Artist and poet Jaime Sabartés (1881 – 1968) had been among the oldest and closest friends of Pablo Picasso since the two of them were 19-year-old artists in Barcelona. Throughout the course of their 40-year friendship Picasso had painted and drawn his pal on six occasions – Sabartés’ comments about those portraits and his memories of those isolated moments appear on the attached pages. He recalled a day when Picasso energetically encouraged him to write down his thoughts, which in time lead to this article, that appeared in his 1948 book, PICASSO: an Intimate Portrait
“I decided, therefore, to take these portraits as texts, to try to imbue with warmth Picasso’s pictures of me, to make them live anew, to enrich them with fragments from the life of their creator and shreds of my own.”
When this article first appeared on the pages of ’48 MAGAZINE, Sabartés had been working as Picasso’s private secretary for nine years. A Picasso poem is included in this reminiscence (appearing on page 4; translator unknown).
The last portrait Picasso ever painted of Jaime Sabartés can be seen on the right (1939).
A forgotten article from 1913 that degraded Picasso and other assorted Modernists can be read here.
