7 rue des Grands-Augustins

The place, briefly

Pablo Picasso took a studio at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins in the winter of 1936, in a seventeenth-century building on the left bank a few streets from the Seine. He kept it until 1955.[1]

In January 1937 the Spanish Republican government commissioned him to make a work for its pavilion at the Paris World's Fair. He had no subject and made little progress for months. Then on 26 April the Basque town of Guernica was bombed by German and Italian aircraft flying for the Nationalists, and the reports reached Paris within days.[1]

He began on 1 May and finished on 4 June 1937. The canvas is nearly eight metres wide and it was painted in this room — a fact worth holding onto when you stand on the street, because the scale of the thing against the scale of a Paris apartment building is the first surprise of the story.[1]

Dora Maar, a photographer and Picasso's partner at the time, photographed the painting in progress from 11 May to 4 June. That record is why Guernica is the most closely documented major painting ever made: you can watch it change state by state, see figures added and painted out, and see the composition arrive rather than appear. Nothing comparable exists for any other work of that importance.[2]

The building held more than the painting. The studio became a meeting place through the Occupation, when Picasso stayed in Paris and went on working while his art was officially condemned.[3]

It is private and there is nothing to enter. But the street is short and quiet and the building is unmistakable, and the Musée national Picasso in the Marais is the place to go afterwards.