Picasso produced Brick Factory at Tortosa in the summer of 1909, when he was aged 28, in Horta de Sant Joan. It was his second visit to the quiet mountain village in Southern Spain, having earlier spent seven months there as a teenager in 1898 with his friend and fellow art student, Manuel Pallarés.
The second visit, ten years after Picasso's first visit, inspired him to produce paintings dominated by landscapes depicted in a geometric style. It was a period in which he rediscovered himself as an artist and developed an experimental new style that would eventually lead to Cubism.
The image depicts a factory which was an unusual subject for the period, as it departed from the typical 19th-century landscapes of distant smokestacks. In this painting Picasso reduced the factory and its chimney to rough geometric shapes, simplifying the forms to almost unrecognizable objects. The volumes of the structure are deliberately sketchy, presented using grey and orange planes, rather than realistic external facades. The shapes of the building have been presented in a way that is neither neat nor regular. Picasso intended to create an abstract image that is difficult to logically describe.
One of the most notable features, however, is the way in which Picasso has happily manipulated the topographical features of the landscape. The factory and palm trees depicted in the painting almost certainly did not exist in real life. Rather, the palm trees in the painting may have been a series of olive presses known by locals as "the factory". Picasso's friend Manuel Pallarés remarked that the factory was an invention and did not exist in that location, and opined that this depiction of the factory can be seen as a representation of the modernizing view of Catalonia or of modernity in opposition to nature.
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