Musketeers, female nudes, Dora Maar, bulls and portraits of various characters are some of the themes of the works shown here. All these drawings have been brought together in a publication that contextualises each of them and has been prefaced by Antonio Muñoz Molina.

For Picasso, drawing is a discipline and also a habit and a vice, an incessant automatism, part of the hyperactivity that kept his eyes and hands constantly busy. He drew as he breathed, with a fluidity that seemed to exclude deliberation and yet always produced exact results, as when he made a lightning collage with four things found on the floor of the studio, or as on those occasions, in his time with Dora Maar, when, to console her for the loss of a puppy, he made extraordinary portraits of him scrunching and folding paper napkins from the restaurant where they ate together. He dated each drawing with the rather administrative calculation of a cataloguer of himself, but also with an impulse to mark its instantaneousness, its quality as a work begun and finished in a day, as one notes the date in a diary entry, a writing not premeditated or reworked, but thrown on the paper like an ink stain (...) This speed is the guarantee of the freshness of what has been done (...)*.

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* Antonio Muñoz Molina Metamorfosis del dibujo