Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  But although Brossa had clear notions of their ideology, he did not succeed in passing them on to Picasso, who was never a political animal. Nor did he succeed in passing on the anti-Semitism that infects some of Nietzsche’s followers, for Picasso, although given to superstition, was far, far too strong a personality for that kind of self-inflating myth.

  What Picasso did draw in was a generalized anarchism and a deep sympathy for Catalan independence: the people around him preached contempt for bourgeois art, which some of them produced, and hatred for intellectual snobbery, which most of them practiced, but the very young and ingenuous Picasso either did not notice their inconsistencies or did not find them shocking: whether he needed the encouragement of the Quatre Gats or not, he remained the very type of anti-bourgeois, anti-snob all the rest of his days.

  The disastrous war with America, the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, had plunged Madrid into gloom, introspection, and pessimism: it had no such effect on Barcelona, where, in spite of labor troubles, agitation, bombs, and repression the mood was sanguine, forward-looking, interested in the outer world. At the Quatre Gats Picasso swam in an atmosphere of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Wagner—an Association Wagneriana met there regularly from 1900—Schopenhauer, the Symbolists, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, all new and exciting names in Catalonia; and although he was no great reader he came by at least a second-hand notion of their ideas.

  He was no great reader. In their love for him some of his friends have maintained that he was: they admit that they never saw him with a book in his hands, but they assert that he read in bed, by night, and they mention books that he owned—Verlaine, for example, at a time when Picasso could neither read, write, nor speak French. Yet Picasso was one of the hardest-working painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, etchers that ever lived: “Where do I get this power of creating and forming? I don’t know. I have only one thought: work. I paint just as I breathe. When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired. It’s still often three in the morning before I switch off my light,” he said to Beyeler. He was also extremely convivial—loved a late gathering of friends; his days were full and sometimes his nights as well, since he loved working by artificial light. And as it made him uneasy to spend his idle nights alone he nearly always had a companion: not one of these companions has ever spoken of his reading in bed.

  He illustrated books magnificently; he owned a considerable number, some of the greatest bibliographical interest; but he did not read a great many. This is not to say that he was not a keenly intelligent man, capable of profound understanding; yet his was an exceedingly quick and sometimes impatient mind, not very well suited for the slow accumulative absorption of prose. Verse was another matter: here the concentrated essence could be grasped almost as quickly as a picture or a carving; Picasso certainly read poetry and he certainly loved poets all his life—Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, to name but three. To be a poet was a passport to his kindness.

  On the other hand he was always surrounded by men who did read enormously, some of them brilliant writers themselves; and his keen, retentive intelligence gathered more from their distillation than years in a library would have given him. As far as Barcelona was concerned, Nietzsche was available to him through the medium of Joan Maragall, one of the best of the Catalan poets and a great translator from the German. Picasso liked and admired Maragall, as well he might, for not only did Maragall destroy rhetorical convention and “risk his life on every line,” but his Excelsior was a noble expression of faith in the future of art for those brave enough to launch far out into unknown seas. Then again Nietzsche’s aphoristic manner was perfectly suited to Picasso: when the philosopher died in the summer of 1900, at the term of his long madness, the papers were filled with appreciations of him; and Picasso undoubtedly read papers. 1900 was also the year that saw the first performance of Tristan and Siegfried in Barcelona (well before Madrid, of course), and although no music other than his native cante hondo or the Catalan sardana ever meant much to Picasso, he was necessarily affected by the admiration for things of the North so general in Barcelona at the time.

  The North was a capital place, seen from the shores of the Mediterranean: not only was it medieval—and the middle ages were golden to the Catalans—but it was modern too, with advanced ideas on sexual freedom. The area included Norway—Munch was already known in Barcelona, as well as Ibsen—and when the young Picasso was asked to illustrate a poem called El Clam de les Verges he produced a somewhat Expressionist young woman dreaming of a Man (his upper half floats in the middle distance of the night).

  The poem and its illustration appeared on August 12, 1900, in Joven-tut, Pèl i Ploma’s rival, whose artistic editor was Alexandre de Riquer, a member of the Cercle de Sant Lluc; and some of it reads:

  We are maidens, maidens

  By the force of hateful laws that keep us enslaved.

  Night and day we seek the wild delights that we dream of …

  If the mind is not virgin must the body be so?

  No, no, let us be free, let us take pleasure in love!

  Tear our white virginal robe: it is a shroud.

  A shroud, and a frail one, hiding a treasure within.

  Obviously the poem was written by a man, Joan Oliva Bridgman, but it does express a modest hope of what might be, and it is typical of the climate of the time. So is another, also written by Oliva and illustrated by Picasso: the excited verse, which begins “To be or not to be,” calls upon the reader to banish the dark smoke of base routine with the sacred light that pierces the shades of mystery—the reader is to be fully or not at all. There is no mention of the sea, favorable or otherwise, but Picasso, perhaps with Maragall in mind, drew a man guiding a boat through menacing waves towards the horizon.

  The North also embraced England, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and at one time Picasso had some faint notion of going there; this was less out of love for the Pre-Raphaelites than from an opinion he had formed of Englishwomen from an account of the intrepid Lady Hester Stanhope. Señora Romeu was said to be an Englishwoman, while Señora Maragall was certainly related to the British Dr. Noble who built a seamen’s hospital in Málaga, and perhaps he found they did not quite answer his expectations; at all events London very soon yielded to Paris.

  The North was the vague metaphysical goal; for most of the painters and literary men of the Quatre Gats Paris was the immediate and concrete aim. Quite apart from its being the center of artistic life and of everything that was new, it was accessible: all educated Catalans and a great many others spoke French, whereas few knew German and fewer still English—they were persuaded that Wilde was a poet. Many of the older men and some of the others had already been to Paris, bringing back a cloud of glory—Nonell had even exhibited in Parisian galleries. And it was Paris that provided the reviews, papers, and magazines that Picasso saw at the Quatre Gats.

  There were many others, such as Casas’ and Utrillo’s Pèl i Ploma, Alexandre de Riquer’s Joventut, Catalunya Artistica, and the English Studio, but it was the French Assiette au Beurre, the Gil Bias illustre, the Figaro, and the famous Revue Blanche that introduced him to Theophile Steinlen, Jean Louis Forain, and above all to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

  These and the company of his many friends was his spiritual food. What he did for earthly nourishment it is difficult to say; and some of the self-portraits of these years show him looking wan and hungry. But he did sell a few drawings and pictures; Romeu commissioned advertisements and menu-cards; and Barcelona had many small shops up and down the Ramblas that specialized in tapabocas, little dishes to be eaten cheaply at any hour of the day or night: a shallow pipkin of sparrows stewed in their own juice was to be had for little more than a farthing, and although blackbirds or squids in their ink came dearer they were still very moderate, particularly as bread was thrown in; and bull’s flesh was cheap after corridas.

  At all events he ate well enough to go for long walks. Sabartés mention
s their expeditions to Tibidabo, the mountain that stands some five or six miles behind Barcelona, giving a magnificent view of the whole spreading city, the harbor, the sea, and the remote sierras: a heartbreaking climb for which all but the most energetic of the penniless young take the funicular railway. And to do an immense amount of work: he had moved from the Calie d’Escudellers Blancs to a large, unfurnished, well-lit garret workshop on the top floor of number 17, Riera de Sant Joan, high in the old city, which he shared with his friend Carlos Casagemas, a strange-looking young man, well educated (he had been trained for the Spanish navy until the American war put an end to any hope of a career in it), the son of the United States consul-general in Barcelona. Since there was no furniture they painted it on the walls: tables, chairs, chests, a sofa, the necessary safe, together with servants, a maid and a boy, to look after it. And wherever the furniture left room there were pictures, pictures that overflowed on to the walls of the ladder-like staircase.

  No doubt many of them were outrageous; he always had a strong earthy sense of fun—to the end of his days shocking people amused him—and it was even stronger then. For example, on the ground floor of the house there was a grocery that sold fresh eggs from Villafranca, and he was attached to the daughter of the shop, so much so that he produced an advertisement for the eggs. The great men of the Quatre Gats, Rusińol, Casas, Utrillo, and the rest, appeared, each holding an egg: the point of the advertisement was a comparison of their testicles with the eggs, from which it appeared that the fresh eggs of Villafranca were larger.

  But there were others too, and if only they had been preserved or even photographed we should have a fascinating account of his development at this crucial stage when an infinity of potentialities were opening in his mind and when he was making those deliberate elections that were to prove vital for him and for the art of the twentieth century. Yet although the camera was usual by then and although he was highly valued by those who knew him, nobody recorded them in any way. Would there have been a hint of the sharp angles and interlocking planes of Horta de Ebro, a longing for the clean straight line after the curving lilies and languors of Art Nouveau, a precursor of Cubism? A foretaste of the Blue Period, so soon to come?

  They valued him highly; and a group of his friends, Pallarès, Sabartés, and Casagemas among them, urged him to give a show of his drawings at the Quatre Gats, a show that would in a way be a challenge to the able, accomplished, established, and fashionable draughtsman Casas. Several men had shown there: Casas himself, Rusińol, Utrillo, Nonell, Pichot, Canals, Mir, and Opisso. Picasso liked the idea, and in the winter of 1899/1900 he set to work on a series of portrait-drawings of the Quatre Gats habitues. Most of his friends appeared in this gallery. Among them Sabartés, slim in those days, but even then myopic, even at nineteen wearing that expression of weak meek obstinacy, skepticism, and deep unshakable self-satisfaction that is more apparent in some of the portraits of later years—a born and willing victim. Nonell, a strong round Mediterranean head, secretly amused, not unlike Picasso himself. (Indeed, almost alone among all those self-conscious people, affected, bearded, pipe-smoking for the most part, Picasso and Nonell had the look of real men, fully alive, who had wandered onto a stage full of minor actors playing dull, unimportant roles forever and ever, stilted creatures, devoured by their self-chosen parts.) Lluisa Vidal, one of the few women of the group, a former pupil of Eugène Carrière in Paris and a great admirer of his. Carlos Casagemas, who had an exhibition at the Quatre Gats just after his room-mate, Picasso: an anxious, haunted face, narrow, all jutting nose and receding chin: he was impotent, but it was not generally known at the time. Manuel Hugué, another fully human being, an admirable sculptor, extremely idle and utterly unreliable, much loved by the friends upon whom he lived, though forever penniless and somewhat given to stealing their possessions: the bastard son of a Spanish general, perhaps, and ordinarily called Manolo. Manuel Pallarès, who was less often to be seen with Picasso these days because of a long-drawn-out and difficult love-affair, but who remained a firm friend. Ramon Pichot, a painter, one of a large family all devoted to the arts, who lived in wild disorder in the splendid Calle Montcada—splendid not in the modern sense, with light and tree-lined space, but in that of the middle ages: a dark and malodorous lane, yet one lined with Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque palaces opening onto secret inward patios; one of them, restored, is now the Picasso Museum. (The Catalan version of Pichot is Pitxot, just as Carlos Casagemas comes out as Carles Casagemes: here I use the forms they used themselves in France.) Opisso, a talented draughtsman and the son of the Vanguardia’s art-critic: although in after days he told Cirici-Pellicer that “because of Picasso’s reserved character it was difficult to assert that they had ever really been friends.” In the same passage Cirici-Pellicer speaks of a somewhat later studio belonging to Soto where Picasso came to work and which he so filled with his own things and his own powerful personality that even Soto took to calling it “Picasso’s studio”; and he goes on to say, “This quite describes the overpowering, encroaching nature of the future creator of Cubism: those who knew him when he was young all agree that … one could only worship him or hate him. His worshipers have told us of his charm, his sound, quick, precise, clear-cut judgment, his immense gifts for improvisation and for perfect imitation [he could instantly produce a pastiche of any known artist, and this talent, indulged with unthinking freedom, brought the charge of plagiarism from the envious or the obtuse], his way of drawing a nude, starting with a toe and sweeping round with one sure, unfaltering line, and of his wonderful steadfast perseverance in his work.… On the other hand, his enemies have told us of his pig-headedness, his boundless self-confidence, his skill at seeing just where he could make a way for himself, and of his contempt for the work of those around him.”

  This is not wholly objective testimony: Cirici-Pellicer was out of sympathy with Picasso’s later work; Opisso knew no fame comparable to Picasso’s, but remained set in the late nineteenth century, when, he affirms, the work of the one could be mistaken for the work of the other: so much so that a collector once gave ten thousand pesetas for a charcoal drawing by Opisso, supposing it to be a Picasso. Yet it is worth recording because of the light it throws on the reactions of his friends to the eighteen-year-old Andalou, a small, commanding figure of no physical size at all but of a caliber hitherto unknown.

  The drawings and a few other works were ready in February, 1900. Neither Picasso nor his friends could afford frames, so they were hung with drawing-pins, more or less at haphazard. The general effect was indifferent, and from the commercial point of view amateurish: nothing like the smooth efficiency of the Saló Parés, where the citizens of Barcelona were accustomed to buying their pictures.

  Drawing has always been less generally valued than painting, and at that time, in spite of Casas’ success, it was held in particularly low esteem. A contemporary artist has given the scale of values that obtained in Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century: first the painter of religious subjects; he was a somebody, a senor. Second the portraitist: he was understood to possess a natural gift for catching a likeness and he was granted the respect due to a photographer. Third the landscape and genre painter, and he was little better than a halfwit. Last, and far below any classification by number, the draughtsman: he was scarcely an artist at all. And in this case the draughtsman was known to come from Andalucia, the home of idleness, levity, Gypsies, bullfighters, and wild extravagance, and to be absurdly young. He had no network of cousins, no local interest. Few people came, apart from the artist’s friends; and of those few none bought.

  In the end the unsold drawings passed to Pere Romeu; he gave some to their originals, and after his death his widow sold the rest, many to the Barcelona collector Graells.

  But these amounted to only a small part of Picasso’s work in 1899 and 1900. What can usefully be said of the countless drawings, the great number of paintings of these eighteen months? Only that they range from what acad
emic realism ought to be to Modernismo and beyond, a range that includes a kind of proto-Fauvism and Expressionism, together with darts in many other directions, most of them enough to satisfy the most exigent, and some deliberate reminiscences of El Greco and Toulouse-Lautrec. Yet just as “influence” has little meaning as far as Picasso is concerned, so isms do not signify a great deal: they never really fit him and he never even fits his own, or rather those that theoreticians impose upon him; nor his “periods” either. Both isms and periods are mentioned in this book, since they do have a certain utility, but they are mentioned sparingly and with strong reserves: apart from such clearly-conceived theories as Divisionism most seem to be post hoc, approximate labels, fortuitous in origin and often misleading in application.

  On the other hand, a repeated theme, a steady preoccupation, is something else again; and at this time Picasso was particularly concerned with windows, as he had been earlier and as he was to be again. The first of the present series is quite straightforward, a drawing of the window over the way from his in the Calle d’Escudellers, a window with a young woman in it, sewing: she is labeled Mercedes. The next is the same window, but closed and blind: a painting this time—the gray house, the iron bars of the balcony, the yellow curtain behind the glass, all strangely important. Then comes a painting of his own window, the lower part veiled with a piece of translucent cloth: just’ that and nothing more. The cloth is suffused with amber light; the dark brown crossbars and frame stand out against the pale, featureless day beyond. The picture belongs entirely to the twentieth century; it is devoid of literature and it is profoundly satisfying: it is the truth, or a truth and a significant one, about that window and that light. Nothing could be farther from Art Nouveau.

  After that another window, closed but showing a suggestion of a landscape beyond, green and white: the room is dark, the inner window-sill is draped with something so deeply gray as to be nearly black; and here again there is that feeling of great unspecified significance.