Picasso’s bohemian year and Pyrenean trip ‘changed the history of art’
Exhibition at Madrid’s Reina Sofia claims a visit to Catalonia led to the artist’s most radical work
Pablo Picasso returned to his Paris studio in 1906 with a new outlook on life
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Pablo Picasso unwashed, sleeping in the same bed as a homosexual poet friend, high on opium and steeped in anarchism.
This portrayal of the Spanish artist as a bohemian is at odds with his contemporary image as a macho misogynist. Yet that was the state of his life in 1906, a year that transformed his artistic career and the history of art, according to a landmark exhibition at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid.
The show, Picasso 1906. The Turning Point, suggests that the year deserves to be viewed as a distinct period in which he developed his approach to nudes and primitivism and evolved into a modernist. It comprises his friendship with Gertrude Stein in Paris, his retreat to the Pyrenean village of
