Picasso recalls a warmer memory from May when he was 24, arriving with brushes, canvases, and paints just as a storm gathered. He brought Fernande Olivier, the couple traveling on sturdy mules into the secluded Berguedà village near Pedraforca, perched on the edge of the Sierra del Cadí. After leaving Paris, they spent about nine weeks in the Pyrenean town of Lleida, a place then home to roughly seven hundred residents. During that period, the artist produced 302 works—sketches, drawings, and oil paintings—that centered on the local people and the ocher-tinted landscapes around them. The stay is described as transformative, a crucial moment that helped him move past an artistic crisis and plant the earliest seeds of modernity and cubism. The inn below his room, Tampanada Lime, is noted as a reference point in the anecdotal record of the couple’s stay, a small but significant chapter in Picasso’s Gósol years.
In a broader chronicle commemorating half a century since Picasso’s death, a new Catalan publication announces a forthcoming volume, with a Spanish edition anticipated in 2024. The book, part of an innovative project from a Catalan publishing house, is accompanied by an exhibit organized by a Madrid gallery that focuses on 1906, a pivotal year in Picasso’s evolution.
Picasso, who had recently shifted away from classical, realistic landscapes toward figurative works, found Gósol to be a fulcrum for change. In that year he painted Harem, a composition featuring four women who are believed to include Fernande from multiple vantage points, and a solitary male figure posed as Bacchus. Art historians describe this as a precursor to the cubist approach that would soon redefine his work. The same period also marks the release of material that recontextualizes Picasso not just as Pablo, but as Pau, a shift reflected in letters he exchanged with a friend and sculptor Enric Casanovas. Reproductions and pieces from that correspondence are now housed at the Picasso Center in Gósol’s town hall.
A letter shows Picasso signing as Pau, a small but telling detail of how he identified with this place and its people. He had traveled from Paris, where he lived in a bohemian corridor of Montmartre, seeking an artistic identity while wrestling personal pain and a creative block. He painted portraits of patrons such as Gertrude Stein, but the face of Stein remained unfinished, a blank page that led him to Gósol. There, the environment and the local church, with its romanesque carvings of Our Lady of Gósol, offered a wellspring of inspiration. The new faces he painted—almond-eyed and mask-like yet charged with emotion—emerged as a bridge between realism and abstraction, a doorway into what Picasso would later call a new mode of seeing. When he returned to Paris, the shift toward a more experimental language was already underway, unencumbered by the earlier expectations of a traditional portrait.
Researchers and descendants of Gósol’s inhabitants helped reconstruct the context of these works. Documents such as a Catalan card in the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and other archival notes including mentions of Apollinaire and a poem by Josep Carner, illuminate the moment when cubism began to crystallize. An individual named Joan Ganyet, a Gósol local and relative of some subjects, opened his home to the artist and arranged access to the room where he stayed at Cal Tampanada, which today sits as a private residence.
In a hostel where Picasso lodged, a fond acquaintance with Josep Fontdevila—an elderly hostelkeeper—left a portrait in a style reminiscent of the masks the artist had been studying. Many works from Gósol also celebrate Fernande, often in intimate scenes, and several pieces depict the town’s women whose men were busy in the fields, shepherding or involved in smuggling. Over time, viewers have noted a complex portrait of the artist—at once bold and fragile with regard to his treatment of women. One figure, known as Mysterious Herminia, appears in a series of drawings that hint at a fictionalized memory rather than a straightforward historical portrait. The author suggests that the name may be a constructed legend rather than a real identity, a reminder of how memory and invention mingle in biography.
Before long, Picasso departed Gósol with a substantial body of work—301 pieces bound for Paris, leaving only one behind, the portrait of Josep Fontdevila. The Gósol chapter closes with the sense that a summer of modernity took root in a small mountain town, reshaping Picasso’s trajectory and enriching the broader story of early 20th-century art.
mysterious herminia
The Gósol stay also framed personal relationships and the way Picasso documented his life through art. The hostel era fed a sense of camaraderie, and the portraits and sketches created there echo the town’s rugged rhythms. Fernande’s presence is a recurring thread, and the women of Gósol—many tied to the land and the local economy—are portrayed with a mix of tenderness and blunt honesty. The portraiture and scenes reflect a growing confidence in Picasso’s move away from conventional imagery toward a more expressive, moody vocabulary. The narrative emphasizes how the artist’s private life and public experimentation intersected, shaping the course of his development as a modern painter.