In 1909 Picasso took
Fernande Olivier on a
momentous summer holiday
at Horta de Ebro. He knew
this mountain village well,
since he had stayed there 10
years before with the family of
his great friend Manuel
Pallares; it was Picasso's first
experience of the countryside,
and he later declared
grandiloquently, 'Everything I
know, I learned in Pallares's
village.' This second visit was a
less happy one: the Pallares
family and other villagers were
hostile because Picasso and
Fernande were not married,
and Fernande herself
was ill
for much of the time.
Nevertheless the bleak
landscape and bare stuccoed
village houses inspired Picasso
to push his experimentation a
stage further, forging a new
style in which visual realities
were reduced to their
geometrical elements.
On his
return to Paris, Picasso
discovered that his friend
Georges Braque
had been
working along almost identical
lines. The two artists formed
one of the most celebrated
partnerships in the history of
art, and Cubism
was born.
