Picasso: A Biography

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Patrick O’Brian. Picasso: A Biography

PICASSO. A Biography

PATRICK O’BRIAN

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Preface

Preface to Original Edition

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

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APPENDICES

1 Picasso’s Family Tree

2 Picasso’s Relationship to Perico the Hermit

3 Picasso’s Stars

4 Picasso’s Palm

5 Jung on Picasso

Index

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

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Coadjutorici amoenissimae Mariae do dedico

Title Page

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Life in Horta during the autumn and winter of 1898 was not all work, however: far from it. Picasso and Pallarès often went for walks—one took them to Gandesa, twenty miles for trousers to replace those worn out in their cave—and they often went to the village café. But these mild joys were nothing in comparison to the traditional feasts. Apart from All Hallows, with its chestnuts and new wine, and Christmas, there was St. Anthony’s day in January, a most important festival at which horses, mules, asses, and sometimes oxen, beautifully groomed, adorned with plaits and ribbons, their hooves blacked and polished, are blessed outside the church, and at which the popular religious ballads called goigs are handed about, together with those prints, the remote ancestors of the strip-cartoon, which are called auques in Catalan and aleluyas in Spanish and which, in a series of charming woodcuts on a single sheet, show the chief events of a saint’s life. Very often, in Catalan feasts, the people are unable to wait for the day itself; and here too the main celebrations took place on St. Anthony’s eve. They took the form of a kind of free-running play, with plenty of room for improvisation, in which the saint appeared, was tempted by as many demons and fair women as Horta and the surrounding hamlets could provide, and did resist. Picasso did not: at least he did not resist the prodigious quantity of wine drunk on these occasions, and was found fast asleep on the staircase of Pallarès’ house.

This vitally important period of his life, in which he acquired new values and a far wider understanding of the world, the best part of a year spent in completely new surroundings, produced no obvious, radical change in his drawing or his painting; and the volume of his work was understandably less—for one thing, he lacked materials.

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