> Gósol, the magical setting.
This was the first time in Picasso’s life that he had felt so uncertain. His perplexity and discomfort were probably destabilizing him. Fernande Olivier’s company did little to soothe his anxious and disoriented mind, and living in Paris became increasingly insufferable. He needed the lap of another woman (his mother), as well as hospitality and friends from another city (Barcelona). The journey to Gósol, in the Eastern Pyrenees (100 miles north of Barcelona and 5,000 ft. above sea level) was completely unplanned[1] and improvised for both Picasso and Fernande, who instead of just taking an urban retreat, found themselves in the middle of the biggest mountain fortress they had ever seen.[2] As said earlier, they spent approximately eight weeks there (probably from May 25th to July 23rd). [3]
Gósol certainly provided Picasso with a primitive everyday life, in the sense of a non-sophisticated way of life, alien to industrialization and immersed in a sublime mountainous landscape. This everyday life was unknown to Picasso but he embraced it as a magical setting which was going to allow him to unleash everything he bore within himself, especially thanks to human landscape and friendship. Therefore, for Picasso, Gósol was more an internal and human landscape than an external landscape. In fact, Picasso had never considered himself as landscape painter, despite painting a considerable number of landscapes.[4] For him, this was not the optimal field for experimentation, whereas the human figure and face were.[5] As Gertrude Stein recollects, the human landscape was the only one that interested Picasso throughout his production.[6]
At this point, it is crucial to emphasize that Picasso’s life and creative process could be explained by friendship. His work is not as auratical as claimed when seen from this point of view. As a matter of fact, “Picasso–the–artist” is an amazing nexus of creative relationships. Love and desire have been used widely to construct the story of his work, even to the point of blinding abuse. Yet the role of friendship is still to be emphasized. And Gósol was a crucialplace for friendship in Picasso’s revolutionary moments, a kind of setting for a sacra conversatione where, alongside other people from the village, three friends “met”: Gertrude Stein in Picasso’s mind with the blocked portrait and with the knee to knee[7] advice about modern painting in general and Cézanne in particular; Enric Casanovas as a sort of efficient cause for the trip to Gósol; and Josep Fondevila in Picasso’s everyday life in the small town, in as much as Josep Fondevila – aged ninety – was Picasso’s best friend in Gósol and the owner of the guesthouse where he and Fernande stayed.
[1] See Richardson, A life of Picasso. Vol I: 434–6.
[2] This is how Fernande narrates it in a delicious letter to Apollinaire, see Pierre Caizergues and Hélène Seckel, Picasso / Apollinaire. Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard / Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1992), 50–4.
[3] See the letters 5 and 6 between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, in Madelaine, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso: 37–40.
[4] See Michel Guérin, “Réalisation et démiurgie”, in Billoret-Bourdy and Guérin (Eds.), Picasso Cézanne, 7–14, especially 10; Itzhak Goldberg, “Le paysage en cube”, in idem, 21–8; Ocaña (Ed.) P. Picasso, Landscapes 1890-1912. From the Academy to the Avant-Garde (Barcelona, Museu Picasso, 1995)
[5] See Stein, Picasso, 506–7.
[6] Stein, Picasso, 497–533, see specially 506.
[7] Stein, The Autobiography, 738.
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Summary