A set of Pablo Picasso’s sketchbooks, made when the artist was living in a French coastal town during the outbreak of World War II, will go on exhibit together for the first time at the Museo Picasso Málaga in January.

“Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks,” the museum says in press materials, “will bring light to Picasso’s methods of working and the ways in which he was affected by the Second World War, providing an insight into a previously unexplored chapter in the artist’s life and career.”

Pablo Picasso, Notebook 202, Royan, November 3-9, 1939. Photo: Rafael Lobato © Museo Picasso Málaga © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025.

The sketchbooks will be presented alongside paintings, photographs, poems, and drawings the Spaniard created during his stay. His large painting Woman Dressing her Hair (1940) will appear on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, demonstrating the works that resulted from the artist’s experiments in the sketchbooks.

The exhibition was curated by art historian Marilyn McCully and publisher Michael Raeburn, who have collaborated on Picasso-focused projects since the 1980s. “Being able to examine the entirety of his sketchbooks (with every page shown digitally) gives an extraordinary opportunity to have an intimate view of Picasso’s creative activity over the course of his year in Royan and to understand the way in which one of his major works evolved,” the pair told Artnet News in an email.

Pablo Picasso, Notebook 202, Royan, November 3-9, 1939. Photo: Rafael Lobato © Museo Picasso Málaga. © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025.

Picasso moved to Royan on September 2, 1939, the day before the declaration of war between France and Germany. He was already 58 and had achieved major international success, breaking into a new level of fame in America that year with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

The artist brought with him his lover and muse, the artist Dora Maar (the subject of the MoMA-lent portrait). His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter had already been living in the town with her and Picasso’s eldest daughter, Maya, since July 1939.

Pablo Picasso, Notebook 202, Royan, November 3-9, 1939. Photo: Rafael Lobato © Museo Picasso Málaga © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025

Picasso’s move did not come as a surprise. Following his anti-war masterpiece Guernica (1937), depicting the devastation wrought by German bombs during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso found himself regularly visited by the Gestapo at his Parisian apartment. Arriving in Royan in 1939 and having abandoned his two large Parisian studios, Picasso was left with limited access to art materials and was forced to scale down his practice. He purchased notebooks, often lined or gridded, from the local Hachette bookshop to use as sketchbooks.

The seaside resort seemed to offer an escape from the threat of bombardment, but in 1945 it too would be destroyed by German bombing. Picasso returned to Paris on August 25, 1940, having witnessed the Nazi occupation of Royan in June.

Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman with her Arms Crossed Behind her Head (1939). © Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso Foundation and the Museo Picasso Málaga, which opened in 2003 in the city of Picasso’s birth and holds 285 of the artist’s works, donated by his family.

The cover of one of Picasso’s sketchbooks from his time in Royan, France. Photo: Rafael Lobato © Museo Picasso Málaga
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025

“Picasso: The Royan Sketchbooks” will be on display at the Museo Picasso, Palacio de Buenavista, Calle San Agustín, 8, Mâlaga, between January 31 and April 30 2025.