From Pablo, With Love

Pablo Picasso has always been articulately hostile to Franco's Spain. Only four months ago, he brusquely refused a request from the Spanish Government to acquire his celebrated Guernica, which depicts the sufferings of civilians in the Spanish Civil War. "Guernica will return to Spain only when the republic is restored," he declared from France, where he has lived for nearly 70 of his 88 years. And he himself probably will not go back before Guernica. Thus, the French were somewhat aggrieved last week when it was announced that Picasso had donated some 900 of his early works to the city of Barcelona to be installed in the small but charming Picasso museum started by his friend Jaime Sabartes.

Homesickness. They should not have been. For Picasso, Barcelona is not Franco's Spain--it is the place where he grew up. His family moved there when his father, an art teacher and curator, took a position at the School of Fine Arts. Picasso was then a precocious 13, and it was there, over the next few years, that he set up his first studio, received his first exhibition and won his first prize--an honorable mention for the painting Science and Charity, for which his father posed as a doctor. To this day, friends say, when Picasso suffers from homesickness, or morrina as the Spanish call it, it is for Barcelona.

Even after his father died, the family kept the apartment, and lovingly maintained the collection, of Picasso's earliest sketchbooks and the paintings he turned out on his occasional return visits. Nobody but Picasso really knows just what the collection contains. But officials estimate that there must be about 260 oils, 600 drawings and 100 or so gouaches. There are sketches of his friends, the gulls circling over the seaport where his father once worked, the dance halls and bullfights that he saw in Barcelona.

Treasure Trove. Besides homesickness, Picasso seems to have been motivated by the fact that in Barcelona he met his lifelong friend and later secretary, Jaime Sabartes. Over the years, Picasso gave Sabartes a treasure trove of his works. In 1963. Sabartes donated the rich collection to the city of Barcelona, which provided a lovely old palacio to house it. Picasso's bequest was actually made a month ago, when he summoned a Barcelona notary public to his Riviera villa and dictated a document, declaring, "I, Pablo Picasso, in memory of my unforgettable friend Jaime Sabartes, grant the bequest to the city of Barcelona . . ."

The artist's gift will leave Barcelona with the biggest Picasso collection in the world--at least numerically. But the canny old master has sequestered in his own private custody thousands of his mature works, and unless Barcelona gets those, too, the site of the definitive Picasso museum is still the master's choice.

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