Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  The material side of his life was precarious in the extreme. He no longer exhibited; he sent no pictures to the Salon des Indépendants nor yet to the new Salon d’Automne, far less to the salons of official art; and when it was suggested that he should contribute drawings to the comic Assiette au Beurre for a sum that might have attained eight hundred francs he refused. To be sure, he was in touch with some dealers: Vollard, of course, and Berthe Weill, and with Clovis Sagot, a former Médrano clown with a flair for painting who had set up shop in what had been a chemist’s (he dosed his artists from the remaining stock, choosing among the pills by intuition alone), but except when he was unusually hard-pressed he preferred them to come to him, which they did but seldom. Another resource was the Péré Soulié, who sold beds and bedding in the rue des Martyrs, just by the Cirque Médrano; he had been a wrestler and he too had a taste for painting, an eclectic taste that embraced the highest and the lowest. Outside his shop he exhibited a large variety of pictures, old and new; it is said that a Goya was found there, and a Renoir; and certainly Picasso discovered his first Henri Rousseau among the heaps of junk. Soulié paid very little—twenty francs for some ten Picasso drawings—but he would produce these minute sums at once, or at least after a pause in the nearest bar; and often his purchases meant the difference between dinner and no dinner.

  Credit was still another; but credit is a perilous refuge, as Picasso found when his bill with the color-merchant reached the awful sum of nine hundred francs and the man cut off supplies. This, for a painter, was starvation in every possible sense. There seemed no hope of accumulating such a mass of money. Vollard was hanging off, and when Max Jacob took him a picture Vollard said, “The belfry is crooked. Your friend is mad. Go away.” And Sagot, though full of good will, had very little capital: I say “full of good will” in spite of Fernande’s hostile testimony, because Sagot, whose brother was a print-dealer farther along the rue Laffitte, marketed the first collection of Picasso’s etchings, which included the “Repas frugal,” the delicious “Salome” drypoint, and a number of circus-people and harlequins (this was the same collection, famous under the title of “Les Saltimbanques,” that Vollard published in such large numbers in 1913, having steel-faced the plates, thus taking away from their delicacy); because contemporaries speak of l’excellent Sagot; and because Picasso liked him, painting a mildly Cubist portrait of his knowing, bearded, long-nosed face in 1909. But Fernande loathed the dealer. She tells of the penniless Picasso asking “the old, unscrupulous, and almost merciless fox” to come to the studio: Sagot appears, chooses three pictures, and offers seven hundred francs, Picasso refuses; days without food, without materials go by. Picasso returns to Sagot, who now offers five hundred, again refused; more hungry days, and eventually the cruel sum of three hundred francs is accepted. It may be true; it probably is true; but Picasso bore no grudge. He accepted many forms of sharp practice calmly: later, for example, when asked why he did not prosecute those who forged his work he laughed and said that if he were to do so all his Spanish friends would be in the dock.

  This was a time when through shortage of materials he was obliged to produce a twenty-franc flower-piece for Soulié without the use of white, that fundamental pigment, and when he would paint one picture over another and then restretch the canvas and work on the back: the lovely “Fillette à la corbeille fleurie,” for instance, has no less than three superimposed pictures behind, a portrait of a woman, two men in top-hats, and a composition of three figures.

  As the summer of 1905 began to turn the studio into an oven rather than a refrigerator, temporary relief came in the form of an invitation to spend a month in Holland. He went with Tom Schilperoot, a Dutchman who was busily squandering his fortune; and in Holland Picasso beheld with dismay the schoolgirls built like dragoons, the fog, the stout young women who would set their fifteen stone upon his lap. He did paint some of them, since work was a necessity to him, but although in painting them he resolved some interesting new problems to do with the volume of flesh, these pictures are not among his happiest works, and it cannot be said that the Low Countries had any decisive effect upon his career.

  When he returned to Paris he sold some of these pictures, very cheaply, to Sagot, and returned to his acrobats, his harlequins, and his “classical boys.” These combine something of his long-past studies from the antique, his young tumblers, and the classic Mediterranean aspirations of Moréas and his other literary friends: Gauguin, Cézanne, and even Puvis de Chavannes may be added to the list of influences, Cézanne with very real justification, since the previous Salon d’Automne had honored him with a whole room to himself and since Picasso repeatedly stated that “he was my one and only master”—an influence that had started in 1901 and that was to grow steadily in strength: almost the only influence, apart from van Gogh, that Picasso ever directly acknowledged. His grave, short-haired boys resemble Greek kouroi (they are plumper than the acrobats), and like the kouroi these belong to no period and to all: “Youth has no age,” he said. Sometimes they ride upon horses or lead them, and although Picasso’s circus horses are miracles of grace, here for once his extreme virtuosity and his visual memory let him down: his lead horse, advancing towards the spectator, is a knock-kneed creature with a lamentable action. But he failed in good company, for the charger in van Dyck’s great “Charles I” has much the same wretched bosom: and in any case Picasso’s horse has the kindest face and a beautiful silvery coat, while the whole picture, with its pink boy outlined in darker rose and its even pinker sand, breathes a grave, quiet happiness, a sense of well-being.

  This too was the year of the “Bateleurs,” otherwise the “Family of Saltimbanques” (which also overlies two other paintings), a very large picture, physically (84 x 90 3/8 inches) and aesthetically, in which he summed up a great deal of what he had to say by means of his wanderers. In a bare, desolate landscape five people stand: a tall, lean harlequin talking to a massive elderly jester and holding a little girl by the hand; behind them two boys, an adolescent carrying a roll or kit-bag on his shoulders and a child wearing clothes far too big for him, both boys unsmiling, sunken-eyed. All these people wear their tired finery, their working clothes, as a matter of course; and these working clothes remove them from all contemporary allusion. Then in the foreground, in the right-hand corner of the picture, on another plane, entirely isolated from the rest, sits a young woman in a Majorcan hat. There is no explanation of her presence, no explanation of the ghostly water-jar that helps to set her so far apart, and none of the other figures: they simply exist there in their timeless world.

  Throughout most of 1905 life was as hard as it had been in 1904, and neither Fernande’s ratatouilles nor Benedetta Canals’ pasta nor the restaurant meals at about a franc a head were really enough to sustain his prodigious output: an occasional sale, followed by wild extravagance, particularly in bottles of scent for Fernande, just kept him going, and he had the reserves of youth to draw upon; but total destitution and sickness were there, immediately at hand, in a world that had no Social Security and very little mercy on failures; and the ordinary climate of his life away from the easel was that of penury.

  Yet better days were coming. The Blue-Rose and the full Rose periods were more generally accessible, even popular; and in November of that year Leo and Gertrude Stein, wandering along the rue Laffitte, saw two paintings in Sagot’s shop that pleased them, the one by a young Spaniard whose name is not recorded, the other by Picasso. Stein bought the first and showed interest in the painter of the second, so Sagot sent him to Pere Soulié. At the sight of these people in brown corduroy and sandals and at the sound of their French, Soulié perceived that they were Americans and therefore asked almost as much for his Picasso as Vollard asked for the Cçzannes the Steins were then buying. They went back to Sagot, who laughed and said that in a few days he would have a big Picasso for them, presumably at a reasonable price. When they returned to the rue Laffitte the dealer showed them the “Fillette à la corbeille f
leurie,” a slim rebellious blackhaired child, worm-naked but for a little necklace and a hair-ribbon, looking sullenly at the painter as she stands on something tawny and holds an ornamental basket of red flowers, brilliant against the blue-green background. Gertrude Stein did not like the picture; she found the child’s long legs and big feet repulsive. But in the ensuing contest she was defeated; the price of a hundred and fifty francs was paid, and Leo Stein carried the “Fillette” home to the rue de Fleurus to join the Cézannes, the Gauguins and Matisses.

  Presently the Steins were taken to Picasso’s studio by a French writer who knew him, and they bought eight hundred francs’ worth of pictures straight away. This was a most important meeting for Picasso, not merely because of the sudden flood of money at a crucial moment, but because the Steins, though not rich by American standards, were steady, discriminating buyers: they owned a remarkable and rapidly-growing collection, which they hung in a studio attached to their house in the rue de Fleurus and which their many friends and acquaintances viewed with awe on Saturday evenings, and they helped to make Picasso’s name known among those who could buy his works. The Steins and Picasso took to one another directly; they asked him and Fernande to dinner, and there Picasso sat at Gertrude’s right hand. In the course of the meal she took up a piece of bread; he snatched it violently from her, crying, “This piece of bread is mine!” Although Toklas says that he “looked sheepish” on being reminded of his party manners the incident did away with formality. In any case, Picasso was genuinely fascinated by Gertrude Stein’s appearance: his eye detected qualities in her massive person that were concealed from the world in general, for by ordinary standards her looks cannot have recommended her at any time; and very early he asked to paint her portrait. She sat for him eighty or ninety times; their intimacy increased and with it their mutual esteem, helped perhaps by their imperfect command of French; and they remained unusually close to one another for many years, long after Picasso had not the slightest need of buyers.

  What is more, this meeting led to his friendship with Matisse; for friendship it must be called in spite of the odd currents of jealousy and rancor, mostly on Picasso’s side; a friendship that lasted, increasing towards Matisse’s death in 1954, and that was based on respect and a certain odd affection. Although Picasso and Matisse had exhibited together at Berthe Weill’s in 1902 they had not met before; and the date of their present meeting is uncertain: it may have taken place in the autumn of 1906, but since it appears that Sergei Shchukine first bought Picassos before this, 1905 seems the more probable year. At all events it was the Steins who took Matisse and his daughter Marguerite to the Bateau-Lavoir, and more than fifty years later she still remembered the vast bulk of the bitch Frika, whom she judged to be a Saint Bernard. Fernande’s extraordinary beauty, her amiability and her size also impressed the child deeply; so did her way of producing sugar for their coffee—she went to a cupboard, scooped up a handful, and emptied it onto a clear space on the filthy table. So did the meal they ate at the Lapin Agile, a beef-steak, then some ham on top of it, and crowning all a fried egg.

  At this point Matisse, though still not generally recognized and still desperately poor, was an outstanding, controversial figure, the leader of the Fauves, whose savage, brilliantly-colored pictures had amazed the visitors to the Salon d’Automne of 1905, arousing the usual storm of protest.

  In 1905 Matisse was an elderly thirty-five, and Picasso a boyish twenty-four: Matisse was a tall, fair-bearded, good-looking man, well-read, well-educated, well-mannered; a northern Frenchman of bourgeois origins, somewhat reserved, but at ease in society and particularly gifted for civil, intelligent conversation; and he delighted in the domestic joys—his wife and his daughter Marguerite were of the very first importance to Matisse. Apart from their common devotion to painting, no two men could well have been more unlike. Yet Matisse was the only painter to whose achievements Picasso reacted all his life long, the one standard by which he judged his own. Nothing could be more pointless than discussing which was the “better” painter; but two observations from these opposite and perhaps equal poles throw some light upon the men who created the aesthetic atmosphere in which we move. Matisse said, “A work of art must, both for the businessman and for the artist, be a mental tranquilizer, something in the nature of an armchair that gives him ease and comfort after bodily fatigue.” (Admittedly he said this in 1908, when his armchair was not the most comfortable of objects.) Picasso said, “I am proud to say that I have never looked upon painting as an art intended for mere pleasure or amusement,” and, “No: painting is not there just to decorate the walls of a flat. It is a means of waging offensive and defensive war against the enemy.”

  At the time of their meeting Picasso did not take a great deal of notice of the Fauves, although he knew some of them, particularly van Dongen: he was never much concerned with other people’s trends, or at least not immediately. But Matisse liked him, and sometime later he proved his liking, his generosity, and his magnanimity by doing him the kindest service that one poor painter can do for another: he brought Sergei Shchukine, a middle-aged, sober, vegetarian cloth-merchant from Moscow, immensely wealthy. Fernande describes him as a little tallowy swine-faced man with a huge head and a terrible stutter; she also adds that he was a Jew: but Fernande saw Jews everywhere (she was said to be Jewish herself) and in fact Shchukine was an Old Believer. Plain or not, he was a sensitive, clear-sighted connoisseur, one of the most enlightened collectors of the age: his favorite occupation during his frequent visits to Paris was visiting the Egyptian galleries in the Louvre, where he, almost alone in his generation, saw the parallels between that ancient sculpture and Cézanne. At his first appearance in the rue Ravignan he bought two pictures, paying handsomely, and between that time and 1914 he bought at least fifty more—they are now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. He was followed by the gigantic sugar-millionaire Ivan Morosov, and by the outbreak of the war Russia possessed many splendid Picassos from the Blue Period to analytical Cubism; an inheritance that the lovers of socialist-realism have sometimes found embarrassing.

  Matisse and Picasso understood the real worth of these wealthy amateurs: neither would for a moment have denied the value of money, but both knew that there was more to it than material gain. Recognition, acknowledgment, and intelligent praise are not only proofs of communication but also an immense stimulant. “The applause of even a single individual is of great moment,” observed the dying Johnson; and speaking to Brassaï Picasso said. “But success is an important thing! It has often been said that an artist should work for himself, for the love of art, and scorn success. It’s a false idea. An artist needs success. Not only in order to live, but primarily so that he can realize his work.” No doubt some degree of success is necessary for every creative man to fulfill himself entirely; and for one like Picasso, half of whose mind was filled with doubt, moderate success was essential. Moderate success: for towards the end of his life, when fame, notoriety, wealth, and isolation from the common world had reached monstrous proportions, he said to David Duncan, “Of all—hunger, extreme poverty, the incomprehension of the public—fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation by God of the artist. It is sad. It is true.”

  Success was necessary, and it was coming, though with gradual and uneven steps that still left Picasso’s livelihood in its usual state of total insecurity. Montmartre. that closed village of painters, writers, quiet citizens, and assorted toughs, had as yet no tourists; but it had plenty of visitors, most of them Parisians in search of fun. Yet some few were foreigners, Hungarians, Germans, Czechs, long pale Swedes, concerned with the arts and in quest of particular artists: some looked for Picasso, and some of those who found him asked him to explain his painting—what did it mean? All his life he loathed questions of this kind, and all his life he was plagued with them. “Everyone wants to understand art,” he cried angrily. “Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, witho
ut trying to understand them? But in the case of painting people have to understand …” In later days he escaped by way of paradox or facetiousness or downright rudeness, but when he was young he set about it more briskly, with his pistol; and one night when he had been cruelly bored by an earnest band of Germans in the Lapin Agile he walked out, going towards the place du Tertre; with thick incomprehension they followed him, but on reaching the square he turned, whipped out his Browning, and fired a volley, a hint that even they could not ignore.

  Yet not all the Germans were bores by any means: among them was a tall, formal young man with private means, Wilhelm Uhde. Whatever he may have read into Picasso’s pictures, he concealed all unwelcome aesthetic philosophy and metaphysics, and became a collector and a friend. In a book written much later he revealed his conviction that Picasso was the embodiment of the Gothic and the German soul, possibly because of his Basque origins, possibly because of the Spanish Visigoths, and even more probably because he was born under the sign of Uranus; but at the time of their close association he kept this to himself, displaying only his real love for the pictures. He began his career as a collector by finding a nude with tow-colored hair taking her bath in a blue room by an unknown young artist in Pére Soulié’s shop. (The famous “Blue Room,” now in Washington and once offered to all comers by Berthe Weill, but in vain.) He bought it for ten francs, and then a few days later he walked into the Lapin Agile for the first time: “The low-ceilinged room was filled with young painters from the rue Gabrielle and the place Ravignan. Someone was reciting Verlaine. I sat at the big table in the middle and called for wine. In the course of the evening I learnt that the young man who had painted my picture was called Picasso and that he was sitting at my right.”