“While Picasso’s ‘primitivism’ has always been known,” says MNAC’s director Pepe Serra, “what is clear upon seeing the show is that Romanesque art was also one of the most important sources for him. The exhibition demonstrates that there is a very strong connection between Picasso and Romanesque art.”

‘Creative lifeblood’

It is likely that Picasso first started looking seriously at Romanesque art four years prior to his trip to Gosol, when a major exhibition of Romanesque and Gothic art opened in Barcelona, coinciding with a resurgence in Catalan nationalism. A little over three decades later, in 1934, by which time Picasso was an international celebrity living permanently in France, the artist returned to Barcelona to visit the new National Museum (then known as the Art Museum of Catalonia), shortly before its official inauguration.

A newspaper covered the event, which proved to be Picasso’s last visit to his homeland – after the rise of Franco, he never returned to Spain. “Passing from one room to another,” the reporter wrote, “Picasso, before those incomparable fragments of early Catalan art, admired [their] power, intensity and skill … and he stated without hesitation that our Romanesque Museum will be something unique in the world, an indispensable resource for anyone who wishes to know the origins of Western art, an invaluable lesson for the moderns.”