Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  The portrait of his aunt Josefa (a difficult old lady, pious and contradictory, his father’s eldest surviving sister) has been called by Juan-Eduardo Cirlot “without doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.” Other authorities might not go so far, but the statement is not downright ludicrous: as it hangs there amidst the juvenilia the picture is immensely striking. Against a dark background the little old woman’s strong-featured yellowish face with its big, lustrous eyes, as dark as her nephew’s, peers out under a black cap, completely dominating the room: the brushwork is bold and assured; the picture is eminently successful. Yet Picasso never painted like this again: he never again used the same Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro nor the same Expressionist approach.

  In its way the second picture is more surprising still. In the first place, it is a landscape, a rare thing in Picasso’s work, and then it is painted in a manner unlike anything he had done before or was ever to do again: looking at this picture of the red Málaga earth sloping up to the light blue sky and partly covered with prickly-pear cactuses, some living, some dead (they grow wild there) one thinks of the Fauves and, more strongly by far, of van Gogh. The first did not yet exist; the second he cannot have heard of: yet there is the fierce color, and there is the powerful, living brush-work of the earth, a heavy dry impasto laid on as with a palette-knife, contrasting wonderfully with the thinly-painted sky. A second glance shows that the picture is entirely his own, entirely individual; a second thought makes it clear that these influences were utterly impossible; and one wonders how any professor can have had the confidence to teach this fourteen-year-old boy anything but the mere technique of his media.

  The confidence was not lacking, however, and back in Barcelona that autumn the men at the Llotja continued to show him how to draw, while his father stretched him two big canvases for pictures that were designed to continue the modest success of the “First Communion” and lead on to sales, commissions, and a steady income. Don José went further than buying the raw materials and giving advice on their use; he even hired a studio for Pablo, in which the paint could be laid on. This first independent studio was in the Calle de la Plata, which runs down into the Calle de la Merced: the word studio, applied to those Picasso knew in Barcelona, does not mean a fine high airy place with a north light but simply a bare room, often very small and ill-lit, where he could work—where the mess would not matter; and here the word independent was strictly relative too, since the garret was only just round the corner from the family flat, within easy reach of parents.

  One of these pictures, a bayonet charge (probably connected with the fighting in Cuba), has vanished: the other, which Don José planned and which he named “Science and Charity,” shows a medical man taking the pulse of a sick woman, while a nun, holding a fair-sized baby, stands on the far side of the bed, proffering a drink (soup, says Sabartés). The doctor was Don José; the nun’s habit was lent by a Sister of Charity from Málaga who now lived in Barcelona; and the genuine baby had been hired from a beggar-woman. Picasso made several drawings and studies in watercolor and oil for this picture; he worked hard on it, and the result pleased his family. “Science and Charity” was sent to the National Exhibition in Mádrid, where it received a mención honorífica from the jury and a dart of facetious criticism from a journalist who thought the sick woman’s lead-blue hand looked like a glove (which it does), and to the Provincial Exhibition at Málaga, where not unnaturally it was given a medal, nominally made of gold. The kindest thing that can be said about the picture is that technically it is most accomplished, that there were a great many far worse in the same tradition, and that it gave and still gives pleasure to those who’ like craftsmanship, anecdote, and realistic description. In any case it was the last work of this kind that he ever painted. It was his farewell to the academic tradition in which he had been brought up and which his world accepted; but the fact that he painted no more Science and Charities does not mean that he was yet the full Picasso, the anarchist whose aim was to destroy the false and flabby world of illustration by violence and to bring another, infinitely more meaningful, into existence, a painting that should purge by pity and terror in its own language and according to its own logic rather than provide ornament, prettiness, or transposed literature. At this time his revolt was still latent: he was still in many ways a boy, and protest, aesthetic or social, was still no more than protest within the context of the world in which he lived. But it was also a time at which he covered sheets of paper with all possible variants of his signature, including the zz for ss which is sometimes to be seen in his early pictures; and although it is perhaps going too far to say that this “anxious search” shows a doubt of his own identity, it may well be the sign of an underlying uneasiness soon to rise to the surface.

  The rest of his stay at the Llotja was taken up with school studies and with his own drawing: his sketch-books are filled with much the same scenes as before, some of them frankly picturesque, though now the touch is even more confident and the variety of approaches greater, ranging from the purely traditional to a number of experiments in which the geometrical simplification of the essential forms is already apparent. Yet although the beginning of several possible points of departure from tradition can be made out in the drawings and pictures, the evolution, the progression, is not that of an iconoclast but of an extraordinarily gifted student who does not doubt the nature of his world—of Pablo rather than of Picasso.

  And it was still as Pablo, the wonderful boy, that he packed his canvases and drawings for the summer holiday of 1897. It was not nearly so happy as those of former years, and although he was seen to take a lively interest in his cousin Carmen, and although his talents were celebrated at a feast attended by local artists, who had the effrontery to baptize him painter in champagne, he did comparatively little work.

  His uncle Salvador had grown even more prosperous; he had recently married the forty-year-old niece of the Marqués of Casa-Loring, a great social advancement; he had a fine house on the Alameda itself, and he was looked upon as the head of the Ruiz family, some members of which he either helped or supported entirely. As such he disapproved of Pablo’s way of signing his pictures Picasso, or P. R. Picasso, or at the best P. Ruiz Picasso. Don Salvador liked the pictures (he hung “Science and Charity” in a place of honor) but there were sides of his nephew’s character that he did not care for at all. It may be that in imposing his authority as the protector and in making Pablo aware that he was a poor relation he overplayed his part, and it is certain that although Don Salvador himself suggested that Pablo should be sent to Mádrid, to the Royal Academy of San Fernando, where his friends Moreno Carbonero and Muñoz Degrain were now influential professors, he nevertheless calculated the sum necessary for his nephew’s support with all the sensible, contriving economy that the rich so often exercise on the poor’s behalf. The Málaga medal turned out to be made of brass, only very, very thinly plated with gold. The sum was to be advanced by the Doctor, by Don Baldomero Chiara, Maria Picasso’s brother-in-law, perhaps by some other relatives, and by Don José: it was to pay for his journey, his keep, his fees, and his materials.

  “It must have been a small fortune,” said Sabartés.

  “I’ll tell you what it was,” replied Picasso. “A mere vile pittance, that’s what it was. A few pesetas. Barely enough to keep from starving to death: no more than that.”

  In the autumn of 1897 (the same year that an anarchist killed Canovas, the prime minister), the pittance carried him to Mádrid, that expensive capital, where he found himself a room in the slummy Calle San Pedro Martir, in the heart of the town; and there he celebrated his sixteenth birthday. He had never been away from home before; he had never had to manage his own affairs or handle anything but pocket-money; and although the Ruizes had always been poor in the sense of having little or no superfluity, Pablo had no intimate, personal experience of true poverty; he had never lacked for food or warmth. This essential lesson was soon to come, but firs
t he had to put his name down for the Academy—once called the Academia de Nobles Artes and familiar to Goya: much decayed since then, but still filled with his works—and to undergo the severe entrance examination.

  He described himself on the form as a “pupil of Muñoz Degrain.” He may have thought this a politic stroke or he may have wished to set himself off from his father. He cannot have meant it as a statement of fact. But pupil of José Ruiz or of Muñoz Degrain, he passed the examination with stupefying ease, just as he had done at the Llotja; and the same amount of legend surrounds the feat.

  Having been admitted with acclaim, he attended a few of the classes, found that they were as bad as the Llotja or worse, and then neglected the Academy entirely, except for its splendid collection of Goyas. There was no family routine to oblige him to go, and in any case he had all the wealth of the Prado just at hand, with time to absorb, copy, and enjoy El Greco, Velásquez, and Goya, who with van Gogh and Cézanne were the most important masters he ever knew.

  A less obvious reason for his neglect was the presence of Muñoz Degrain and Moreno Carbonero at the Academy. They were both shockingly bad painters, and although Muñoz Degrain had some notion of light and although Carbonero was a good draughtsman, their canvases were the epitome of official art at its nadir. (There is some connection between size and worth in the official mind, and their pictures were often huge.) And they were not even competent: one vast Muñoz Degrain, preserved at Málaga, is the illustration of an anecdote about a man serenading a woman on a balcony; a cloaked rival, now slinking off, has shot him with a blunderbuss; and the woman’s face has turned a startling green, as well it might, for her lover is weltering in his gore. It is so eminently, ludicrously, bad that at this distance of time one feels a glow of affection for the painter; but in 1897 this cannot have been the case with Picasso. As a small boy he had liked Muñoz Degrain: since then he had developed enormously, and although he had not yet made the decisive move to Modernismo, he was now surrounded by the greatest paintings that Spain had yet produced, and the contrast must have been painfully striking. At no period of his life was Picasso easily embarrassed, but meeting Muñoz Degrain just then must have been painful; and as for Moreno Carbonero, Picasso simply despised his teaching. He despised all Spanish teaching: “If I had a son who wanted to be a painter,” he wrote to a friend at this time, “I should not keep him in Spain for a moment, and do not imagine I should send him to Paris (where I should gladly be myself) but to Munik (I do not know if it is spelt like that), as it is a city where painting is studied seriously without regard to set theories of any kind, such as pointillisme and all the rest.…”

  In Mádrid he found a class-mate from his first year at the Llotja, Francisco Bernareggi, an Argentinian; and when Picasso was not walking about the streets of the city, drawing indefatigably, they went to the Prado together and copied the pictures they admired. It is significant of Picasso’s continuing respect for his father’s judgment that they both sent their copies back to Don José in Barcelona. Velásquez, Goya, and Titian he approved of, but when they sent him their versions of El Greco he wrote, “You are taking the wrong path.” Among Picasso’s was a late Velásquez portrait of Philip IV, from which it is clear that the student had either not yet acquired the master’s touch or that in his poverty he could not afford the master’s materials, particularly his famous brushes. There is also a version of one of Goya’s “Caprichos,” the bawd and the whore who were to reappear so often in much later years, and a careful, affectionate drawing from an early nineteenth-century print of José Delgado, otherwise Pepe Illo, the illustrious Andalusian bullfighter and the author of La Tauromaquia o Arte de Torear, which Picasso was to illustrate sixty years later. He had something of Picasso, and of the Gypsy, in his amused, knowing, proud old face—he was close on fifty (ancient for a torero) when a bull killed him at last, in 1801. Bulls: all these years, from early Málaga to Mádrid, Picasso had loved to see them live and die. The drawings and paintings that he made have not always been mentioned in their place, often being more by way of personal memoranda, but they run through his life, a constant presence.

  The sketch-books are filled with his usual street-scenes, including some wonderfully drawn horses; and here again we see his preoccupation with his name. On one page Ruiz is written in careful capitals, each letter beneath the other: next to it P. Ruiz, ringed about with the kind of halo-line that he was using then, and not far off the initials P.R. several times repeated. And in some places we see the Picazzo that he had tried out before. This was at a time when his father had shown particular love and generosity.

  The most striking of the drawings and paintings, however, are those which show his first steps towards Modernismo and indeed towards a world far beyond it. Two landscapes of the Buen Retiro, painted in misty fin-de-siécle colors, clearly point in that direction; and in a drawing labeled “Rechs the Pre-Raphaelite,” with its symbolic oil-lamp, the connection is obvious. (The Pre-Raphaelite movement, though at its last tepid gasp, formed one of the heterogeneous ingredients of Modernismo.) And of course he was aware of the movement: in a letter written at this time he said, “I am going to make a drawing for you to take to the Barcelona Cómica to see if they will buy it.… Modernist it must be …” But there is also a group of gaunt chimneys rising above a wall that foreshadows an art from which anecdote and the picturesque are entirely banished, while unnamed forms, new or archaic, assume a vital significance; and an enigmatic window with an iron balcony, a subject to which he was to return again and again in later life.

  Another friend he met in Mádrid was Hortensi Güell, a young Catalan writer and painter from Reus, whose portrait he drew later in Barcelona, a few months before Güell killed himself. This was the first of Picasso’s friends to commit suicide.

  Young people are surprisingly frail, in spite of their ebullient spirits and elasticity, and there are times when misfortune or unkindness will destroy them: Picasso was working hard in Mádrid, but he was never to be seen at the Academy. News of this reached Málaga. Rich Don Salvador saw it as another proof of Pablo’s indiscipline, want of purpose, and defiance of established authority: he and the Málaga relations cut off their supplies. Don José, on the other hand, took Pablo’s side; he maintained his contribution and even increased it as much as he could; but his£100 a year did not allow him to do much, and the pittance dwindled to subsistence-level or below. One of Picasso’s many self-portraits, drawn considerably later, shows a thin adolescent, wan and pitifully young. Had he drawn it at the time, the face would have been more pinched by far. This cutting-off of his allowance came at a time when he was growing fast, and although he would probably never have reached his father’s six foot however much he had been fed, a reasonable diet at this point might have added those few inches that make all the difference between a small man and one of average size. As it was, he remained short; and it is a matter of common observation that in men of a determined character, combativeness is in inverse proportion to height. Perhaps it was just as well: if Picasso had been as tall as Braque, would he ever have painted the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” or “Guernica”? At all events (and this is another instance of the peculiar and unpredictable sweetness that made part of his extremely complex and often contradictory character) he bore no grudge for this or many other affronts: when Don Salvador lay dying in 1908, Picasso wrote to his cousins Concha and María most tenderly, with obviously sincere anxiety and pain. Though to be sure since 1897 Don Salvador had paid for his nephew’s exemption from military service.

  The days passed, and winter came on: it comes early in Mádrid, a city of extremes, perched on a bare steppe two thousand feet up, with icy blasts from the Sierra de Guadarrama, and it can be most bitterly cold even for a native, let alone a Mediterranean sun-worshiper like Picasso. Furthermore, the air is so desperately unhealthy even in a dead calm that it will, as the local proverb says, “kill a man, although it will not blow out a candle.”

  Between bouts of pain
ting, Picasso moved house several times, following his harassed landlords as they fled from the bailiffs, always keeping to the same kind of street—San Pedro Martir, Júsus y MarĬa, Lavapies—never far from the great rag-fair of the Rastro. It was in the last of his garrets that the Mádrid air and the effects of privation caught up with him. He fell ill with a violent fever, his throat was excoriated, his flayed tongue assumed the appearance of a strawberry, he came out in vermilion spots all over, the spots rapidly coalesced, and he presented the classic aspect of a patient suffering from scarlet fever.

  The illness could be mortal then, but Picasso was tough. After some weeks of bed, losing his old skin and growing a new one, he was able to creep out for the verbena of San Antonio de la Florida, on June 12. These verbenas take place on the eve of the saint’s day, and although no doubt they were pious in their origin, for centuries they have been little more than fairs, with a great deal of singing, dancing, drinking, and fornication of a secular, if not pagan, character: Picasso was not going to miss a moment of it.

  Then he took the weary train to Barcelona, where home cooking, kindness, and his natural resilience restored his strength and spirits so quickly that a week or so later when Pallarès invited him to convalesce in the country air, at Horta, he accepted at once.

  Horta, where Pallarès was born and where his parents lived, was a village of some two or three thousand people; or perhaps one should say a very small town, since it possessed a mayor, a doctor, and a sereno, a watchman who called the hours and the weather throughout the night and who represented the law: he also buried the dead. It stands on a steep small hill in the middle of a plain surrounded by mountains, and it lies in the high limestone country known as the Terra Alta, on the far limits of Cataluñia, within sight of Aragón: it was then called plain Horta, or Horta de Ebro (though it is miles from the river), and now it is Horta de Sant Joan, a mayor of some sixty years ago having had a particular devotion to that saint.