‘Picasso’s use of sketchbooks as part of his creative process is now proverbial. The first of these dates from his years in La Coruña and was started in January 1894, when he was aged 12. For the artist this support became an outstandingly important field of experimentation, while he also used it to rapidly jot down images, ideas and even annotations on the application of colours. The time spent in Royan was a key moment in Picasso’s use of the carnet, as in a single year he filled a total eight sketchbooks, five of which belong to the Musée national Picasso-Paris [1]. Jaume Sabartés explained that due to the increasing shortage of canvas in Royan, Picasso “bought sketchbooks in the Hachette bookshop and immediately filled them copying the general outlines of the paintings he produced in order to have a record of what he might subsequently erase or transform over time”[2].
One of the most complete sketchbooks in terms of reflecting this practice is the one to which these two studies belong. It was filled in just seven days, between 3 and 9 November 1939. As an experimental laboratory it is exceptionally important, since it includes preparatory studies for various important works from that period, but also a number of postscripts. The principal protagonist is Dora Maar, whose figure monopolises most of the drawings, subjected to experiments of different types. In numerous sketches Picasso employed viewpoints from the back and sides using the classic double profile. He also drew various studies of the oil painting Bust of a Woman with Arms Crossed behind Her Head, both of the face and the whole body. A couple of preparatory drawings – one with a frame drawn around it – would simultaneously give rise to *Head of a Female Figure* [3], while other studies led on to further portraits of Dora Maar. Of a different type are three studies entitled Head of a Girl which are based on the image of Picasso’s daughter Maya writing. One of them is framed in black, which in Picasso’s terminology indicates a possible future oil, as proved to be the case when shortly after he painted just the face, eliminating the other minor elements [4]. The carnet also includes a group of drawings of horses with decorative trappings, a bull and a bullring. In its first three pages the sketchbook returns to the essence of the start of this practice in La Coruña as a space for bodybuilding, its original function, here with an interpretation of the Portrait of Margaret of Austria by Jean Hey, the Master of Moulins, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Departing from his own reality and acting like a diligent art student, Picasso tests himself by executing each of his versions of the portrait in a different technique: pencil, ink and gouache. Here we have the artist in Royan, avoiding the war but keeping alive his own interior tension and his own skills’ [5].
[1] Specifically, between September 1939 and September 1940, although he would add various drawings from 1941 to one of them. This carnet is one of the seven Royan sketchbooks that were discussed in the catalogue of Picasso’s sketchbooks published in 1986: GLIMCHER, Arnold and Marc Glimcher. Je suis le cahier: Les carnets de Picasso. Paris: Grasset, 1986, p. 329, nº 105.
[2] SABARTÉS, Jaume. Picasso. Retratos y recuerdos. Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1953, p. 216.
[3] Royan, 9 November 1939, oil on canvas (Z.IX,355).
[4] Royan, 7 November 1939 (Z.IX,37).
[5] Eduard Vallès in: LEBRERO, José. Pablo Picasso: New Collection 2017-2020. [Cat. exp. Museo Picasso Málaga, 2017]. Malaga: Museo Picasso Málaga, 2017, p. 268-269.
