picasso was seldom active, but helped the French resistance however he could and contributed money to the Republican cause in Spain. And, although he was generally unmolested by the Germans, there’s no doubt where his loyalties lay, best illustrated by an old story about the time he was paid a friendly visit by a Nazi officer who noted a photo of Guernica and asked, “Did you do that?” to which Picasso replied, “No, you did.”