Picasso showed great interest in Romanesque art throughout his career. The many testimonies to the artist’s interest in this early art include his visit to the Romanesque rooms in the museum in 1934. Among the various primitive influences on the avant-garde movement, Picasso himself considered that Romanesque art provided “an invaluable lesson for the moderns”, as he commented during his visit to the museum.

Picasso’s personal library, and his correspondence with a series of individuals, further confirm this fascination. What Picasso admired about Romanesque artists was their ability to explain reality through a language full of signs and symbols, at once simple and powerful. Like other avant-garde artists, Picasso considered the Romanesque as an indubitably artistic phenomenon, an attitude that contrasted with the archaeological treatment that this art received in certain sectors.

Based on a selection of works from the Musée national Picasso-Paris, the exhibition suggests a dialogue between the Romanesque works and pieces by Picasso from different periods in his career. The purpose behind this is to highlight the previous existence, in Romanesque art, of artistic solutions that help to resolve the problems and challenges faced by contemporary artists and, therefore, also by Picasso in his work.

Picasso visited the Art Museum of Catalonia in early-September 1934, shortly before its official inauguration. The museum presented a series of works by Picasso from municipal collections, to which were added twenty-two other works acquired by the collector Lluís Plandiura. Picasso visited the exhibition with his friend Joan Vidal Ventosa, and they were accompanied by the museum director, Joaquim Folch i Torres. According to the press, Picasso expressed particular interest in the rooms devoted to Romanesque art, which he praised effusively. The following day, Picasso returned to France, and his tour of the museum therefore forms part of the Spanish artist’s last known visit to our country.

The year 1906, and, needless to say, 1907, are key dates in Picasso’s involvement in the international avant-garde movement, influenced by his interest in primitive art and his visit to Gósol. It was in 1906 that Picasso reacted against the so-called Pink Period of previous years, which he called “sentimental”, at the same time as he abandoned the narrative element in his compositions. He now began to work in a new painterly language, one in which he eschewed the imitation of the model. His new language was formally very simple and characterised by a frontal, hieratic compositional style. At Gósol, as he pursued this path towards a new modernity, Picasso worked on masking faces, an approach that would reach one of its culminating points in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which he painted in 1907. This section contains several self-portraits by Picasso, as well as portraits of his lover, Fernande Olivier, one of them done in Gósol. Picasso also applied some of the solutions that he discovered at this time in certain compositions in later periods, using the most diverse techniques.

The documents in this exhibition case, placed on show for the first time, formed part of Picasso’s personal collection, now conserved in the archives of the Musée national Picasso-Paris. The documents on display are a careful selection from a much larger archive of varied documentation acquired by Picasso and related to Romanesque art. Books and catalogues from the artist’s library; photographs of Romanesque pieces, which he collected; and a number of letters and postcards testifying to his interest in this primitive artistic style.  In this correspondence, in their texts or in the works illustrated in their postcards, several members of Picasso’s circle of acquaintance reveal how pleased the artist must have been to receive a Romanesque image. In certain cases, moreover, there have evidently been previous conversations about Romanesque art.

Chronologically, the documents begin in 1922, with a postcard from Joan Miró, and end in 1964 with another from his friend Joan Vidal Ventosa. In between is, for example, a letter from the Picassian anthologist Christian Zervos, written in 1936. This broad timespan shows the extent to which Picasso’s admiration of the Romanesque was as consistent as it was enduring over time. Many of these postcards are illustrated by works or fragments of pieces that form part of the museum's collection, and which can be admired in this same room.

Picasso was born into an environment strongly influenced by a religious worldview. The violence inherent in crucifixions and decapitations is clearly reflected at certain periods in the artist’s creative career, and such scenes are also present in the medieval iconography. The first crucifixion appears in his work when Picasso was just twelve years old, in La Coruña, and the image continues to appear at different times. A particularly outstanding example is the series of drawings that Picasso produced in 1932, inspired by Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece. In the final drawings, the figure of Christ crucified becomes an ensemble of articulated bones in an iconography that is highly representative of his Surrealist period. Although we cannot point to any kind of influence from them, whether direct or indirect, there is a striking link between Picasso’s (dis)articulated crucifixions and the articulated crucifixions found in Romanesque art. These physiognomic alterations, which have the effect of transmitting the convulsion of the bodies, are even more explicit in his decapitation scenes, which embody enormous visual violence.

The distortion of the human figure, particularly the treatment of faces, is a constant in Picasso’s work, and is found in several variants. This approach is seen particularly intensely in works from his time in exile in Royan, France, during World War II, when the face of his lover, Dora Maar became a testing ground in which the facial features are distributed randomly while their unity is preserved. Besides the war period, this objectification of the human figure can also be observed in other periods of Picasso’s artistic career, when he employed solutions that involved turning human bodies into inorganic entities and vice versa.