Museu Picasso: the complete trace of the boy who drew like Velázquez and spent seventy years unlearning

What is Museu Picasso and where does it come from?

The Museu Picasso is not the Picasso museum you expect. The iconic works are not there — Guernica is in Madrid, the Demoiselles d'Avignon are in New York. What is here is what almost no one has: the complete trace of a boy who drew like Velázquez at the age of fourteen and decided to spend seventy years unlearning. Founded in 1963 when Jaume Sabartés, Picasso's personal secretary, donated his personal collection to the Barcelona city council. Picasso later donated some 2,000 more works himself. The museum occupies five connected Gothic palaces from the 13th-15th century, on Montcada street in El Born.

Why go — and what's the purpose of your appointment with the artist?

Picasso spent seventy years of his life painting every day. I didn't expect inspiration. I painted. What the Museu Picasso shows like no other museum in the world is that discipline sustained for decades. The series on Las Meninas — 47 versions of the same painting painted in four months in 1957, all preserved and displayed together in room 12 — are the best visual lesson on Julia Cameron's method that you will ever see.

How to take advantage of it (concrete practice)

Stay 20 minutes in the Las Meninas room. Note what changes between version 1 and 47. You take home the most important lesson from Cameron's book: daily discipline generates more art than inspiration. Picasso didn't wait to have a good idea. He painted the same scene 47 times to discover it. It's operational proof that morning pages work. After room 12, go out along Montcada Street towards Born, sit in Plaça del Born with your notebook and draw ONE thing you have seen — anything. If it lasts twenty minutes, you have made an appointment with the artist in his purest form.

Why this place connects with Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way

The practice of the appointment with the artist that Julia Cameron prescribes in The Artist's Path has a principle: creativity needs to be fed before I can produce. Cameron calls it 'filling the well.' The metaphor is exact: if it doesn't rain, the well runs dry. If you don't expose your brain to non-work stimuli once a week, your ability to generate new ideas quietly declines, week by week.

Museu Picasso is an ideal place for a date with the artist because it meets the three conditions that Cameron asks for: It takes you out of your routine (a place other than your work and home), does not require production (you are going to receive, not create), and exposes you to curated stimuli (someone with judgment decided this was worth watching). Three conditions, an hour or two, once a week. It is probably the practice with the best mental ROI that you are going to add to your routine.

If you haven't taken the course yet, this is the place to start. Your Artist's Path is the free 12-week program that applies Julia Cameron's method to your life — including two hours a week blocked off on your calendar for appointments like this. More about the course at the end of the post.