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Marilyn McCully has drawn on previously unpublished photographs in the Olga Ruiz-Picasso Archive to give a fresh account of the last visit Pablo Picasso and Olga, with their son Paul, made to Spain in 1934. They spent a few days in San Sebastián, where they attended a bullfight, then visited Madrid, the Escorial and Toledo, before ending the trip with a visit to Barcelona, to see Picasso’s mother and his sister and her family.
After this visit and the outbreak of the Civil War two years later, Picasso never returned to his homeland, but recollections of Spain – of his childhood in Andalusia, of the art he had admired as a student in Madrid and Toledo, his life as a young man in Barcelona – form a thread throughout his subsequent work, including the poetry he started to write in 1935.
The bullfight had already been a powerful theme, full of symbolic associations, in Picasso’s art. McCully illustrates this together with the food and customs of Málaga, where he was born and spent his childhood, the traditions of Spanish ceramics, and his choice, after the World War II, to live near Cannes, on another shore of the Mediterranean. He was also inspired by the art of the 17th century, Spain’s Golden Age, to bring the world of El Greco into his poems and paintings and to undertake variations on Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Towards the end of his life, Picasso welcomed old friends to his house, to form a virtual tertulia – the typical gathering of Spaniards in a café for regular talk, argument and exchange of opinions.
After a lifetime’s fascination with Spain, the author has written a book that reflects her deep appreciation of Spanish culture, its art history and, above all, of Picasso.
Illustration: Picasso at a bullfight held in his honour in Vallauris, 1955, with his son Claude and Jean Cocteau, photographed by Edward Quinn.
Picasso in Exile: Memories of Spain
Marilyn McCully
27 x 21 cm • 48 pages • 39 illustrations • soft boards with jacket attached
Limited edition numbered from 1 to 400, published with the support of Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte
ISBN 978-0-9526584-5-0
Price: £25
Copies now available from Cacklegoose Press or on abebooks.com.
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