Picasso's Frieze on the Architects' College

Why is it significant?

Stand in the middle of Plaça Nova, keep the cathedral behind your left shoulder, and face the flat modern block across the square. Run your eyes along the pale band above the ground floor... those are not cracks in the concrete. They are drawings.

Key Facts

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Stand in the middle of Plaça Nova, keep the cathedral behind your left shoulder, and face the flat modern block across the square. Run your eyes along the pale band above the ground floor... those are not cracks in the concrete. They are drawings. Stick-thin figures, children holding up branches, giant festival figures, a crowd that seems to be dancing, all scratched into the façade like chalk on a pavement. This is the Col·legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya, the architects' association, finished in 1962 to a design by Xavier Busquets. The friezes were drawn by Pablo Picasso. And yet Picasso never stood where you are standing to see them. He had vowed not to set foot in Spain while Franco ruled, so he made the designs in France, and the Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar transferred them onto the concrete with a sandblasting technique the two of them had developed. Picasso's line, cut by another man's hand, in a city he would never walk through again. That paradox is the thread of this whole walk. The boy who arrived in Barcelona in 1895, not yet fourteen, came with a father who taught drawing and a family still grieving a little daughter who had died that winter. Between fourteen and twenty-two he grew up in the streets around you: first studio, first exhibition, first friends who were poets, anarchists and broke painters. Paris made him famous. Barcelona made him Picasso. Look at what he chose to draw for a building full of architects. Not a building at all. Festivals. Children carrying palm leaves, the giants that sway through every Catalan town fair, a crowd lifting a banner. In the early sixties, under a regime that kept Catalan popular culture on a short leash, these scrawls on a public square read to many locals as a quiet gesture of affection from a famous exile. Behind you stand the two round towers of the Roman gate and the Gothic cathedral, two thousand years of stone facing a sketch by the most famous painter of the twentieth century. Now let's go where the young Picasso actually spent his evenings. Walk up the broad shopping street of Portal de l'Àngel and turn right into narrow Carrer de Montsió.