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Picasso’s barretina

The refurbished Jacint Rigau Museum presents the first exhibition dedicated to Picasso and the Roussillon capital

“What a nice bum the sun has ...” So begins the poem Picasso wrote in the guestbook of the palace of his great friends in Perpignan, the Counts Jacques and Paule Lezarme in August 1954. The verse is scented with surrealism, sex and the essence of life.

Picasso found in Perpignan “a wonderful balm for his difficult personal situation,” explains Eduard Vallès, curator of the exhibition Picasso-Perpinyà. The circle of intimacy. 1953-1955, which is the highlight at the refurbished Jacint Rigau Museum’s reopening after three years work and an investment of €9 million. The museum itself is a journey from the Gothic period to the Kingdom of Aragon and ends with a room dedicated to Catalan artists exiled in 1939, such as Antoni Clavé and Josep Grau Garriga alongside other iconic artists of the museum’s collection.

But until May 2018 when it closes, the Picasso exhibition will eclipse all else. Vallès, the curator of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) found the poem among other undocumented material linking the artist with the northern Catalan city, pertaining to his time there. This had remained hidden for 60 years and now brings a new light on the relationship, a place he came to feel as a home.

Picasso was there a number of times but his most intense Perpignan years were from 1953 to1955 and reflect a more nostalgic Picasso. He already has the world at his feet, but he is in his 70s and has not set foot in Franco’s Spain since his self-imposed exile. Perpignan is an assault, a volcano of emotions because he is aware that he is so near that place to which he cannot return. It brings out the Catalan side of a man who is also suffering heartbreak; the woman he has been with for the last 10 years, Françoise Gilot, has sent him packing, and it is here that the artist has taken refuge.

A normally prolific artist, during his time in Perpignan he painted little, a few portraits of minor consequence, but what he did do was to write and much of the exhibition centres on this more introverted aspect of a man enveloped in intimacy.

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