Picasso: Royan's notebooks

The Picasso Museum in Malaga is hosting Picasso: los cuadernos de Royan , an exhibition that brings together eight previously unpublished notebooks of pencil and ink drawings, accompanied by photographs, paintings and poems. This selection allows us to explore the creativity of the Malaga artist between 1939 and 1940, at a time of maximum uncertainty marked by the outbreak of World War II.

At the end of the summer of 1939, with the outbreak of war, Picasso moved to Royan, a small coastal town on the French Atlantic, looking for a place that was apparently safer than Paris. He was accompanied by Dora Maar and her secretary and friend, Jaime Sabartés, while Marie-Thérèse Walter and her daughter Maya had already been living there for months. Despite the distance from the French capital, the artist traveled to Paris on several occasions to manage his work and ensure that his documents were in order.

En el ruedo , Pablo Picasso (1939). © Photo: Volker Naumann, Schönaich  © Succession of Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025  

Royan became his new creative setting, but with significant limitations. The lack of pictorial materials, especially canvas and oils, made Picasso find in drawing his main means of expression. He bought several notebooks in a local bookstore and turned them into his portable workspace, using them both in his hotel room and in cafes or on walks around the city. Royan's notebooks reflect a wide variety of subjects. They include studies of female figures reminiscent of Dora Maar, as well as still lifes marked by a dramatism that seems to have been influenced by the war situation. In one of these notebooks, poetic writings are also found, a lesser-known facet of the artist that he had begun to explore in 1935.

The exhibition, which can be visited until April 3, not only shows these notebooks, but also accompanies them with other works that Picasso created during his stay in Royan. Among them, Bust of a woman with crossed arms behind her head , Three heads of lamb , Woman combing her hair and Café in Royan , pieces on loan from museums such as the MoMA in New York or the Musée Picasso in Paris, stand out.

Woman combing her hair , Pablo Picasso (1940). © Digital archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence © Succession of Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025