Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  However, in time José Ruiz did turn his mind to a thorough-going artistic education for his son. He taught Pablo the techniques of pen-and-ink, charcoal, pastel, and crayon; later he promoted him to painting in oil and watercolor, though at the same time he insisted upon a great deal of drawing, of exact and conscientious drawing. As a teacher Don José was a strict disciplinarian, obeying the law to the letter and requiring both obedience and hard work; it was a rigorously academic training, of course, for even if Don José’s tastes had not Iain in that direction, the school was under the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, a deeply conservative body. Picasso accepted the discipline happily, and in the antique classes he made drawings of casts that astonish the beholder not only with their accomplishment but even more with their power of giving the faded model’s back their life, a life that had been there when the statues were first carved and that his pleasure in the act of drawing restored to their degraded plaster shadows. What for most people is a hopelessly arid exercise was a delight to Picasso, and his art-school studies glow with pleasure: controlled, disciplined, and almost anonymous, but certainly pleasure.

  Picasso told Brassaï, when he and the photographer were talking about children’s painting and infant phenomenons (they never last, said Picasso), that the precision of these academic drawings frightened him; and certainly there is something a little monstrous about their easy virtuosity when they are compared with the decorations that he was drawing at the same time in his school-books, a time when he was in fact no more than a little jug-eared boy of twelve or thirteen. Perhaps it was at this period that Picasso was first inhabited by his particular demon: not the more or less impersonal spirit that comes to children in their nonage, incapable of sin, but the fully adult creature that Sartre calls the vampire and that certainly, in the case of some writers, lives upon their blood. Except for Friar Bacon’s squat black dog, the demon has never, I believe, been isolated and identified, but it is a real presence, and those who have known this possession report the experience as both extraordinarily exalting—mind aglow, senses concentrated, hand flying, body, heat and cold forgotten—and as something with an element of dread.

  Outside the school his work was much more free: among the surviving oils there are some little tentative pictures dating from 1892 and 1893, then a more assured cottage, probably of late ’93, technically far more competent and painted on a properly stretched canvas; and then suddenly, with no apparent transition, the extraordinarily accomplished head of a man that Cirlot, an authority on these early years, places in circa 1894, that is to say when Picasso was twelve or at the most thirteen. It is a small picture (thirteen and a half inches by eleven and a half), though it looks much larger; the head and shoulders of a man, bald-fronted, tanned, with a short grizzled beard: he is shown almost in profile, looking slightly upwards and to the right, and he docs not have the least air of sitting for his portrait. The background of a very light gray sets off this ruddy brown head and browner neck, but it does not cover the fine-grained canvas entirely; and the whitish shirt below the neck is only suggested. Picasso certainly meant to leave the picture in this state, for in the little portrait of his uncle Baldomero Chiara, which is firmly dated July 3, 1894, the paint shades off into the virgin paper, and in that of Dr. Costales (a fine old gentleman with mutton-chop whiskers and a deep fur collar) which he painted in 1895, the top of the canvas is quite bare. The picture is full of light, full of life, and the finely proportioned head—finely proportioned to the limits of the canvas—is quite wonderfully striking. An eminently Spanish picture, with the best of Spanish naturalism, absolutely nothing childish about it at all: it has little or nothing of the nineteenth century, nothing in the least sentimental, and Velásquez would have admired it, whether he knew the painter’s age or not. Indeed, it has a certain kinship with the head of the elderly man in Velásquez’ “Los Borrachos” at the Prado, which the young Picasso had never seen.

  The next year, when Picasso was still thirteen, he painted many more pictures, several of which have come down to us. There is not much point in describing them in detail, but they show many different lines of approach, many different techniques, always more assured. Among them is his dog Klipper, one of the earliest in the long series of Picasso’s animals—cats, mice, apes, pigeons, an incontinent goat, turtle-doves, owls, and always dogs. Klipper is a brownish-yellow creature, a basic dog of medium size, more smooth than rough: an intelligent head with a large, knowing eye.

  The picture has all the marks of a good portrait; and it is painted without the least trace of sentimentality. Picasso’s relations with his animals were very close: he had an extraordinary gift for entering into direct contact with them: could handle a wild bird or walk up to a furious dog when most people would have provoked an ugly scene: and the tired old cliché about the power of the human eye finds its justification in Picasso. He had in fact a most luminous and striking eye, a singular, penetrating gaze, always the first thing that people noticed. But these relations were quite unlike those which are usual in Anglo-Saxon countries. A child brought up on the spectacle of slaughtered bulls does not have the same reactions as one brought up on fiopsy bunnies or the products of Walt Disney’s muse: Picasso did not shift his animals to a semi-human plane—he met them on their own. He loved cats, not the sleek castrated fat domesticated creatures, not pussies, but the rangy feral cats of the southern gutter, who will fly in your face at the drop of a hat. His animals lived according to their own codes, more or less, with no undue notions of right or wrong, nor of cleanliness, imposed from above.

  Then there are more remarkable heads of poor, elderly men, masterly pieces of strong, sober Spanish realism, brown pictures. There is nothing of the picturesque peasant to be seen in these worn, stupid, hopeless people; even the torn shirt has no hint of the theatrical rags so common at the time. Yet only a very little earlier Picasso was drawing highly picturesque and rather feeble Moors and Moorish palaces: the development was extraordinarily rapid, and only months lie between the schoolboy doodling and the unbelievably accomplished throw-away pen and ink sketch of a Pantheon with a minute Velasquez, a pair of doves in flight, and some truly delightful putti, apparently bringing him a color-box.

  To all these pictures Picasso preferred his “Barefoot Girl” and his “Beggar,” both painted in 1895; and these he kept with him all his life.

  I will not describe “The Beggar,” which is a most able, confident study in the idiom of several others of that time, but the subtly different “Girl” must have a few lines. She sits on an uncomfortable straight-backed chair against a broken dark-green background, dressed in a long russet frock with a white cloth over her shoulders, her hands folded in her lap and one large chilblained foot dangling. She is a sad child, deep dismay struggling with sullenness in her face at repose: dismay not at her present situation, but at the world into which she has been pitched. She is of about the same age as the painter, and she sits there patiently; her immense, lustrous, asymmetric eyes gaze forward, a little down, at nothing. Here the technique is surer still, the brush-stroke firm and decisive on the dress, gentle and flowing on the face; and here there is much more personal involvement. Picasso did not spare her big hands, thick ankles, and coarse great feet; he was not in the least degree concerned with prettiness; but it is evident, not merely from her eyes and the pure oval of her face, that he was entirely with her.

  Both these canvases were rather large for Pablo at that time, about two foot six by one foot eight, and it is said that the model for the second and perhaps the canvas too were given him as a present for his good behavior during the Christmas holidays.

  Once Picasso had begun his true ascent, acquiring at the same time a mastery of his tools, Don José let him help with the details of the decorative pictures he still produced. He would, for example, cut off a dead pigeon’s pink legs and claws, pin them to a board, and tell Pablo to paint them in. In the course of a few months it became evident to both that even on the technical
plane the boy’s painting was far beyond the man’s. José Ruiz could no more have painted that beggar’s head or the barefoot girl than he could have confronted a bull in the arena. He acknowledged it; solemnly handed over his brushes to his son, and never painted again.

  It was perhaps an unfortunate impulse. The truth must in time have become even more obvious, but this gesture crystallized the situation and by so doing altered it, making it far more extreme. The young are often cruel; and there are circumstances in which they can be devoid of pity, especially towards those whose role it is to be strong and who are weak. Even now a father who abdicates, who declines the absurd role of the omniscient, omnipotent, infallible monarch of the glen, is liable to arouse a confused but strong resentment; and the status, thankfully laid aside, can never be convincingly resumed when at a later date it may become necessary: at that time, and in that place, such an action was more exceptional by far.

  One of Picasso’s outstanding characteristics as a man was his kindness, and this was evident in his face, in his habitual expression; but he was no more all of a piece throughout than any other—indeed he had more contradictions in him than most—and he could be very hard. There are also discreet, muffled, imprecise rumors of marital discord at this period: José Ruiz, aging fast, cannot have been a very lively companion. It is not surprising that Pablo’s affection should have shifted almost entirely to his mother in such an event; nor that the Picasso, which had been absent from the signatures of most of these early paintings, should now reappear. The bold P. Ruiz is replaced by P. Ruiz Picasso after 1895, and with few exceptions the Ruiz vanishes altogether after about 1901. And most of his portraits of Don José are not signed at all, whereas those of his mother are.

  Yet this does not mean any decided, lasting, definitive, and evident animosity between José and Pablo Ruiz: the portraits alone prove that, and there is a great deal of evidence for an enduring, though tempered, affection on both sides. Then again at this point the family was struck by a cruel blow that certainly brought its members together. Concepción, Pablo’s youngest sister, fell ill with diphtheria, and in spite of Dr. Costales’ devoted care she died: at that time the disease could kill in three or four days, and in Spain it did kill about half of those it attacked. Don José felt the loss most bitterly: she was the only one of his children who resembled him in the least, a fair-haired child, tall for her age, and slim.

  But in any case the La Coruña days, with their dreary, oppressive atmosphere, the shut-in life so conducive of secret domestic war, were in their turn coming to an end. A former assistant of Don José’s, Ramón Navarro Garcia, who taught figure-drawing at the famous art-school of the Llotja at Barcelona, wished to return to his native Galicia. When he proposed the exchange there could be no hesitation on José Ruiz’s part. Not only would they get away from the sad house, so very much sadder now, but Barcelona meant the Mediterranean once more, an escape from the gloom and rain of La Coruña; furthermore, the Llotja post carried a better salary: three thousand pesetas a year, almost exactly £100, or $482. At the end of the term the family packed their bags. They were to spend the summer holidays of 1895 in Málaga, taking the train, which would carry them there by way of Madrid. Picasso’s luggage included a great many pictures: he had tried to sell some in a little exhibition at an umbrella-maker’s shop (in the doorway, says Gómez de La Serna), but that had not been markedly successful; and he had given a few to Dr. Costales. The drawings and paintings that remained might be grouped in the following categories: juvenilia (though even among these there is the occasional prophetic pure, unhesitating line, especially in the bulls), boyish “historical” scenes, the interiors and other paintings that show the influence of his father’s friends Ferrandiz and Munoz Degrain, sketch-books of great interest to the art-historian, drawings of hands (all his life he was preoccupied with hands, singly and in pairs), and these strong, firmly-painted canvases of his twelfth and thirteenth years. There were also two little things that could be lumped in with the juvenilia if they did not seem to have a particular significance for the later years—they are little cut-outs, a dog and a dove, that only need to be stuck to a canvas to be the first of all collages. And these small paper silhouettes are perhaps the only examples of his father’s direct influence in the whole collection.

  A couple of days or so in Madrid, after the prolonged horror of a creeping Spanish train—more than thirty hours to cover the five hundred miles of line winding about the mountains, with four changes and innumerable stops—a Madrid at the height of its blazing summer, cannot have been very gratifying; nor can the travelers have been at their most receptive. However, Don José and his son did visit the Prado, and there for the first time in his life Picasso saw Velásquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Ribera, Goya, to say nothing of Valdes Leal, Murillo, and the host of illustrious foreigners.

  Whether the immense indigestible wealth, the heat, his fatigue, and the lighting that made it almost impossible to see “Las Meninas” whole, oppressed him or not, he had recovered his spirits by the time they reached Málaga, four hundred miles farther on. They were welcomed, feasted, made much of. Their native air, their native speech and food, revived the returning exiles, and Pablo, still the only boy the Ruiz brothers had between them, was particularly caressed. He was always in his element at a party—conviviality was meat and drink to the abstemious Picasso all his life—and this may well have been the happiest holiday that he spent in Málaga. He was so taken up with having fun that his work, even his sketching, shows a falling-off in quantity. However, he did paint a picture of the kitchen, and he did make a very delicate pencil drawing of their old servant Carmen, with her sleeves rolled up as once she had rolled them up to lead him to school by force; and perhaps influenced by the familiar atmosphere recovered, he signed it P. Ruiz, as he had done in former days.

  His relations were proud of him. Painting was now no longer the desperate career that it had been when Don José made his choice, and they may even have distinguished between the canvases he brought back from La Coruña and his father’s work. In any case, despite the shaky condition of the peseta, twenty years of peace had led the richer sort to buy paintings more frequently, and Muñoz Degrain, Moreno Carbonero, and other men they knew were doing well in Madrid, so well that the State bought their pictures for the Museum of Modern Art in the capital itself. Pablo’s manifest destiny was accepted without question: Dr. Salvador, who had grown more prosperous still, hired an aged seafaring man as model and gave his nephew a duro a day to paint him, five pesetas, a sum at least twice as much as a laborer could earn.

  Towards the end of the summer they took to the sea once more, coasting along northwards past Almería, Cartagena, Alicante, and Valencia; and the September sea was so kind that during the voyage Picasso could paint, not hurried sketches of the shore, but oil upon canvas, and that of a considerable size. After three days of sailing, Barcelona came in sight, an immensely busy port with the vast city spreading wide on either hand, the sinister Montjuich to the left, Tibidabo rising behind, and mountains beyond: to the right, factory chimneys, gasworks, palm-trees, industrial suburbs.

  As soon as he set foot on the quay, Picasso found that once again he was surrounded by a different language. All around him the people spoke Catalan, as incomprehensible as Gallego or even more so; and many of them were dressed in the fashion of their country—a red bonnet like a Phrygian cap, curiously plaited rope-soled cloth shoes, a broad red sash, a little waistcoat.

  And as the Ruizes walked along to the lodging that a friend had found for them in the Calle Cristina, not far from their landing-place, this impression of being abroad grew stronger. For the Barcelona of 1895 was a wholly European city, something they had never known before; a huge, busy, and intensely Catalan city, with half a million people in it, all talking their own language and all living according to customs and values that were foreign not only to Málaga but to Madrid and the whole of the rest of the Peninsula. The thirteen-year-old Pablo could not have felt
more a stranger if he had landed in Marseilles or Genoa: once again he was entirely uprooted.

  Chapter III

  THIS is not the place for a detailed history of Catalonia and its capital: but the culture into which Picasso was plunged was determined by that history, and since he passed his most formative years in Barcelona, becoming integrated with the Catalan community, speaking their language, and making his earliest and most lasting friends among them, some modest outline is essential to an understanding of the forces that worked upon the vital years of his adolescence and early manhood.

  In the middle ages Catalonia was an independent country, lying on both sides of the eastern Pyrenees, but with most of its territory in the Peninsula. The Moors had held it for a while, but Charlemagne soon thrust them out, and in the ninth century Wilfred the Shaggy cut himself free from all foreign allegiance and ruled without contest as a sovereign chief of state.

  His country was poor in natural resources, but rich in an active, enterprising population. (“From a stone the Catalan will draw bread” says the Spanish proverb.) After the turmoil of the Moorish wars those who lived upon the coast early returned to commerce, carrying on the Roman tradition; and in spite of their indifferent harbors they soon became one of the most important trading nations in the Mediterranean. Barcelona rivaled Venice and Genoa; Catalan ships sailed to the North Sea and the Baltic, to Alexandria and points beyond; Catalan maritime law and marine insurance were accepted as standard far and wide; and while the other states of Spain were shut off from the rest of Europe, preoccupied with centuries of war against the Moors or with fratricidal struggles for power, Catalonia flourished, with a splendid literature of its own, a highly distinctive architecture, a school of painting which bears comparison with that of Lombardy, a renowned university, and a general culture that had long been wide open to influences from France, Provence, Italy, Byzantium, and the learned Moors and Jews of southern and central Spain.