Picasso in Barcelona

Born in Málaga in 1881 and relocated with his family to an apartment in the Porxos d’en Xifré in Barcelona in 1895, Picasso was one of the very first Andalucians to identify with his adopted city and learn Catalan.

From 1895 to 1897 he attended the school of fine arts in the Llotja de Mar, where his father taught. He was singularly unimpressed. 'At 15, I painted like Velázquez, and it took me 80 years to learn to paint like a child,' he said before he died.

Picasso was around 15 when he drifted into the Bohemian artistic milieu at Els Quatre Gats, where he was encouraged by Barcelona’s most famous painter of the day, Ramón Casas.

Even so, Picasso never had much money in Barcelona and he knew first hand about the impoverished, outcast subjects of his first, ‘Blue’ Period (1901–4), revealing his ‘precocious disenchantment’ before he took off to settle permanently in Paris with his first wife, ballerina Olga Khokhlova, who danced at the Liceu—who married him in spite of Picasso’s mother telling her ‘No woman believe any woman would be happy with my son.’