Pablo Picasso's Stunning Repetitions
"I am the notebook"
Two things were true of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) from a young age: he was rebellious, and he loved to draw. As a child, he was obsessed with sketching, so he would get into trouble to have time alone with his sketchbook.1 Later, barely fourteen years old, while at the the Barcelona School of Fine Arts, when instructed to write “One must learn to paint” in his notebook, he wrote instead, “One must not learn to paint.”2 From the start, Picasso flaunted the rules.
Even when he wasn’t working on his sketchbooks, he was still sketching. Picasso’s school books are filled with youthful drawings.
Here are a few more examples from 1893/1894 when Picasso was 12 or 13 years old.
The first two pages (above) are filled with drawings of pigeons, which happened to be his father’s preferred subject. Picasso’s father, José Ruiz y Blasco,3 was an artist and instructor at the Art Academy of Málaga. He was also Pablo’s first art teacher.
Picasso would later drop his father’s last name and retain his mother’s. But in his early years, he went by the name Pablo Ruiz. He dedicates “La Coruña,” one of his childhood magazines, to his father and notes himself as “Director / P. Ruiz.”
As Picasso told it, when he was a teenager, his father asked him to complete one of his own unfinished paintings. The young Pablo did such a good job, his father handed over his paint brushes and exclaimed that he would never paint again.4 This statement proved hyperbolic considering that Picasso’s father did, in fact, continue to paint.
The point remains, though, that Picasso’s father recognized his son’s precocious talent. In fact, Picasso could imitate virtually any style of painting by his teenage years. Still, his father remained a towering presence. In his first large-scale painting, “First Communion,” he used his father as model for the priest.
By dropping his father’s last name later in life, Pablo distanced himself from his father’s shadow. Picasso set out to be original. And, as we know, Picasso’s style would change dramatically over the course of his long, celebrated career. But one thing never changed: Picasso continued to rely heavily on his sketchbooks.
Picasso’s Notebook Covers
Picasso turned to notebooks as a crucial tool throughout his life. He explained:
I picked up my sketchbooks daily, saying to myself: “what will I learn of myself that I didn’t know"5
Between 1894-1967, Picasso filled 175 sketchbooks. They were so important to him that he inscribed one of the sketchbooks with the words
Je suis le cahier
I am the notebook
His son, Claude Picasso, describes the artist’s notebooks as “stepping-stones to trampolines for somersaults.”6 And, critics agree that Picasso used his notebooks to work on discrete artistic problems ranging from stylistic to thematic issues.
Let’s spend some time on the sketchbooks Picasso used to prepare for his most controversial painting.
Picasso Prepares to Stun the World
As the 20th century began, Pablo Picasso hunted for a new style. Because photography had improved considerably from its 19th-century beginnings, artists recognized that their talents for realism would be less valuable. They needed to do something else. Picasso answered with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
In 1907, this painting set the art world on fire. Even Picasso’s future collaborator Georges Braque described it “as if a fire-eater had been drinking petrol.”7 Indeed, art critics tend to mark the beginning of modernism with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” because of its clear departure from previous painting norms, in which artists attempted to faithfully represent the world. But why represent nature realistically if a photograph could do it just as well?
One need only look at Picasso’s notebooks to recognize the staggering amount of work that went into “Les Demoiselles.” He carried out 809 preliminary studies and filled 16 different sketchbooks with his attempts to represent the women. It was with this painting that he introduced the world to what would become known as cubism.8
With “Les Demoiselles,” Picasso radically simplified human forms so that they no longer signaled any social or psychological information. Picasso began working with shapes that did not necessarily belong together. Specifically, he collapsed several perspectives into a single image. For example, the two central women in “Les Demoiselles” face forward, but their noses are in profile.
Picasso spent a lot of time working on the women’s faces—often moving from realistic representations to geometric forms.
In the notebooks, Picasso established “a repetoir” that he could pull from for “Les Demoiselles” as well as future paintings.9
Much as he worked on composing a face of geometric forms, he also worked on the proportions of a human body, using techniques he had learned at the academy.
And then he used these proportions as worked on the women’s bodies over and over again.
He worked on how he would position the women.
And then, he considered the color scheme.
After hundreds of sketches, he felt ready to approach the canvas and, ultimately, to stun the world.
Picasso was one of the first celebrities in the age of photography and film. For that reason, we have some wonderful footage recording his process. So, I’ll leave you with the artist himself, as filmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot for his 1956 film, The Mystery of Picasso.
Notes on Picasso’s Notes:
Think back to your childhood: Having studied many creative people’s notebooks, I’ve found that, like Picasso, people often clearly express their preoccupations, interests, and character quite early in their childhood notes. Perhaps that is true of you too? I know it is true for me.
Creativity is Repetition: I’ve been thinking about Picasso’s creative practice in terms of repetition—the necessary, unglamorous labor of creative work. And thinking about it in terms of writing in particular (because I’m a writer and an English professor). Writing this post helped me realize that so much of what I try to teach students is that writing requires a kind of sketching—trying out multiple introductory paragraphs before settling on one, for example. I also realize that this is what I do when I write. It’s not even conscious at this point. I tend to write a different introduction every time I open a document. If time allowed, I’d rewrite every sentence in this post a hundred times.
Think about the relationship between pages of your notebook: One particular technique Picasso used in his notebooks was pressing hard enough with his pencil to leave an imprint on the following page that he could play with as he sketched the same form (in this case, a woman’s head) again. Play with pressing down on your pen or pencil to create ghost images as Picasso did.
Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.
Yours in note-taking,
McCully, Marilyn. “A Secret Studio,” Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks. Pace Publishing, 2024, p. 5.
Quoted in Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906. Edited by Marilyn McCully, National Gallery of Art / Yale University Press, 1997, p. 24.
As was Spanish custom, Pablo’s full name included his father’s and mother’s surnames. He was born Pablo Ruiz Picasso. You’ll notice in the image of “La Coruña”, Picasso designates himself as “Director P. Ruiz.” As his art career took off, he dropped his father’s last name.
I am reminded of Lewis Carroll’s childhood magazine.
Quoted in Je Suis Le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso. First Edition, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, p.2.
Picasso, Claude. “A Memoir” in Je suis Le Cahier, p. 5.
Paraphrased by Warncke, Carsten-Peter. Picasso: 1881-1973. Taschen America Llc, 2006, p. 165.
"Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is considered proto-cubist because the term “Cubism” would not be applied to Braque’s work until a few years later.
Warncke, p.148.
I have never been inspired by Picasso, frankly never understood all the rave about him. But now, reading this and seeing the sketches yes the man can draw... no disrespect to Picasso. I have a drawing by him. I never look at it even though it's on my wall. Because I know it's there and I love it because it is a sketch, it feels like it's in two lines and it's perfect. In fact so lovely I wrote about it in a poem. What I love about this is the background and the detail in his work. Yes he can draw, but he prefers to be a rebel. That shows how little I knew about Picasso and without meaning to it's so easy to misunderstand what we don't understand.
Wow! This is a super read to start off the week! Inspiring.