In the summer of 1906, a young 24-year-old Pablo Ruiz Picasso traveled with Fernande Olivier to Gósol, a then-remote village at the foot of the Cadí, which could only be reached after eight hours up the mountain by mule. In less than three months, he created more than three hundred pieces –including oil paintings, watercolors and drawings–, some of which are seen today as direct precedents for what is perhaps the most transformative work of the 20th century: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which he painted back to Paris and that made him, now yes, a highly recognized artist. What happened in this town in Berguedà for Picasso to overcome the creative block he was going through and find the solutions that would definitively promote his art?
The writer Iñaki Rubio has answered the question with a non-fiction novel, Pau de Gósol. Picasso al Pirineu (Comanegra), in which he narrates this stay and traces his relationships with the townspeople, especially with Josep Fondevila, head of the family at Cal Tampanada, the inn where they stayed, but also his relatives at Cal Benet.
Rubio, born in Barcelona in 1974 but Andorran by adoption, had been thinking about the subject for years, especially after wondering about the women who appear in Picasso’s drawing Payesas de Andorra: most likely they were residents of Gósol that the young painter he photographed in the village. From then on, the writer became immersed in documentation, but also in conversations with the inhabitants of the town, some of them relatives of people who knew the artist. But the author defends that “it is not a specialist’s book”, but that the objective was to create a narrative work that allows the reader to enter Picasso’s soul: “I had to transmit the knowledge with the tools of the novelist, so that the story transform the reader as Gósol transformed Picasso”.
To achieve this, of course, he had to wind up his imagination, either by inventing dialogues or even creating and writing erotic scenes. “It was impossible not to do it in the case of Picasso, but it was one of the most difficult things in the book,” Rubio explains during a meeting in this town. And it is that we not only see Picasso enjoying sex with Fernande, but he devises scenery between paintings of his couple. But he also maintains an enigma: who was Herminia, the woman that Picasso portrayed up to 17 times? Was there more than words? As a narrator, Rubio speculates that in a mountain village environment, at the beginning of the 20th century, a foreigner talking to a woman could lead to misunderstandings and some reprimand from Josep Fondevila.
During those two and a half months, he recalls, the painter loosened the cord of jealousy over his model: “It’s just that there were only women in the town during the day, because the men were working outside, and also Fernande only spoke French… ”. In any case, “here Picasso and Fernande were happy”.
Searching for a new identity, he stopped being Pablo Ruiz Picasso to become Pau de Gósol, the name with which he signed some of the letters –some written in Catalan– that he sent from there. He felt welcomed, and was able to work a lot: “He was afraid of blank space, and his way of finding artistic solutions was to paint, paint and paint.” Many of these pieces, by the way, can be seen in November in the great exhibition that the Reina Sofía dedicates to this stage of the painter and that has been in preparation for years.
The reader follows the painter in the midst of creating some works of the moment, whether it be The Harem, Three Nudes, the portrait of Fondevila or the Woman with the loaves –which today, turned into sculpture, presides over the town square–, in which the artist will use the face-mask that will later help him finish the portrait of his patron Gertrude Stein. According to legend, only in one day and without having seen her again. One more step towards the cubist revolution that was to come.
Catalan version, here
