Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks

Between September 1939 and August 1940 Picasso produced eight sketchbooks of pencil and ink drawings while he lived in the French town of Royan, where he moved with Dora Maar and accompanied by Jaime Sabartés following the outbreak of World War II. Marie-Thérèse Walter and Maya, her daughter with Picasso, had already settled in the town. In the following year the artist made the 500-kilometre journey between Royan and Paris several times in order to check that as a foreigner his documents were in order and also to inspect the storage of his works and attend an exhibition of his drawings.

Possibly due to the difficulty of finding art materials in Royan, Picasso bought several sketchbooks and ordinary paper notebooks, both lined and graph paper, at the Hachette bookshop. The sketchbooks are now the focus of this exhibition, curated by Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn. Throughout his career Picasso habitually used sketchbooks to jot down visual ideas, some referring to previous works and other to new ideas for future compositions.

Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks, organised in close collaboration with Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, will contextualise the sketchbooks by presenting them alongside other works created by artist in Royan, as well as documentation relating to that period. Drawings, gouaches, paintings, photographs and poems by Picasso will together reveal a prolific stage in his life and artistic career.