Gósol is a small town in the Bergadá region in the Lleida Pyrenees. Located about 150 kilometers from Barcelona, with an altitude of 1,423 meters, its access through ascending roads full of curves is now complicated. But nothing to do with the difficulties in getting there that Pablo Picasso encountered when at the end of May 1906 he decided to isolate himself for a while in the town with Fernande Olivier, the model who became the artist’s first great love. They were both 24 years old. Accompanied by a Fox Terrier puppy, they made the difficult journey by cart and mule. They entered the town between May 27 and 29, and probably left back for Paris on July 23. The artist, already sought after and respected, was experiencing a moment of blockage. His legendary quickness disappeared when he attempted to portray his friend and patron Gertrude Stein. Eighty days after leaving, upon entering his Parisian studio, he carried in his head the keys to modernity on a path traveled by Cézanne, Manet and Matisse. Picasso resolved the portrait of Gertrude Stein by grafting a proto-Cubist head onto a Rose Period body, thus creating one of the most transcendent and powerful images of the 20th century. Modernity had begun. would arrive soon Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), the enormous oil painting (244×234 centimeters) that marks a before and after in the history of painting due to its stylistic and conceptual break with the past. Gósol’s period will star in one of the great exhibitions of the year: Picasso 1906. The great transformationfrom November 15 to March 4, 2024 at the Reina Sofía Museum.
The Gósol period has aroused the interest of numerous researchers, although the reference book for scholars is Picasso in Gósol, 1906: a summer for modernity (The Raft of the Medusa, 2007), by Jèssica Jaques Pi (Barcelona, 56 years old), professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. With her family ties in Gósol, Jaques Pi has not stopped enriching her research on that important Picasso period, although some questions still remain.
Before beginning the decisive trip to Gósol, Pablo Picasso was already a respected artist. His importance grows from his friendship with Gertrude Stein (since November 1905). Jaques Pi remembers that Stein, “a writer, rich, American, lesbian and Jewish, marked two moments in the consideration of Picasso in the first decade of the 20th century.” “Before her,” explains the historian, “Picasso moved in the artistic circles typical of the most precarious bohemia of Paris, that of Montmartre; Thanks to her, he moved into more select circles. Gertrude met Picasso in 1905 and invited him to her Saturday gathering, where the artist met Matisse and was able to see his first works. cézannes and other works by artists who would precipitate the avant-garde. Gertrude was a patron of many of them, and also of Picasso; Furthermore, both hybridized creative processes, since Stein’s writing has a lot to do with cubism. Picasso sold his paintings with dealers Vollard (first) and Kahnweiler (later), possibly the most capable of giving him the boost he needed to transcend bohemian circles and lead him to be an international painter; In 1911, 1912 and 1913 his work had already been exhibited in a small room in New York, and in 1912 in two exhibitions in Berlin and Munich, which were no less important because they were discreet, given that it was something unusual for foreign artists who were trying to “make your way in Paris at the beginning of the century.”
The reasons that have been considered to explain a trip to such a remote place are many and varied. There are those who say that he was sick with syphilis or that he was hooked on opium. But the most credible version is that Picasso wanted his parents, who lived in Barcelona, to meet his girlfriend, the model Fernande Olivier, and then continue with her to that tiny, isolated town that several Catalan friends had told him about.
Much is known about Picasso’s successive partners, but not so much about what is considered his first great adult love, Fernande Olivier, a gap that the Museu Picasso in Barcelona will remedy next year with an exhibition dedicated to her as a model. Born Amélie Lang (Paris, 1881-1966), she changed her name to hide from her husband, a guy she had abandoned due to mistreatment. Jèssica Jaques Pi describes Fernande as a woman of the same age as the artist, taller than him. “Known as the belle Fernande,” says the historian, “her character was at the same time warm, witty and kind. She knew how to mix the precariousness of the bohemian life that she shared with Pablo in the Bateau-Lavoir (a building where artists lived poorly) with hedonistic details typical of the wealthiest classes, such as a passion for exotic perfumes. As a definitive anecdote, Jaques Pi points out that what made Fernande suffer the most in Gósol was not the cold of the extremely rainy summer of 1906, but rather that she was left without her favorite perfume, Eau de Chypre, as shown by the delicious letters she wrote to the a great friend of both, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in which he tried to get him to send it to him from Paris.
Olivier was with Picasso from 1904 to 1912. She was the only woman who, already separated from Picasso and in moments of precariousness, claimed part of the income from the sales of works from the years they shared, as a way of recognizing her participation as a model and couple. She posed in numerous works for Picasso. Perhaps the best known are Woman with black mantilla (1905), bronze woman head (1906) or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).
Why did they travel to this remote place? Did you have health problems? Jèssica Jaques Pi responds that the usual story says that Picasso went to Gósol to try to abandon opium, or even because of a venereal disease; and that he left because of an outbreak of typhus in the town. Consulting the municipal archives, no one died of typhus that year, and the (few) period photos show a Picasso in full health. He did take some opium, but he did not consider it serious until the death of his friend, the painter Karl-Heinz, in 1908.
The trip was hard (eight hours by mule to access the peaks), but Picasso and Olivier did not give up. Jacques Pi says that the couple arrived in a landscape as sublime as it was remote, inhabited by a community immersed in an economy of strict survival and with autonomy of resources out of pure necessity. They stayed at the Cal Tampanada inn, the only one in the town, run by Josep Fondevila, an octogenarian who would have a fundamental presence in Picasso’s production until his last paintings.
The community to which Picasso and Fernande arrived was fundamentally made up of women, given that men of working age were dedicated to itinerant trades (shearers, cattle dealers, nomadic shepherds). The women took care of children, the elderly, livestock, houses and the little cultivation that the high mountain lands allowed. Some, the most agile and daring, risked their lives carrying a bundle from the French border, full of perfume and tobacco essence. Picasso discovered in Gósol a form of femininity that had nothing to do with that of Málaga, A Coruña, Barcelona, Madrid or Paris, not even with that of Horta de Sant Joan; It was a matriarchy that would lead to the iconography of the strong woman, so recurring in all of his work.
The historian adds that the neighbors communicated in a very French-speaking Catalan. The children had Spanish as their school language and was foreign to their way of life. Picasso probably mixed both languages to integrate into the matriarchal community, and he appreciated this human landscape to such an extent that he gave himself the nickname Pau de Gósol, as can be seen in documents from the time signed by the artist.
What life did they live in the village? “We can imagine,” answers the writer, “that she painted when it rained, and that when it didn’t rain she went out to draw sketches in the Carnet Català, a small notebook where she took notes and sketches. Together with Fernande, she had to eat and dine at the Cal Tampanada inn, and play cards. Perhaps she accompanied the smugglers full of emotion in the face of danger, and she found some fossils in her wandering along the paths between the terraces. She probably took more than one nap in the meadows and learned to reap the wheat, she watched the couples dance on Sundays and played with her fox terrier and other village dogs, and petted the donkeys and mules. And above all, she will enjoy the friendship of two people, that of Josep Fondevila and a woman to whom she gave the nickname Herminia and led to the most iconic canvas of those he painted there, The bread woman (Philadelphia Museum of Art), a peculiar appropriation of Da Vinci’s La Gioconda.
When do they decide to leave town? It seems that only they knew the real causes. Ruling out the possibility that there was any kind of plague on the mountain, it is most likely that Picasso already had the path to follow in his head. In about three months he had finished or sketched more than 302 works. Jèssica Jaques Pi answers that “Picasso’s production in Gósol transcends the artist and contributes to the story of art history some of the most typical creative strategies of modernity, fundamentally three. The first: with the advent of photography, art should not (and can no longer) imitate reality, but quite the opposite; It is reality that will imitate art. The second: the acceptance that to learn you have to unlearn, that to build you have to deconstruct. The third, the power of the sign: artistic forms were deprived of a pre-established meaning. All of this can be seen in the long-awaited exhibition at the Reina Sofía.
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