PICASSO, Pablo. Carnet Catalan. Paris: Berggruen & Cie. 1958.
Two volumes: facsimile sketchbook (120 x 80 mm), bound in faux leather, ff. [36]; and accompanying text, oblong duodecimo, original tan wrappers, pp. 34, [4], front wrapper printed in black; both in fine condition, housed in the same slipcase, printed label to front board of slipcase.
Limited facsimile edition, number 164 of 500 copies available for sale of a total edition of 550 copies, of Pablo Picasso’s 1906 Catalan sketchbook, with a preface and notes by the English Art historian and collector Douglas Cooper (1911-1984).
After selling several of his ‘Rose Period’ canvases to French art dealer Ambroise Vollard, Picasso was able to return to Spain with his first muse Fernande Olivier in the summer of 1906. His work in Gósol, Catalonia, marked a pivotal moment in his oeuvre and with it, also the trajectory of twentieth-century art. Picasso’s 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, while reflecting his interest in the aboriginal and ancient art seen in the Louvre, is still dominated by classical forms. The Carnet catalan captures this transitional phase into proto-cubism, with carefully plotted and shaded sketches of Fernande in various poses, a male nude, and peasant figures from village festivals. It includes caricatures of the poet and one of the fathers of Surrealism Guillaume Apollinaire and mock-erotic sketches of Fernande. While Picasso’s artistic development is not fully evident in the sketches, some elements, foreshadowing works like Deux Femmes Nues and even the seeds of Demoiselles d’Avignon, are already discernible.
The original Carnet Catalan is at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona.
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