A Day in Horta: PICASSO
‘Everything I know I learned in Horta’ (Pablo Picasso)
Beyond Barcelona: Finding Picasso in Horta, Catalonia
In the spring of 1898, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) aged sixteen and studying art in Madrid, was seriously ill with scarlet fever. His Catalan friend Manuel Pallarès (1876-1974) invited him to get out of the city and recuperate for a few weeks at the Pallarès family estate in the countryside of Horta de Ebro (now Horta de Sant Joan) in the Terra Alta of Catalonia. The rural hilltop village of Horta dates from the medieval era. It had around 2,500 inhabitants in 1898 (1,500 today). Pallarès and Picasso explored the limestone massif of the wooded, rocky Els Port (now a national park), sketching rocks, wildlife, and the grazing goats and sheep.
What caught Picasso’s attention was Montanya Santa Barbara, a mountainous crag, that dominates the Horta landscape (see images gallery below). Directly north of the village, the pyramidal rock juts up from verdant plains where vineyards are plotted, and olive, almond, walnut, eucalyptus and carob trees grow. It is a visually compelling sight. It is said that the pair spent weeks camping out, living in a cave, releasing a sense of escapism, and freedom, absorbing the surroundings, drawn to the simplicity of basic, rural life. For a city boy, born in Malaga, uprooted through his father’s job, to the cities of La Coruna, and Barcelona, it was a stimulating change. Picasso helped out on Pallarès family farm, staying on for months until February 1899. In that time he sketched, drew and painted the farming community, the local people, adults and children. Copies of all his work from this period are displayed in Centre Picasso, in Horta. Early worksreveal Picasso’s ability to infuse a sense of intimacy with visual interpretation. Picasso later said that everything he knew he had learned in Horta.
A second visit in 1909 was so different. Now more financially secure Picasso travelled from Paris to Barcelona, and on to Horta with his French girlfriend, muse and model, Fernande Olivier (1881-1966). Their unmarried status, living together, caused a minor sensation in the village. Horta’s rural life, with little to do, was a shock to Fernande. Letters to her friend Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967) written between May and September 1909, relate that she liked the villagers, and they liked her but she was bored. During the five-month stay her friends in Paris who promised to visit never came. Ill with a possible kidney infection she could not leave. Fernande requested Toklas to send her novels by Dickens, and embroidery thread.
For Picasso, revisiting ten years after his first stay felt at home in Horta. He negotiated rooms for a studio from the local baker. He had bought a camera and took photographs of Fernande, the village, the villagers, the children, the local police. The pair frequented the village café-bar (now a hardware shop), socialising with local friends. Spending long hours in his studio it was in Horta that Picasso’s work in cubist form, embryonic in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907 (Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA) was stretched and analytically explored. The pyramidal shape of Horta’s village, and faceted geometric forms of the houses are translated in The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909 (MoMA, New York). Picasso’s Horta drawings of Fernande, the angular features of her face with hair worn up, piled on her head, were fused with Picasso’s observation of the three-dimensional angular facets of the Santa Barbara mountain close by (see photo). One can see this woman-mountain fusion clearly in the series of paintings created in Horta that include Woman with Pears, summer 1909 (MoMA, New York), Nude 1909 (Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa, Japan), and the Horta hills in Still Life with Bottle of Liqueur, August 1909 (MoMA, New York).
An exploratory near-abstract series of charcoal drawings of Fernande, included Study for a Head of a Woman, 1909, Horta de Ebro, summer 1909 (Musée national Picasso-Paris) which formed the basis of cubist paintings, and a three-dimensional sculpture Head of a Woman (Fernande)1909 – were created when he returned to Paris. The drawings are such an insight into his working methods. In Horta, the Centre Picasso holds no original works but the visual display of copies of Picasso’s drawings, paintings, photographs and letters from 1898-99, and 1909, linked to the views of Santa Barbara outside the museum’s doors, bring one closer to Picasso’s cubist vision, begun here.
Picasso never forgot Horta. A delegation from the village visiting him in France in 1969 discussed the possibility of a Picasso museum. For him it was a special place and time in his life. As he recalled ‘Everything I know I learned in Horta’.
For information on Horta – link to Catalan Tourist Board www.catalunya.com
BOOK: Rosalind Ormiston, Picasso, Prestel Publishing, 2020.
IMAGE: Picasso and delegation from Horta, 1969, copyright Horta/Catalonia tourism IMAGES of HORTA copyright Rosalind Ormiston
