Exhibition: Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks

Royan is a city on the French Atlantic coast where the Malaga-born genius Pablo Picasso moved for almost a year, between 1939 and 1940, coinciding with the outbreak of the Second World War. The Picasso Museum in Malaga brings together the eight sketchbooks from Picasso's stay in the city. They are contextualised through other drawings, paintings, gouaches and poems by the author, as well as through works by his companion, the artist and photographer Dora Maar, who travelled with him.

In these sketchbooks, Picasso notes down ideas for larger works. However, we also find his creative process and his reflections on the personal and artistic impact of the war. The final embodiment of some of these drawings can also be admired in the same exhibition in some cases, such as the work “Bust of a woman with arms crossed behind her head.”