This catalogue reveals the richness of the artist’s work in times of scarcity, showing a creative process that fluctuates between detailed study and final composition. This narrative helps understand how Picasso explored and transformed his themes at a time of deep introspection during a tragic period. The artist experimented with figures, bodies, and everyday objects, alternating between symbols that are recurrent in his works and new abstract and expressive forms and demonstrating how the circumstances became catalysts for his creativity. Throughout the pages of these sketchbooks, we witness an evolution of figures and subjects and see how, for Picasso, each sketchbook became a ‘laboratory’ of creation, and each page a window onto his thinking.