Читать книгу Picasso: A Biography - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 10

THIS is not the place for a detailed history of Catalonia and its capital: but the culture into which Picasso was plunged was determined by that history, and since he passed his most formative years in Barcelona, becoming integrated with the Catalan community, speaking their language, and making his earliest and most lasting friends among them, some modest outline is essential to an understanding of the forces that worked upon the vital years of his adolescence and early manhood.

In the middle ages Catalonia was an independent country, lying on both sides of the eastern Pyrenees, but with most of its territory in the Peninsula. The Moors had held it for a while, but Charlemagne soon thrust them out, and in the ninth century Wilfred the Shaggy cut himself free from all foreign allegiance and ruled without contest as a sovereign chief of state.

His country was poor in natural resources, but rich in an active, enterprising population. (“From a stone the Catalan will draw bread” says the Spanish proverb.) After the turmoil of the Moorish wars those who lived upon the coast early returned to commerce, carrying on the Roman tradition; and in spite of their indifferent harbors they soon became one of the most important trading nations in the Mediterranean. Barcelona rivaled Venice and Genoa; Catalan ships sailed to the North Sea and the Baltic, to Alexandria and points beyond; Catalan maritime law and marine insurance were accepted as standard far and wide; and while the other states of Spain were shut off from the rest of Europe, preoccupied with centuries of war against the Moors or with fratricidal struggles for power, Catalonia flourished, with a splendid literature of its own, a highly distinctive architecture, a school of painting which bears comparison with that of Lombardy, a renowned university, and a general culture that had long been wide open to influences from France, Provence, Italy, Byzantium, and the learned Moors and Jews of southern and central Spain.

This was the golden age to which Picasso’s Catalan friends looked back with a resentful nostalgia—the age when the Counts of Barcelona, who by marriage had become kings of Aragón, carried the Catalan tongue far beyond its original limits, conquering the Balearic islands, Sicily, Naples, Corsica, Sardinia, the Moorish Valencia, and all the Moslem country down to Murcia, an age whose architectural glories still filled their city.

Even in the early seventeenth century Cervantes could speak of Barcelona as “the seat of courtesy, the haven of strangers, the refuge of the distressed, the mother of the valiant, the champion of the wronged, the abode of true friendship, unique both in beauty and situation,” but although the splendid buildings were still there, the glory was already gone. That unhappy marriage with the heiress of Aragón was followed in the course of time by the union of Aragón and Castilla in the persons of Ferdinand and Isabella. Their heir, the Habsburg Charles V, inherited a united Spain from which the last Moorish rulers had been expelled, together with vast possessions in America; and already Catalonia was an oppressed country, cut off from all commerce with the New World, the great fresh source of wealth. For centuries the Castilians had disliked their industrious neighbors, and the Emperor Charles, who knew little of Spain when he came to the throne, sided with the Castilians; and so it continued, generation after generation, with what the Catalans looked upon as one piece of oppression after another, and with bloody risings from time to time, until the end of the Habsburg line in Spain.

In the bitter wars that followed—Marlborough’s wars—the Catalans supported the Austrian pretender: his successful rival, the French Bourbon who ruled Spain as Philip V, took Barcelona by storm and turned upon the Catalans with great severity. He suppressed Catalan as the official language, imposing Castilian in its place, abolished their ancient privileges, the Cortes and the fueros, closed the university of Barcelona, and built a citadel and a much-hated ring of walls to enclose and overawe the city.

The policy of repression and assimilation continued with even greater force; local laws and customs were done away with; the language was discouraged. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this policy had some success; it certainly came close to destroying Catalan literature, although it was unable to kill the language itself—a language closely related to the Provencal in which many of the earlier poets wrote; a harsher language to the unaccustomed ear, but one capable of the utmost subtlety in the hands of such writers as Ramon Llull (Caxton published him in translation) or Ausiàs March; and, with its comparative absence of vowel endings, perhaps the most masculine of Romance dialects.

But there was always a resistance, both political and cultural; and with the coming of romanticism the Catalan poets began their Renaixença, a movement designed not only to revive the country’s literary culture but to express the nation’s wish for at least some measure of independence. The Renaixença was strongly supported, often by people with little concern with poetry or the arts: in 1841 the university was restored, and some years later the hated walls went down but still the Catalan was not master in his own house.

The Barcelona that Picasso explored in 1895 presented some analogies with Joyce’s Dublin: there was the same nationalist revival, the same passionate resentment of a foreign government, the same memory of a glorious past now overshadowed, the same tradition of deep opposition to central authority, the same conviction of a higher culture oppressed by a lower; and historically there had been the same readiness to call in foreign aid to get rid of the oppressors. But the religious element was lacking; and whereas Joyce’s Dublin was desperately poor, Barcelona had been growing steadily richer ever since the restoration of the monarchy in 1874. The port was now handling eight thousand ships a year; the manufactures had increased enormously; the city had spread far beyond its ancient limits; and Barcelona’s taxes, though grudgingly paid, provided a great part of the government’s income.

Yet these were the days of unrestrained capitalism, and Barcelona also possessed a huge urban proletariat. Picasso had been acquainted with squalor ever since he was born, but the misery of a great industrial city was something far beyond his experience; so was the reaction to this misery. For whereas the victims of the chronic agricultural depression in Spain suffered in silence, or at least without rioting, the intolerable conditions in Barcelona led to strong left-wing movements, to frequent strikes, and to anarchism. Anarchism was preached all over Europe and America at that time, but nowhere did it take such a hold as in Barcelona; and there it added a still more eruptive element to the general anti-government atmosphere. An anarchist had set off a bomb in the crowded Liceo theater shortly before Picasso’s arrival, on the grounds that “there could be no innocent bourgeois”; and the Ruizes had hardly settled down before another bomb was lobbed right into the great Corpus Christi procession. The Establishment called the bombs “infernal machines”: it had no sympathy whatsoever for those who thought that the existing order had to be destroyed to bring a decent society into being, and very little for those who proposed a less radical reform. But Picasso never belonged to the Establishment at any time, and protest, both moderate and extremely violent, appeared early in his work.

It did not appear at first, however. As a boy he was no part of the community: although he had no difficulty in making himself understood, the city being bilingual, he had only to open his mouth to make it clear that he was a stranger and a stranger of no great consequence, for an Andalou was instantly labeled idle, Gypsyish, mercurial, and above all not serious, a very grave charge in hard-headed Catalonia. And since he had no gift for languages this was his status throughout his early adolescence. It was as an outsider that he discovered Barcelona, and perhaps for that very reason he saw the squalor and injustice more clearly than the natives.

Little of this was visible in the new districts outside the walls, with their broad streets crossing at right-angles, but the heart of Barcelona lay in the old town, and that was where the Ruizes lived. The flat in the Calle Cristina soon proved too dark and inconvenient and after a short stay in the nearby Calle Llauder they removed to number three in the Calle de la Merced, a tall, five-storied house with a battered coat of arms over its gloomy entrance, facing equally tall houses on the other side of a street some four yards wide: a dank street into which the sun could hardly penetrate except at midday and the kind of house that Don José would naturally have chosen. It was only a hundred yards or so from the art-school and he stayed there for the rest of his life.

Immediately northwards stood the still older Barrio Gótico, with its medieval houses and palaces by the cathedral, which itself was no distance at all from the Ramblas, the main artery of the old city, a broad, tree-filled avenue running right down to the port, with a fine shaded promenade in the middle, always crowded with people and enlivened by a flower-market, a bird-market, cafés—a continual flow of life. And on the far side of the Ramblas lay the densely-populated Barrio Chino, a rabbit-warren of deep, winding lanes, full of whores and sailors: picturesque slums, with their dark wine-shops lined with enormous barrels, seamen’s bars full of music, purple characters walking about, and the Mediterranean sun blazing down on the innumerable lines of colored washing hanging from the high façades, but slums nevertheless.

It was a dirty city, upon the whole, with the middle ages lingering on in many parts of it, and the streets packed with horses, mules, and asses, carrying paniers or pulling carts, drays, wagons, carriages, omnibuses, cabs; a city smelling not only of horse and humanity but of the port, the fish-markets, hot olive oil, and the countless factory-chimneys.

But it was an immensely living one, with nothing of that air of decrepitude and death so familiar in the rest of Spain, and it was inhabited by a race with the reputation of working extremely hard, of worshiping money and success, an unpolished, hard-headed nation. The removal of the court had long since changed the nature of Cervantes’ “seat of courtesy,” and Picasso’s Barcelona was emphatically a commercial city, one that according to Jean Cassou “had never heard of good taste”: which, when one considers the castrating effect of good taste, was just as well for Picasso. Yet the prevailing materialism was tempered by a strong sense of religion, by a natural gaiety, and (whatever Cassou may say) by a certain feeling for the arts.

It was Catalan businessmen who had launched Gaudí some twenty years before Picasso’s arrival; it was they who supported the thriving opera-house, the concerts, and the many choirs that sang Catalan songs both for pleasure and as a means of nationalist assertion. Their sensitivity to painting was less than it had been in the fifteenth century, when the municipality commissioned masterpieces from Huguet and Dalmáu; and one gallery alone, the Saló Parés (together with temporary exhibitions in the hall of the Vanguardia newspaper), was all that Barcelona could support in the way of living artists. Yet even at this time, when in every country but France painting was at its lowest, most dreary ebb, they did patronize their favorite Fortuny, they did possess an artistic club, dedicated to St. Luke, and it was their sons and even daughters who filled the busy art-school.

This school was in the Exchange, a fine late-eighteenth-century building that incorporated the great Catalan-Gothic hall of its fourteenth-century counterpart built during the reign of Peter the Ceremonious. It was down by the harbor, its function being to accommodate merchants, ship-owners, and marine insurers in their dealings, and the Catalans called it the Llotja, just as they called Peter En Pere. The official, Castilian, name was La Lonja, while En Pere came out as Pedro; and this dual system, which is to be found at every turn, makes it difficult for a writer to be consistent. The Catalans themselves often waver; Jaume Sabartés, a Barcelonan born and bred, signed his invaluable books on Picasso with the Castilian Jaime, and many a Catalan Joan uses the more familiar Spanish Juan outside his own country.

This was the school that José Ruiz wished his son to attend. The elementary classes would have been an insult to his talent, but for entry to the higher schools of life, antique and painting two examinations were required, both of them of an adult standard, the minimum age being twenty.

These examinations he had to undergo, for although Don José’s colleagues might be persuaded to accept that a short boy of thirteen was “apparently about twenty years of age” if in fact he really could draw as well as a mature art-student, they did not choose to make public fools of themselves by admitting a beginner, and they set him the tests in all their rigor. At this level they had nothing to do with ordinary school subjects, which perhaps was just as well: his first task was to draw a school model draped in a sheet; the second was a standing nude.

A certain amount of legend has gathered about these examinations, and while some writers say that although a month was allowed, Picasso did the work in a single day; others prefer one hour instead of the permitted twenty-four.

In fact the two surviving drawings are dated September 25 and 30, 1895, but even so there is no doubt that he produced them in a surprisingly short time. They ignored the art-school convention that would have turned the first model into a toga’d Roman and the second into a reasonably noble figure: Picasso drew exactly what he saw, a school model draped in a sheet and a stocky, ill-proportioned little man, very naked in the hard north light. But he did so with such extraordinary academic ability that there could be no question of the result; he was at once put down on the list of those admitted to the higher school for the academic year 1895–96. There were a hundred and twenty-eight of them, in alphabetical order, and he was the hundred-and-eighth, his second surname being spelled Picano.

Most of the other names were typically Catalan—Puigvert, Bosch, Batlle, Campmany, Creus—and none achieved any wide notoriety. But number eighty-six was Manuel Pallarès Grau, who happened to be Picasso’s neighbor in his first anatomy class. Pallarès was a powerful rustic youth of rising twenty, an art-student of some standing, and of course he was much bigger than Pablo; but in spite of these differences they made friends at once. Indeed, the whole school accepted him, his personality and his obviously outstanding gifts doing away with the chasm between thirteen and twenty, a time when each year counts for ten. Here again it was taken for granted that Picasso was an extraordinary being, to whom common laws did not apply. Neither extreme youth nor extreme age ever mattered to Picasso where human relationships were concerned; all his life he met people he liked on the direct plane of immediate contact, unobscured by the accidental differences of birth, age, or nationality; and he and Pallarès, his earliest and certainly his most valuable friend in Barcelona, remained deeply attached as long as they lived.

These first two years in Barcelona were comparatively quiet, industrious, and dutiful. It seems absurd to speak of any exceptional industry and sense of duty in a man who never stopped working all his life, whose output has been estimated at over fifteen thousand paintings to say nothing of his sculpture, engravings, and countless drawings, and whose sense of what was due to his art led him again and again to throw away success, critical and financial, when he was poor and needed both; but his later morality was his own alone, and here the words are used as they are understood by bourgeois families who want their son to “get on.” He lived at home, of course, and he attended the school regularly: he had put himself down for several courses, including History of Art and Aesthetics, and although in time he took to cutting these lectures, he was assiduous in all classes where there was a model. What is more, he perpetually walked about Barcelona with Pallarès, drawing with scarcely a pause, filling albums and sketch-books with street-scenes, horses, cats, dogs, whores, bawds, anarchist meetings, scores and scores of hands, paired and single, beggars, soldiers leaving for the unpopular Cuban campaign, soon to end in war with the United States. And he was busy at home, drawing and painting his family—a pastel of his mother, at least three portraits of his father, many drawings and paintings of the patient Lola—and preparing a big canvas for the spring exhibition of Fine Arts and Artistic Industries. It is a strictly academic picture, somewhat in the manner of the respected Mas y Fontdevila, and certainly painted under Don José’s supervision: it shows Lola in the white dress and veil of a girl at her first communion, kneeling before an altar with her father standing beside her. There is more Industry in it than one usually associates with Picasso, but within its limits it is an accomplished piece of work, and when it was shown (with the wild price-tag of 1500 pesetas—fifty pounds at the then rate of exchange) it met with a certain amount of mild praise.

This was also the time when Picasso produced a sudden little output of religious pictures, including the charming “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” that he kept with him all his life: they amount to a dozen or more, and it is as though the fourteen-year-old Pablo were making a determined effort to be a “good boy.” At about this period, however, he also rid himself of his virginity: he and Pallarès went to all manner of places, and Picasso’s drawings show an early, exact knowledge of the female form, although the models at the school were all men. Picasso himself, when asked when he had first made love to a girl, held his hand a little more than a yard from the ground. One of these bawdy-houses was nearby, in the Calle d’Avinyó (Avinyó is the Catalan for Avignon, and to be consistent I should also put the Catalan carrer rather than calle; but calle is what the pilgrim will find written up on the wall), the very street to which the Llotja has recently been removed.

With so much work to do—and the list should include the great number of careful studies from the school’s collection of plaster casts, one a prophetic charcoal drawing of a man carrying a lamb—and with such a close companionship with Pallarès, Picasso had not much leisure for the other students. He did make friends among them, particularly with Josep Cardona Furró, a sculptor, and with Joan Cardona Lladós, a draughtsman; but upon the whole they seem to have been rather a dull lot, and there is no record of the animated discussions of the new worlds of painting and philosophy that were to come a little later, when Picasso frequented the Quatre Gats, with its much maturer, far more aware and living company.

Yet even if these students knew little or nothing of Impressionism and still less of the Neo-Impressionists and Symbolists, they must all have been conscious of the Art Nouveau that was sweeping southwards from France, Germany, England, and the north in general, and that in its Spanish form took on the name of Modernismo. Santiago Rusiñol, one of the most advanced of the earlier generation of painters and a poet (and one of the first men to buy Picassos), had organized several well-publicized Fiestas Modernistas at the nearby Sitges; and during the celebrations of 1895 two of his recently-acquired paintings by the then neglected El Greco were carried in procession. The sillier, more mawkish manifestations of later Art Nouveau make any association with El Greco seem strange, but the connection was more evident in 1895; and whether Picasso was at Sitges or not (most probably he was not) El Greco certainly had great influence on him when in time he reached Madrid.

Before seeing the Prado again, however, he was to spend another year at the Llotja and two summer holidays in Málaga. The first holiday, in 1896, was a period of the most surprising activity. Of the many drawings, pictures, and portraits that he produced in those months, two stand out as being quite exceptional; and neither shows the least trace of Barcelona. Although Picasso respected the professor of painting at the Llotja, Antonio Caba, the director of the school (an awful figure) and an able portraitist, in later life he said he did not like the pictures he painted when he was a boy in Barcelona: he preferred those of La Coruña. Now, back in his native town, he seems to have returned to that earlier state of spirit, with a greater power of expression and more to express.

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 brushwork 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 Madrid, 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 Madrid, 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, María 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 Madrid, 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 first 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 Madrid 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. Velasquez, 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 Madrid, 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-siècle 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 Madrid 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 Madrid, 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 Madrid, 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 painting, 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 Mártir, Jesús y María, Lavapiés— never far from the great rag-fair of the Rastro. It was in the last of his garrets that the Madrid 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.

Even now it is at the back of beyond: in 1898 it was more so. They took the train to Tortosa, where Pallarès’ brother was waiting for them with a mule. They piled their easels, canvases, color-boxes, and baggage on to the mule and walked, first up the fertile valley of the Ebro, with its orange-groves still in flower and its rice-paddies, then they struck southward across the mountains for its tributary, the Canaleta. Sometimes one or another would perch himself on the baggage and ride for a while, but most of the time they walked, rising continually into a new air and a new vegetation—arbutus, rosemary, lentiscus, rock-rose, thyme—the highland country with vast stretches of bare mountain, forests of Aleppo pine, and wastes: only a few primitive villages in the fertile parts and an occasional isolated dwelling, a saw-mill where there was* running water, a charcoal-burner’s or a lonely shepherd’s hut. The road dwindled as they went, and in fifteen miles or so it was no more than a mule-track. In a deep and sunless gorge, haunted by vultures, it wound about on either side of the rapid stream, crossing it by fords in the less dangerous places; but by the time they reached the end they had traveled close on twenty miles, and there were only two hours to go—only three or four more great mountains to cross and they would be home.

For one who had never been outside a town and who had never walked five and twenty miles in his life, even with the help of a mule, this was a striking introduction to a new world—a world in which it was natural to step out briskly in the falling dusk, because of wolves.

A new world for Picasso: an ancient world for its inhabitants. The Pallarès and their neighbors had lived in this remote village since the night of time, living off the land as people had always lived, long before ships plied from Barcelona. The ancient ways, language, skills, and values came naturally to them: Manuel Pallarès himself could carry a two-hundredweight sack on his shoulders, plough a field, saddle a mule, or milk a cow without having to think about it. His father owned land in the plain surrounding the village, and an olive-mill, renowned for the purity of its oil; and the family, together with their animals, lived in a big, rambling house built round a courtyard. It made a corner with the lane now called Calle Pintor Ruiz Picasso and the village square, a finely-conceived, dignified little plaza with the church on one side and deep, massively-pillared arcades, on the top of Horta’s hill, the only flat place in it.

In these parts the peasants do not live out among their fields, but warned by Moorish raids, brigands, civil wars, and insurrections, they huddle together in little more or less fortified towns or villages. Horta is happy in its site, an abrupt, easily-defended mound, and the houses are tight-packed from top to bottom, a fascinating mass of lines, angles, and volumes; it is also happy in its local stone, and the church is a handsome building, ancient, but done up in the seventeenth century, at about the same time as Pallarès’ house; while the smaller houses, which often bridge the lanes, are substantial, made to last for generation after generation: and they are mostly washed with blue.

In the evening the steep narrow streets (often rising in steps and always carefully ridged for hooves) are crowded with animals coming home: mules, asses, cows, goats, sheep, and a great many busy dogs. They live in byres and stables on the ground floor, among the domestic hens and rabbits, filling the town with a pleasant farmyard smell and warming their owners on the floor above; and early in the morning, woken by countless household cocks, they go out into the plain, a great saucer rimmed with mountains. It looks flat from a distance but in fact it undulates, and the less fertile higher ground is covered with almond-trees and olives; there are figs and vineyards too, but this is near the limit for grapes. All round the rim dry-stone terraces carry more olive-groves as high as they will go: an enormous investment over the centuries, not of money but of time and labor (they being unmarketable in that economy), for a minute return. The lower part of the plain is taken up with arable and pasture, in strips; but there is not a great deal of fertile land, and the people of Horta have to work very hard indeed to wring a living from it. This is not the misery of central and southern Spain, where absentee landlords own huge estates and where the landless peasants are hired by the day in a buyer’s market, but it is a harsh life, and the possibility of disaster is always present. Apart from all the natural calamities of farming—cattle diseases, swine-fever, chicken-pest—the crops can often fail: moisture does not lie on limestone ground, and Horta is no great way from those parts of Aragón where wine is exchanged for water, in times of drought.

In 1897 their works and days had scarcely changed since Hesiod’s time: the acceleration of history (in which Picasso was to play his outstanding part) had not touched the Terra Alta. On the contrary, with the chronic agricultural depression it had slowed down since the spurt of the seventeenth century, which had seen the rebuilding of Horta’s church and the square. Theirs was still essentially subsistence-farming; a bad year, a drought, could bring death from starvation, and they knew it. There was little cash in Horta’s economy and that little was guarded with extraordinary pains—heavy iron bars to the windows, deep peasant suspicion—an odd contrast with their overflowing hospitality. They practiced the ancient virtues of thrift and hard work; their ordinary diet was sparing, their feasts enormous, with measureless wine; they were intensely pious and correspondingly blasphemous, the commonest oath being “My shit in the face of God.”

This may seem an unlikely background for a Llotja student, but Manuel Pallarès had early shown a gift for drawing, and although his father was of course the absolute ruler of the family, his patriarchal authority acknowledged by one and all, he was no more capable than another man of withstanding his wife’s steady, unremitting pressure. He would have preferred to keep Manuel on the land, but he had three other sons, and in any case the gross materialism of the petty bourgeois is no part of the Catalan peasant’s tradition. With tolerably good grace he resigned himself to parting with a capital farm-hand and with a considerable sum of money; and in time Manuel reached the Llotja, by way of Tortosa and a private art-school.

Manuel Pallarès had a typical Catalan head, round, male, far from beautiful, a good deal of space between his nose and his mouth, with shrewd good sense shining from it. He fitted into his place the moment he came home, helping with the innumerable chores of a farm—no airs or graces at all. There was little about the land he did not understand, from building a stack to gelding lambs; and since he was a passionate hunter he also knew a great deal about the mountains and the game that lived in them.

“Everything I know I learnt in Pallarès’ village,” said Picasso in later years: and “everything” included not only the use of the curry-comb and the scythe; an intimate acquaintance with the making of wine and oil; the harvesting of hay, corn, grapes, and olives; the shearing of sheep; the killing of a pig; and the milking of a cow; but also the ability to speak Catalan with total fluency as well as a deep understanding of essentials that no townsman can ever know directly.

But he and his friend were also there to paint, and to do this they retired to a cave, miles and miles away in the mountains, in an uninhabited, deeply-wooded region called the Ports del Maestrat, almost in Aragón. The cave was inadequate, uncomfortable, and shallow as well as being inaccessible, but they had the curious idea of painting two large compositions there. Picasso’s father sent the canvas, the village carpenter made the stretchers, and they set off with a mule, provisions, a dog, a small boy, and Pallarès’ younger brother, Salvador. They went as far as the mule could go, made a fire, and camped for the night in the open air. The next day, carrying their easels and color-boxes, Picasso and Pallarès climbed up through the forest and eventually found their cave. Here they stayed for weeks and weeks, painting, drawing, walking about, bathing in the nearby stream, collecting firewood and sometimes fossils. They slept on a deep bed of scented grass and leaves, and just outside the cave they kept a great fire burning until late at night: every few days Salvador brought them food—bread, wine, rice, beans, potatoes, stockfish, salt pork, oil—and among other things Picasso learned to cook. He had a knife that served to split kindling, peel potatoes, slice the fat bacon, and feed him at table: he kept it forever, and Josep Palau i Fabre, the Catalan poet to whom this account is due, he having had it from the mouth of Pallarès himself, saw it at Notre-Dame-de-Vie some sixty or seventy years later.

As the days grew shorter and the summer waned, thunder gathered in the mountains, and one night rain, driving right into the shallow cave, soaked them and all their belongings. A few days later a prodigious wind blew all night: at dawn they hurried to the place where they had been working, and they found that their pictures had been hurled far and wide, the stretchers broken. (Picasso had been busy with an Idyll and Pallarès with a Woodcutter.) They detached the canvases, lit the fire with the stretchers, and decided that this was enough. Salvador brought the mule, they loaded their battered pictures on to it, and returned to Horta.

In the village they found men back from Cuba, in a dismal state. The war with the United States was over; the island was nominally independent; Spain had suffered a most humiliating defeat. Yet this could have little effect upon a community that had never felt itself bound to Madrid by anything but taxes and conscription; the village welcomed the returning soldiers and then turned straight to its immediate, necessary tasks. Harvest would wait for no man, nor would the gathering of the grapes. The gutters ran purple with the washing of the lees, the presses creaked, and for weeks the lanes smelled of fermenting wine. Then came Saint Martin’s day, and Horta echoed with the shrieks of dying swine: their blood did not run down the streets, however; it was carefully preserved for that local treat—the butifarra, a bloated, black-mottled sausage. And as the olives ripened, turning color as the winter advanced, they had to be beaten down or picked, and the great millstone began to turn, grinding out their oil.

Picasso helped wherever he could, but even saddling a mule or wielding a pitchfork has a knack to it: when the great dunghill in the central court was to be cleared away and taken to the fields he set to with the best will in the world, but presently his fork had to be taken away from him for his own protection, and he was put to carrying the dung in baskets and loading them into the paniers of the ass. He was well liked in the family and in the village, and when he went to the mill the people there would give him their particular delicacy, a great round of dark country bread, toasted, set to swim in the virgin oil, fished out when it began to sink, rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with salt, and eaten on the spot.

At other times, apart from making a great many drawings, he worked at a painting called “Aragonese Customs.” It has not survived, but if a caricature in Blanco y Negro is to be believed, it was strictly representational—a woodcutter with an ax: a woman kneeling in the background. And he had the opportunity of painting what might have been an outstanding example of Spanish realism. The winter storms are furious in those parts, and during one of them an old woman and her grand-daughter were struck by lightning. In such cases an autopsy had to be carried out: the medical man invited Picasso and Pallarès, imagining that it would please them. His colleague should have come from Gandesa to help, but as it was raining he did not do so, and the doctor asked the sereno to proceed without him. All this took place in a dark night in a hut by the graveyard. The sereno took the saw kept for the purpose, lifted the child from her coffin, placed her on a table, and sawed her head in two down the middle to satisfy the doctor as to the cause of death. He was smoking at the time, and as he worked, his hands and his cigar became deeply spattered. Then came the old woman’s turn, but Picasso declined to stay for the second operation. Indeed, he did not even make a drawing of the first; yet might not this vertical division have had some effect upon his own treatment of the human head in later days?

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.

The drawing is even more assured, and there are some truly wonderful sheep and goats, studied essentially for their life and movement. The touch is more determined, and in some of the drawings he paid more attention to texture than before: in his intricate shading he used some methods new to him, but his general approach was still the same, in spite of a greater interest in light and darkness and the use of a heavier outline for the figure. And still there is this preoccupation with his name: a peasant in wooden shoes, sitting on the ground in front of a broken pipkin, is surrounded by P. Picazzo Picasso Picaz P. Ruiz Picasso Picasso Picas.

In the paintings that have survived, much the same applies. Apart from the rural nature of the subjects, most of them might have been painted a year or so earlier; and there is one of a cart-shed which, with its strong light and deep brown shadow, harks back farther still.

Upon the whole the drawings are more obviously brilliant than the pictures. There is a timeless quality about very good drawing which is lacking in the fin-de-siècle colors he was sometimes using then; yet among the paintings there were some landscapes in which hindsight can see the seed of that Cubism which was to flower in Horta itself some ten years later and others which give the lie to the statement that Picasso took nothing from nature itself but saw the world only through other men’s pictures, a statement made by those who had never seen this then invisible part of his work, and one upon which a great deal of theory has been founded.

However, of these pictures it was certainly “Aragonese Customs” that pleased Don José most. Before it vanished it won another honorable mention in Madrid, another piece of facetious criticism, and in Málaga another gold medal.

He finished this picture in February, 1899, waited for the paint to dry, rolled the canvas up, made his farewells, and returned to Barcelona. There could be no more convincing evidence of his amiability among those he esteemed than the fact that in spite of his having stayed with the Pallarès three quarters of a year, he was urgently pressed to come back again.