Get out of Paris
By the spring of 1909 Picasso was, by his own account, worn out. He was 27, newly able to sell his work but not yet rich, and stuck: the savage breakthrough of his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon two years earlier had blown a hole in painting — it had repelled even his closest allies, and the two years since had been a restless, unresolved search for what to build in the gap it left. So he did what he often did when a problem would not move: he left the city. With his partner Fernande Olivier (his companion through these Montmartre years) he traveled south, across the Pyrenees, to a remote village in Catalonia called Horta de Ebro (today Horta de Sant Joan).
He knew the place. It was the home town of Manuel Pallarès, his oldest friend, a fellow painter who had taken the teenage Picasso there in 1898 to recover from a bout of scarlet fever. Picasso always said those months in the Catalan hills had made him — “everything I know, I learned in Pallarès’s village,” he liked to claim. Now he came back as a man with a problem to solve, and the village handed him the answer almost by accident.
Cézanne, and a box of shapes
He arrived carrying an idea he could not stop turning over. Paul Cézanne — the older painter whose memorial shows had hit every artist in Paris when he died in 1906 — had written, in a letter that young painters now passed around like scripture, that one should treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone: build a picture out of simple solid shapes rather than copying surfaces. It was a recipe for structure, for making a painted thing feel weighty and built. Picasso had been chewing on it for two years.
And here was Horta: a dry, sun-bleached hill town of bare ochre stone, its flat-roofed houses stacked up the slope in hard-edged terraces — already, in real life, a heap of plain geometric blocks. A village that looked like a Cézanne theory made of masonry. Picasso took one look and, in effect, stopped inventing and started copying — except that what he copied was the underlying geometry, not the postcard. The laboratory had built itself.