Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. Museo Picasso Málaga. Gift of Christine Ruiz-Picasso © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025
A new exhibition at the Museo Picasso Málaga will explore the radical development of Picasso’s artistic practice during the time he spent living in the French coastal town of Royan from 1939 to 1940. The exhibition, which will bring together Picasso’s sketchbooks from this period for the first time.
Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks, organised in collaboration with the Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation, will contextualise these notebooks by presenting them alongside other works Picasso created in Royan as well as documentation from that period. Drawings, gouaches, paintings, photographs and Picasso’s poems will collectively illuminate this prolific chapter in the artist’s life and career.
Between September 1939 and August 1940, Picasso produced eight sketchbooks filled with pencil and ink drawings while residing in Royan after relocating to the town, with Dora Maar and his friend and secretary Jaime Sabartés, following the outbreak of the Second World War. Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter and their daughter Maya were already settled in Royan.
Throughout his career, Picasso frequently used sketchbooks to capture visual ideas. But, after moving to Royan and leaving behind two spacious studios in Paris, the nature of his artistic activity changed. Perhaps due to the limited availability of art materials in Royan – such as canvases and oils – Picasso purchased several ordinary notebooks from the local Hachette bookshop, filled with lined or grid paper, to use as sketchbooks. The notebooks were small, which allowed him to carry and use them wherever he went.
The drawings Picasso made in the eight sketchbooks reveal ideas not only for larger works, but also an evolving approach to form. A highlight of the exhibition will be the large oil-on-canvas Woman Dressing her Hair, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which Picasso completed in June 1940. The painting brings together many of the radical ideas and experiments around form and composition featured in the sketchbooks.
Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks will bring to light Picasso’s methods of working and the ways in which he was affected by the Second World War, providing an insight into a previously unexplored chapter in the artist’s life and career.
The exhibition is curated by Marilyn McCully and Michael Raeburn.
Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks, 31st January – 30th April 2025, Museo Picasso Málaga
