Geography and art

Horta and Picasso and their relation

The village and the painter maintain a lovely relationship since the first time they knew

Pablo Picasso in Horta de Sant Joan / Source: Centre Picasso
Pablo Picasso in Horta de Sant Joan / Source: Centre Picasso
Daniel Cort Daniel Cort

The first time that the place and the artist met was at 1898, Picasso was 16 years old. Pallares, one of Picasso’s friends decided to invite him to help him to recover from his illness. The charm of the village made Picasso change his knowledge and he started to feel a certain sensation of freedom that he began to reflect in his paintings. He started painting animals and people. At this time Horta enjoyed a range of various animals and nature. In this first stage of his eight months at Horta, Picasso drew around 70 works that were mainly about the ecosystem of the zone. In August Pallares and him decided to pass the month in a cove of the huge forest zone of Els Ports, a recognized and protected zone by the UNESCO.

The cove in which Pallares and Picasso passed the nights. Source: Descubriendo a Pablo Picasso

Pallares and Picasso met each other in the Academic of Beautiful Arts in Barcelona, where he returned after the first stage in Horta de Sant Joan. But Picasso stopped attending class, as he knew what he was and who he would become. Therefore he decided to have a trip to France to present his works to the Universal Exhibiton of Paris. There he knew Max Jacob, who taught him the French language and its literature. However, there was a time of poverty and desperation in the French capital and he journeyed to Madrid to live there.

Different influences throughout the years

There started the Blue Period (19011904), characterized by sombre painting rendered in shades of blue and green. In this phase Picasso spent the first five months in the Spanish Capital, and the rest of the years he travelled between Paris and Barcelona. Picasso kept gaining art ideas in the Rose Period (19041906), characterised by a lighter tone and style utilising orange and pink colours. Lastly, the period before the second stage of the painter in Horta was the African art and primitivism by which he received influences of the Iberian Sculpture.

Second stage at Horta of Picasso

On 5 June 1909 Picasso returned to Horta. He is not the teenager that left the village in 1899. Now he is a young painter that has received many influences about various styles and has sold many of his paintings.

“He couldn’t go directly from Barcelona to Horta, Picasso had to take a train to Tortosa and then go from there to Horta by carriage with horses”, declared Vicent Ruiz Prades, director of the tourism office of Tortosa.

The painter didn’t come there to get inspired by landscapes that he already knew. He wanted to get the images that he had in his mind and put them to the maximum point of art. It was a tribute to the village in where he recovered. To make it he started an adventure into a new artistic style: the cubism. “The first cubism picture that Picasso drew was the brick factory of Tortosa“, said Vicent. He brought there a curious object, a camera, to certificate that the landscapes that he draw were real places. The cubism developed in Horta was characterized by geometrical forms, effects of depth, austere colors and the nature shown without accidents and anecdotal. At the beginnings of  September of the same year, he left Horta. He never returned back, but he left there a legacy by which the village and the human will be together forever.

Briqueterie a Tortosa / Source: The Artchive

The Picasso Museum in Horta de San Joan

Centre Picasso in Horta wants to make a permanent tribute to Picasso and reunite in a chronological and loyal way all the works that the painter created in Horta and by which he immortalized the place. The visitor that will visit the museum will see an amount of deep links that unite the painter and Horta, links that synthesize in one sentence: Everything I have learned, I have learned in Horta.

To assist to the museum you have to pay 4 euros and is divided in three floors . On the first one appears his teenager epoch until the 16 years. On the second one is reflected his cubism period there’s might be the most iconic representation of the friendship of Pallares and Picasso: the table and the chairs in which they drunk coffee and played domino. In the other hand, in the museum there are also photos from the village at the Picasso’s time and a curious comparative image that compares the Picasso’s epoch with the actuality involving the number of habitants, the vegetables planted, the medium with which people travelled.

A photo taken from the window of Picasso Museum / Source: @DCort19

Daniel Cort

Soy el redactor jefe de la sección de deportes. Me encargaré de contaros toda la actualidad que gira alrededor de ellos. Me gusta investigar y descubrir.