Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  That was the end of Picasso’s second Paris. The next time Sabartés saw him, in the spring of 1902, he was living at home and working in a studio belonging to Angel de Soto and the painter Rocarol. It was just off the Ramblas, in the Calle Conde de Asalto; and just across the way stood the remarkable house or palace that Gaudí had built for his patron Güell in 1885, a mass of labored stone, wrought iron, and bronze. Gaudí was one of the earliest exponents of what might be called the Catalan Gothic revival and by far the most gifted, by far the most interesting: yet even his highest flights left Picasso unmoved. Gaudí belonged to an earlier generation (he was some thirty years older than Picasso); he was a member of the Cercle de Sant Lluc, a practicing Catholic, and, in spite of his increasingly adventurous, highly individual architecture that went far beyond Modernismo towards a kind of surrealism, he was very much a part of the Establishment. As far as Picasso was concerned, Gaudí was old hat.

  The studio was on the top floor (Picasso spent most of his young life up a great many stairs), and it was flooded with the light of the Mediterranean sun. The change from winter in Paris could hardly have been more pronounced, but his painting was still blue, indeed bluer than ever.

  He stayed in Barcelona until the autumn, and he worked hard all the time, falling into a steady routine of getting up late, working all day, going to the Quatre Gats or some café on the Ramblas, and talking until the morning hours; then, when even the hardiest had gone home, he would walk about in the coolness of the night.

  During these months his painting, for the most part, followed the line that was already evident in Paris and that was to develop even more strongly when he returned there: blue, of course, and with an increasing concentration upon the single figure. Ambitious compositions such as the “Burial of Casagemas” were no longer to be seen; the backgrounds lost their richness both in brushstroke and incident, while the simplification of his figures, often enclosed by a heavy outline in the Gauguin manner, grew more pronounced, detail giving way to unified masses; and the heavy impasto was replaced by a lightly-brushed, even surface. And increasingly, not only at this time but throughout the Blue Period, his subjects could be understood as social protest—beggars, very poor women with children, blind men, lunatics, outcasts. This has led to a charge of sentimentality. Yet there is a world of difference between true feeling and sentimentality, and it may be that those who bring this charge are using the smear-word as a form of defense, a denial of the facts. When Picasso spoke of the horror of extreme poverty, alienation, hunger, and loneliness he knew what he was talking about; then again he was living in close touch with the people in a city where working conditions were so intolerable that riots broke out in the very month of his return, and they were followed by a general strike in February. The authorities sent the notorious General Weyler to deal with the situation in Barcelona, and he did so with such an extreme brutality of repression that the government fell. However, it recovered a week later and carried on, leaving the working-class exactly where it had been before, apart from the disappearance of many of its members, some of whom “vanished,” while others were shut up in Montjuich, that cruel fortress.

  It is true that at the age of twenty, that is to say in 1901 and 1902, Picasso had not reached his purer and in a way more impersonal painting, utterly cut off from all literature; and it is true that at twenty he did not always avoid slickness, particularly in his drawing; but talk of the sentimentality of the Blue Period surely tells us more about the speaker than it does about Picasso. He was in fact a remarkably unsentimental being by Anglo-Saxon or even by Spanish standards; in the case of Casagemas, whose death he felt very deeply indeed—it haunted his painting for years, and already he was thinking of another important canvas based upon it—he had no objection to using the Burial as a screen, nor to returning to the studio in the Riera de Sant Joan that they had shared, nor to painting his friend with little wings, smoking a pipe, wearing a hat, and presenting himself to Saint Peter at the gates of Heaven.

  Yet the blue of this time was not always sad by any means: it could be wonderfully tender, as it is in the child holding a dove in London or the little girl eating her soup in New York; or it could be the neutral medium for a statement, as it is in his night-painting of the roofs of Barcelona seen from his studio and other pictures. The period was not always blue, either: throughout his life Picasso confounded those who love neat labels by suddenly.producing something anachronistic, either in a backward or a forward sense. During this stay he not only painted a cheerful nude in green stockings and a mother and child by the sea without a touch of blue about them, to say nothing of an advertisement for Lecitina Agell (guaranteed to cure lymphatism and weakness in the bones) and posters for a neighboring food-shop, but he also made several drawings which do not belong to this epoch at all, since they prefigure his work in the 1930s.

  Another drawing shows a corner of his studio, the “ingrato y sordido taller de la calle del Conde de Asalto” as Eugenio d’Ors calls it. It is of no great importance in itself, being a kind of private note, perhaps to do with the interesting angles made by the easel, the canvas, and the chair, for Picasso drew to himself as some men talk to themselves, and he drew incessantly; but it is worth mentioning here because it also says something about his way of working. Although he used a palette as his symbol for the painter (he did so this year in a drawing of himself on the beach), he was never seen with one on his thumb: he asserted with some indignation that he could hold one, and no doubt as a boy he did hold his father’s; but as a man he either left the palette on the floor or he used newspapers or a chair or a little table or the floor itself or a combination of some of these. And here in the drawing there is the chair with a piece of cardboard on it, a pot, and some brushes. He also had a highly personal way of approaching his canvas. Sabartés describes this in 1901: “I usually found him in the middle of the studio, near the stove, sitting on a rickety chair, rather a low one as I remember. The discomfort did not worry him in the least … he fixed the canvas on the lowest notch of the easel, which forced him to bend almost double as he painted.… If he had to look attentively at the palette (it was on the floor, a mass of white in the middle and the other colors, mostly blue, dotted round the edge) he still kept a sideways eye upon the canvas; his concentration never left either. Both were in his field of vision and he took in both at the same time.” And again in 1940, when he had no easel in his refuge at Royan he bought a gimcrack object so small that he was obliged to paint crouching, with his belly between his knees. Nevertheless he strongly resisted Sabartés’ attempts at making him buy another, just as he resisted all change in his habits or his physical surroundings: his bones were intensely Spanish, and Spaniards, on taking leave of one another, will often utter their ancient, traditional spell, “Que no haya novedad,” may no new thing arise: a curious wish for Picasso, but one that he accepted with perfect equanimity.

  Any account of Picasso must be a tale of apparent contradictions: his work was of essential importance to him, of an importance that cannot be exaggerated, and he vehemently insisted upon quietness and solitude for it, yet he would use bad tools and perishable materials, so that many of his constructions are now little more than wrecks and some of his finest pictures are crumbling off the fibro-cement upon which he painted them; he was totally indifferent to comfort, yet he fussed about his health and he was easily terrified by a scratch or a cold. He was eager to get money, yet in France, where the law gives artists a royalty of 3% on the price of all their works sold by auction (and in his later years Picassos not only fetched enormous prices but also passed rapidly from one speculator to another), he refused to cash the large and frequent checks; he was intensely conservative in his habits, yet his painting was a continuous revolution, in perpetual flux. At this time he was particularly concerned with solitude—again and again the theme of the solitary recurs, often a woman, sitting hunched at a café table—yet he was himself gregarious.

  One of the places where he soug
ht company was of course the Quatre Gats, where he painted a capital portrait of Corina Romeu, produced some more advertisements, and designed the card announcing the birth of the Romeus’ first son; another was the Guayaba, in the now-vanished Plaza de l’Oli. It began as a studio in which his friend Joan Vidal Ventosa worked as a restorer, a photographer, and a maker of poker-work decorations and it developed into a kind of club frequented mostly by the younger customers of the Quatre Gats: its name was a facetious corruption of Valhalla, for Barcelona was still at the height of its enthusiasm for Wagner and the North. Here he renewed many old acquaintances and made several new ones, some of which ripened into friendship. There was Eugenio d’Ors, then a young law student, and who early in that year of 1902 had published a much-discussed article on Nonell in Pèl i Ploma. He maintained that the object painted should be an active, not a passive, element in the painter’s life, and that it should be an entity with a continuing existence of its own—a view that coincided with Picasso’s and that might have strengthened it, if Picasso by this time had needed any outside support. But by now he had come out of his egg, as the Catalans say: agreement may have been agreeable; it cannot have been decisive.

  Other friends were the Fontbonas, the sculptor Emili, whom he had known in Paris, and his brother Josep, a medical man. It was at Gracia, in the Fontbonas’ house, that Picasso made his first sculpture (also of a woman, bowed down, sitting on the ground with her arms folded); and in his invaluable Picasso i els seus amies Catalans, the fruit of years of patient, scrupulous research to which this book owes a great deal, Josép Patau i Fabre shows that he almost certainly did so in this same year of 1902. Picasso himself could not remember, and experts have wrangled over the date for years.

  The Reventós brothers, Ramon the writer and Cinto the gynecologist, also came to the Guayaba: Picasso had known them long before, and he often went to see Cinto at his hospital, where he walked about the wards in an atmosphere of complicated misery, disease, loneliness, and death. He was also allowed into the place where the corpses lay, and to the end of his life he kept a woman’s head that he painted there.

  But although these meetings and these studies were absorbing, and although for a while he was passionately interested in a strip-tease girl called La Belle Chelita—so interested that one day Sabartés, calling at noon, found him still in bed, surrounded by his night’s work, a great series of delicate, exquisite, explicit nudes that were never seen again—Barcelona was not Paris; and Picasso was not happy; he was not even superficially happy.

  He wrote to Max Jacob: it was an illustrated letter, and the drawing on the back—a dead horse being dragged out of the bull-ring—is wonderfully fluent; the same cannot be said for his handwriting, which was now further embarrassed by attempting a foreign language. As far as the letter can be made out it runs:

  Mon cher Max il fait lontaim que je ne vous ecrit pas—se pas que je ne me rapelle pas de toi mes je trabaille vocoup se pour ça que je ne te ecrit Je montre ça que je fait a mes amis les artistes de ici me ils trouven quil ia trot de amme me pas forme se tres drole tu sais coser avec de gen con ça mes ils ecriven de libres tres movesas et ils peingnen de tableaux imbeciles—se la vie—se ça

  Fontbona il trabaile vocoup mes il ne fait rien

  Je veux (aire un tableaux de le desin que je te envoye yssi (les deux seurs) set’ une tableaux que je fait—set’ une putain de S. Lazare et une seur

  Envoys moi quelquechose crit de vous pour la ‘ ‘Pel & Ploma’’—

  Adie mon ami crit moi

  ton ami

  PICASSO

  Rue de la Merced 3—Barcelona

  Espagne

  My dear Max it is long since I have written to you—it is not that I do not remember you but I am working a great deal that is why I do not write

  I show what I do to the artists of this place but they think there is too much soul but no form it is very amusing you know talking to people like that but they write very bad books and they paint idiot pictures—that’s life—that’s what it is

  Fontbona works a great deal but he achieves nothing

  I want to make a picture of this drawing I am sending you with this (the two sisters) it is a picture I am doing of a St. Lazare whore and a nun

  Send me something you have written for Pèl i Ploma

  Good-bye my friend write to me

  Your friend

  PICASSO

  On the front of the letter, surrounded by the text, there is a drawing of himself labeled “Picasso in Spain” and showing him in a broad-brimmed hat, with a Romanesque church and a bull-ring in the background. And the drawing which he enclosed did in fact turn into a grave, statuesque, and even hieratic painting, highly formalized and reminiscent of some Catalan Romanesque carving and fresco—in 1902 there was a great exhibition of medieval art in Barcelona, and Catalonia is extraordinarily rich in Romanesque. (The St. Lazare to which he refers was a hospital in Paris where venereal diseases were treated and to which still another medical friend admitted him as a visitor.)

  In April of this year Manyac’s remaining rights in Picasso enabled him to arrange a show with Berthe Weill, who now had a gallery of her own. Most of the thirty works she hung were painted before the full Blue Period: there were some of the “Spanish” pastels that he had brought to Paris, there was the hetaira with the collar of jewels, several of his cabaret or Toulouse-Lautrec phase, and some of those pictures which had shocked the newly-arrived Sabartés with their violent colors, but there were also blue pictures such as “Le Tub,” and it may be that the exhibition seemed to be running in several directions at once. The well-known critic Adrien Farge wrote the preface to the catalog in the usual dithyrambic strain; but everyone knows that the writer of a preface is not on his oath, and although many of the kind things that he said were also true, the visitors remained, upon the whole, unconvinced. There is the usual uncertainty about just what was sold and how the proceeds were shared, although Berthe Weill does state that at about this time a collector bought the splendid “Moulin de la Galeae,” the first picture Picasso painted in his second visit to Paris, for two hundred and fifty francs, while the “Omnibus” fetched a hundred and sixty. But in any case the artist’s gains were not enough to allow him to make his third journey north.

  This had to wait until October of the year 1902, when he set off, full of hope, with a friend, the painter Sebastia Junyer-Vidal. Once more Picasso recorded this journey in an auca, a series of drawings that show the pair in their third-class carriage (unforgiving wood and iron in those days), with Picasso in the corner seat, smoking his pipe. It is clear that they are cold—they pace the platform at Montauban huddled in their greatcoats—and that they were colder still by the time they reached Paris some twenty-three hours later; but they stride away from the Gare d’Or-say—Junyer carrying the trunk—with every appearance of good spirits; while a last but alas purely hypothetical picture shows the famous art-dealer Durand-Ruel giving Junyer a great bag of money. Picasso might reasonably have had great expectations, for although his earlier visits had not made him much richer they had brought him valuable contacts and a far greater measure of success than usually falls to a very young man.

  But this time everything was against him; nothing went right. First he took a room in the Hótel des Ecoles, in the Latin Quarter, far from his old haunts in Montmartre and Montparnasse, far from his established friends; then he shared a still cheaper room under the roof of the primitive though picturesque Hôtel du Maroc in the rue de Seine with the sculptor Agero.

  A vast bed under the sloping ceiling almost filled the room, so that the painter had to lie down if the sculptor wanted to move about; while a single round window, like a port-hole, provided all their working light. Nevertheless, Picasso managed to paint an admirable Maternity, a mother and child by the sea, in pastel; and he did a great deal of drawing. The rent was small, something in the nature of five francs a week for both, but even so it was beyond their means, and Max Jacob observed that “n
either Picasso nor the sculptor used to eat.” From time to time he brought them fried potatoes.

  In 1902 Max Jacob was twenty-six; after a brilliant school career in his native Brittany he had attended the Ecole coloniale in Paris, with some idea of governing the French empire. This only lasted for about six weeks, however, and his art-studies at the Académie Jullian were equally brief, although he was in fact unusually gifted. By 1902 he had already been a lawyer’s clerk, a barrister’s secretary, a baby-sitter, a piano-teacher, and an art-critic, and now he was keeping body and soul together by coaching a small boy. Yet brighter days were coming: a wealthy relative called Gompel, who owned Paris-France, a shop in the boulevard Voltaire (and who later owned several Picassos) said that Max might come and work there as a warehouseman in the basement. Jacob took a fifth-floor room nearby, fair-sized but unheated, and although it had only one single bed in it he at once invited Picasso to come and stay. This was the timeliest invitation, for Picasso had recently had a most unpleasant experience with a group of Spaniards who also lived in the rue de Seine. Exactly what this experience was is not known: Picasso was unwilling to speak of it even to Sabartés, and Sabartés has passed on even less; but it evidently concerned money (these people were quite well off), selfishness, and contempt, and it filled him with a disgust for life, a disgust that he remembered with far more pain than the hunger and the piercing cold of that Paris winter. Clearly he had been wounded in his pride; and as Zervos says, he was the proudest man on earth.

  Picasso was always fond of working by lamp or candle light, and this was just as well, since it allowed the two friends equal shares of the narrow bed; Picasso slept in it by day, while Jacob was at the shop, and Jacob slept in it while Picasso drew all through the night.