What relationship did Picasso have with the Anís del Mono factory? And with the Poblenou cemetery or the Clausolles orthopedics on Ferran street? When it seemed that everything had been said about the painter’s relationship with the city “where he started it all”, the one in which he understood “how far he could go”, as he himself would confess, it turns out that there is still a lot left to tell. In the final stages of the Picasso Year, which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of his death throughout the world, he arrives at the Picasso Barcelona bookstores. Una cartografia, a delightful work by Claustre Rafart Planas that offers a bold and thorough reading of the city that Picasso lived in when he was nothing more than a young man trying to make his way in the art world, to which he returned in a Hispano Switzerland, when he was already a star and stayed at the Ritz hotel with his wife Olga Koklova and his son Paulo, and the one he always kept alive in his memory from a voluntary exile for his firm opposition to Francoism. “I will never come back”.

Rafart, who in 2007 already published Picasso’s Barcelona Landscapes (Editorial Meteora), wanted to go much further, composing a Picasso cartography that stops at 135 enclaves linked in one way or another to the artist’s biography. Each one of them contains a small story, a microhistory that, together, makes up another history of the city at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. “Each of the entries is like a small tasting that would be given for a chapter of a book or even for an entire book,” says Rafart about a work that means her farewell as curator – now retired – of the Museu Picasso, editor of the volume together with the Barcelona City Council and the Tenov Publishing House.

Following in the footsteps of the adolescent and young Pablo Ruiz who was not yet Picasso, Rafart began his journey in the port, where on September 13, 1895 he disembarked with his family from a cargo ship Cabo Roca, coming from Malaga, stopping for the first time. addresses on Reina Cristina and Mercè streets, and accompanies him to his visits to the Napoleon Cinematograph or the Tivoli Equestrian Circus, where he met the horsewoman Rosita del Oro, with whom he had an intermittent relationship until he went to Paris in 1900.

Then will come the bohemian Picasso who frequents Els Quatre Gats, who stopped in front of the assortment of trusses and surgical devices that he saw in the window of the Clausolles orthopedics on Ferran street, an establishment that Joan would ask gallery owners about long time later. and Miquel Gaspar and which, according to the author, “must have given him an idea of ??surrealism before surrealism.” We see him attending the bullfights in the El Torín bullring, eating mussels and drinking bottled wine in La Musclera, in Montjuïc, working in his workshop and visiting those of his friends… His first exhibition in the Sala Parés and his incursions through the Fifth District, the Edén Concert in which the cupletista Bella Chelito performed and the brothel slums on Conde del Asalto Street, where he met Carlota Valdivia, a one-eyed madam whom he immortalized as La Celestina in 1904. Many years later , when his biographer John Richardson asked him about her, Picasso took out a piece of paper and wrote down her name and address on a piece of paper recommending that he go see her (Richardson was homosexual).

Going off the beaten path of the Picassian route, Rafart incorporates new stops into that “spatial biography”, such as the Old Hospital of Santa Creu, where, going to look for his friend Jacint Raventós, a medical student, after class, he saw a corpse that he would later portray in The Dead Woman. The historian also adds the old Barcelona Término station (current France station), from where in 1906 she took a train with Fernande Olivier to Manresa on the way to Gósol (until now it was believed that they had left Plaza de Espanya with the Ferrocarrils Catalans).

Picasso went to the Poblenou cemetery to say goodbye to his father, José Ruiz Blasco, who died in 1913. He traveled to Tibidabo several times. From the Vilató-Ruiz home on Paseo de Colón he received a letter from his mother in 1933 informing him that Both she and her sister Lola had been able to vote for the first time (“how times change, all the nuns have voted”) and, although she never visited the Anís del Mono factory in Badalona, ??Rafart takes us there because its bottle caught her attention. to the point of incorporating it in Still Life with a Liquor Bottle (1909), actually a cubist self-portrait in which he appears as a one-eyed harlequin with a liquor bottle body.