Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks

Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks brings together for the first time the eight books of sketches made by Picasso during his stay in this French town on the Atlantic coast. It contextualises them along with other drawings, gouaches, paintings, a palette and poems he produced during this period, as well as a group of works produced by his partner, the artist and photographer Dora Maar. Together, the pieces on show shed light on an especially prolific period in Picasso’s life and artistic career.

Picasso moved to the coast when World War II broke out. Although he made occasional trips to Paris, he remained in Royan from September 1939 to August 1940, accompanied by Dora Maar and his friend and secretary Jaime Sabartés. A privileged witness, Sabartés would record this period in a chapter of his memoirs, Picasso, portraits & souvenirs. Picasso’s dog Kazbek, a Saluki, also travelled with them; the lambs’ heads the painter fed him also served as a source of inspiration during this period.

On arriving in Royan, Picasso and Dora Maar stayed at the Hôtel du Tigre. The following day Picasso set up a studio in the dining room on the ground floor of the Villa Gerbier de Jonc, where his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter and their daughter Maya had taken lodging. In January 1940 the artist rented a new studio near the harbour in an apartment building known as Les Voiliers, attracted by its light and the panoramic view it commanded.

The eight sketchbooks not only show ideas for larger works but also illustrate Picasso’s evolving approach to form, revealing his working methods as well as how World War II affected him personally and artistically. Besides offering an insight into the artist’s creative process, they attest to his extraordinary versatility, as can be seen in Sketchbook 202, from the Museo Picasso Málaga’s collection. Its contents range from classical drawings, such as Portrait of a Young Princess after the Master of Moulins, to radical depictions of Dora Maar and sketches of bullfights, a theme that was ever-present in Picasso’s oeuvre. Some of these drawings are related to outstanding works in the exhibition, such as a study for Bust of a Woman with Arms Crossed behind her Head. The evolution of his bold approach, seen in the handling of the head and body and in the overall simplification of the palette, can be traced in this sketchbook.

It also contains the preparatory drawings for Head of a Woman (‘For the Greek People’). The final painting was executed in his workshop at Gerbier de Jonc and moved to the new studio at Les Voiliers, where it was displayed in a prominent place on an easel. In May 1946 Picasso gave it to the city of Athens as part of the donation made by French artists to pay tribute to the Greek resistance in the aftermath of World War II.

At Les Voiliers the artist worked for a time on a large-scale composition, Woman Dressing her Hair, which he completed in June 1940. Lent by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it is one of the most important pieces in this show. It reflects many of the groundbreaking ideas and experiments with the form and composition of figures that concerned Picasso at the time and marks the culmination of the numerous drawings of a seated female nude that filled his sketchbooks during the year. In most of these sketches the woman is a brunette, like Dora Maar, though several others recall the seated figures in the harem in Eugène Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834; Musée du Louvre, Paris), which the artist greatly admired.

The exhibition also includes pieces produced by Dora Maar during those months. Besides painting, Maar worked on several sketchbooks, one of which contains a page with sketches of Picasso’s head in a hat. Maar, who had already documented the gestation of Guernica in 1937, produced important photographic records of the studio at Les Voiliers, a notable selection of which is on view here.

After painting a large picture on canvas showing the view from the window of his studio, Café at Royan, on 24 August 1940 Picasso left the city for good, together with his friends, to return to war-torn Paris.

Exhibition curated by Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn, designed by Cécile Degos and organised in collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.