Читать книгу Picasso: A Biography - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 11
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ОглавлениеHORTA de Ebro had given Picasso a complete break, time and peace for reconsideration of everything that was important to him; it restored his health and strength to such a degree that he resisted the privation of the coming years; and even more important for the immediate future it provided him with the language of the country he lived in. He did know a little Catalan before going there, but he had not been obliged to use it: at Horta he swam in the language—not a word of Castillan around him for close on a year—and it had sunk in deeply. He now spoke it without effort, using the language, says Sabartés “exactly, and with no literary turns or affected phrases.” Sabartés should have known, since he and Picasso went on speaking it together for the next sixty-nine years: but on the other hand, for Sabartés Picasso could do no wrong; and Cirici-Pellicer, a more objective witness, says that Picasso “usually employed a mixture of the two languages [Castilian and Catalan], which made his manner of expressing himself eminently picturesque.” Certainly he wrote it incorrectly. He was no good at languages: in 1911, after years and years of Paris, a monoglot French mistress, and the perpetual company of French friends he could still begin a letter “iyer de toute la journé je ne ai pas eu de letre de toi”; and to the end of his life he never lost his very heavy Spanish accent nor his highly individual approach to the French language.
Picasso had a brilliant and original mind, but it did not do its important work in words; it was not primarily a verbal mind. It traveled into regions where words are either non-existent or irrelevant; he worked out no consistent verbal theory whatsoever, and his dicta on art can be made to say anything at all. He did utter some fine aphoristic flashes, some of which he undoubtedly meant; but what he really had to say he said in paint, sculpture, and line. He loathed art-criticism, analysis, and verbal aesthetics: his philosophy is to be seen on the wall, and rightly taken it is all of a piece.
But as far as Catalan is concerned he was certainly fluent and perfectly comprehensible, and this meant that on returning to Barcelona he could form an integral part of the group of writers, painters, and poets who met at Els Quatre Gats, a café or tavern or beer-hall or cabaret modeled on Rudolphe Salis’ Chat Noir and Aristide Briant’s Mirliton in Montmartre. They were a mixed body of men, differing widely in tastes and abilities, but they were united in their love for Modernismo and for their own language: an habitué speaking only Spanish would have been an intruder. And since some were anarchists, believing that the new world would dawn when the last king was strangled with the guts of the last priest, and most were Catalan separatists, there might have been some danger in admitting an outsider to their intimacy. (Not that this should be exaggerated: the real, the hard-line anarchists who tried to put Bakunin’s ideas into practice were almost exclusively working-men, whereas the conscientious bohemians of the Quatre Gats belonged to the middle class—their anarchism was theoretical, and their separatism did not go far beyond singing “Els Segadors,” the nationalist song.) Picasso was well introduced, however; not only did he speak the language, but he already knew several of their members; and within a few weeks of his return he was perfectly at home there.
The Quatre Gats was founded in the summer of 1897 by a versatile character named Pere Romeu, who had taught gymnastics and run a puppet-show in Mexico; he had traveled a good deal, and at one time he worked at the Chat Noir. The name may have been chosen to avert ill-luck, since it means “nobody” or “almost nobody.”
“Were there many people in the procession?”
“Four cats, no more.”
Whether the charm was intended or not, it worked: the place was thronged with people, mostly of the kind to whom this announcement, printed in a kind of blackletter, was directed:
“To persons of good taste, to citizens on either side of the Ramblas, to those who require nourishment not only for their bodies but also for their minds.
“Pere Romeu informs them that from the twelfth day of the month of June, in the Calle Montesión, the second house on the left as one goes from the Plaza de Santa Ana, there will be opened an establishment designed to provide both enchantment for the eye and good things for the pleasure of the palate.
“This house is an eating-place for the epicure, a glowing hearth for those who long for the warmth of a home, a gallery for those who seek delights for the soul, a tavern for those who love the shade of the vine and the true essence of the grape, a Gothic beer-garden for lovers of the north, an Andalusian patio for those of the south; it is a house of healing for those who suffer from the sickness of our century, a refuge of friendship and harmony for those who shelter beneath its roof.
“They will not be sorry to have come, but on the other hand they will certainly regret having stayed away.”
The Calle Montesión was an out-of-the-way little street on the then unfashionable northern edge of the old town: the house was the work of the young architect Puig y Cadafalch, to some extent a follower of Gaudi and a whole-hearted, unselective lover of Modernismo. Els Quatre Gats had a great many beams, a great deal of ironwork wrought into bulbous, vegetable, art-nouveau shapes, a fully arched brick entrance, and a general Teutonic air of phony medievalism in keeping with the atmosphere in the Barcelona avant-garde of the time, which was much influenced by Wagner and by the north in general, including England, as well as by France. At the back it had a large room for shadow-plays (like the Chat Noir) and puppet-shows; and this room was also used for exhibitions.
The ingredients that went to make up Modernismo ranged from Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and beaten copper on the one hand to Bakunin, Nietzsche and El Greco on the other, with Hiroshige, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kate Greenaway and a morass of cheap sentimentality in between. Naturally there were a great many contradictions in the Quatre Gats, a fair amount of silliness, and some of its customers were hangers-on of the arts who dressed up as decadents or anarchists and gave it to be understood that they were consumptives or syphilitics or both; but the senior members of the group were men of talent.
The most important of these were Santiago Rusiñol, Ramón Casas and Miguel Utrillo. Rusiñol was a painter and poet twenty years older than Picasso: he was one of the leading figures in the movement, and it was he who organized the Fiestas Modernistas at Sitges, where he built the neo-Gothic Cau Ferrat and saw to the erection of a monument to El Greco. During these fiestas he uttered fluent, cloudy, mystical, enthusiastic orations, in one of which he exhorted his hearers “to translate the eternal verities into wild paradox; to draw life from the abnormal, the extraordinary, the outrageous; to tell the horror of the reasoning mind as it gazes upon the chasm, the earthquake-crash of disaster, and the creeping dread of the imminent; to descry the unknown, to foretell fate,” and thus to practice an art “at the same time resplendent and nebulous, sophisticated and barbaric, medieval and modernist.” He did not tell them how to do it however, and the only book of his the writer has seen is innocuous, sentimental, and pretty. Yet he was a fairly good painter, infinitely beyond Muñoz Degrain or Carbonero, and he did write articles in the Vanguardia, the great Barcelona daily and probably the best paper in the country, supporting the Impressionists and the Symbolists when they were virtually unknown in Spain, and he did love El Greco. Picasso did not need Rusiñol’s example to do the same—writing from Madrid in 1897 he had spoken of “El Greco’s magnificent heads”—but it may have strengthened his admiration: at all events in that same year of 1899 he painted an “El Greco figure,” a dark and impressive, rather diabolical, long, bearded face with something of the Cretan’s own technique. And the fact that there was something eminently sound in Rusiñol’s ideas may have helped the rest of the oration down: Picasso did not hear it—he was in La Coruña at the time—but Rusiñol was a great one for speeches (J. M. de Sucre says that he gave Picasso a copy of these “Oraciones” illustrated by Miguel Utrillo and Suzanne Valadon) and like most orators he was given to repeating himself—in any case his views were shared by the rest of the group, and with variations they were to be heard daily at the Quatre Gats. Not the slightest relation of direct cause and effect is here suggested, but the absurd thing is that in the course of his life Picasso did in fact fulfill something closely resembling Rusiñol’s excited program; although to be sure he was never nebulous or medieval and there is something to be said for the view that he was never modem either, but outside time: a painter modern for us only by the accident of contemporaneity.
Casas and Utrillo were also painters and writers, and between them they ran Pèl i Ploma, the Catalan literary and artistic review. Both were successful men, and both, like Rusiñol, had lived and studied in Paris, where Miguel Utrillo acted as the Vanguardia’s correspondent and where he met Suzanne Valadon, to whose son Maurice he gave his name. Utrillo was also one of the earliest and most percipient authorities on El Greco.
Generally speaking the other men Picasso met there were younger: far and away the most important was Nonell, whose painting he admired and even more his drawing; then there were Casagemas, Junyer, and Andreu, with whom he went to Paris; Manolo Hugué the sculptor, whom he helped until the end of his days; Sebastià Junyent, who went mad; Josep Xiro, who did the same; Joachim Mir (he and Picasso exchanged portraits); Brossa the anarchist; Zuloaga, who turned Fascist in Franco’s time and denounced his former friend; Eugenio d’Ors, who wrote the well-known Pablo Picasso and other studies; Sabartés, who looked after his affairs for the last thirty-odd years of his life; the brothers Reventós and many, many others.
One of the reasons why he had time for making all these friends in spite of working as hard as usual—and the number of pictures and drawings from these years is very great—is that shortly after his return from Horta in February, 1899, he and his father disagreed.
Being a father is generally acknowledged to be an ungrateful trade; being a son is another—Zeus and Saturn found it an impossible relationship. Don José was then rising sixty, an age at which nine months count for very little; Pablo was seventeen, when less than that makes the difference between a boy and a man. He had just come back from a long period of total independence, with no one to speak to him in parental terms; and it would have been strange if they had not disagreed.
He left home and spent several weeks in a bawdy-house. He cannot possibly have been a guest who paid in cash, but he returned the girls’ kindness by decorating the walls of the room in which they sheltered him. The location of the murals (covered over long since, no doubt) and the exact sequence of events has eluded the researches of even Josep Palau, yet it is probable that it was after the brothel had fulfilled its didactic purpose that he moved in with his friend Santiago Cardona, the brother of the sculptor he had known at the Llotja. Picasso had a small room where he worked and slept, and its window gave on to the Calle d’Escudellers Blancs, a narrow, densely-populated street leading from the Ramblas towards the cathedral: it was here that he was painting in April, 1899. The other rooms were devoted to the making of corsets, and at intervals of painting and drawing Picasso loved to operate the machine that made the holes for the necessary tapes; since the workmen liked him, as workmen always did, he could indulge himself as much as ever he chose.
The break with his family was neither violent nor lasting, however; there are kindly drawings of his father from this period, and his sister often came to see him. And it was here, too, in this little room, that later in the same year Sabartés first met Picasso, brought by a fellow sculpture-student, Mateo de Soto. “Science and Charity” was leaning up against a wall, together with “Aragonese Customs,” and Picasso, among piles of drawings and sketchbooks, was busy at another painting for which Soto was the model. His piercing black gaze put his diffident visitor out of countenance; the pictures and the drawings quite overcame him; and when they said good-bye Sabartés bent in a kind of respectful bow. This was the beginning of what may be called a friendship, according to one’s definition of the word, and of what must be called a domination that lasted, with one long interruption when Sabartés was in America, until his death in 1968.
For Dr. Johnson every conversation was a contest for superiority: this was also true of Picasso, and there were few relationships in which he did not quickly establish himself as the dominant partner. Later in his life, when he could bring world-wide notoriety and great wealth into play, victory was fatally easy; but even at this stage, when he was eighteen, penniless and unknown, he was accepted as a leading figure at the Quatre Gats, even by those who can have had little notion of his talent and even by those who disliked him.
It was not that he talked much at the Quatre Gats; in fact he was often silent, moody, withdrawn, absorbed or apparently bored, as well he might have been with some of the morphine creeps who frequented the place—he was always easily bored, and more easily as the years went by. But when he did speak he spoke well, often wittily, and always with the unconscious authority of a man who could already draw and paint better than any of the artists there except perhaps Isidro Nonell.
A man: in some ways certainly a man. Much of his painting had been fully mature these four or five years past. But he was not yet formed: he had read little, he had had virtually no formal education, and in the nature of things he had very little experience of adult life; what is more, the child Pablo still lived on in him then, as it was to live on for the rest of his life, with comic hats, false noses (and child-fresh painting) at the age of ninety.
At this time he was beginning to work out his own aesthetic, an aesthetic destined to destroy painting as it was then conceived and to thrust the boundaries of perception far beyond their known limits: one is tempted to say “to enlarge the idea of beauty” except for the fact that Picasso was primarily concerned with being rather than with what is ordinarily understood by that vague word beauty. “Beauty?” he said to Sarbatés, “… To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.”
It was an enormously ambitious project, and it was accompanied by self-doubt, periods of depression, and false starts: one does not shatter one’s own matrix, eat one’s own father, without some hesitation; yet in ten years from this time it was largely accomplished. Already the results of the process were evident in the prodigiously rapid development of his work in 1899 and 1900; but as a wholly conscious process it was only just beginning, and the milieu in which it began helps to explain at least some of the external forces acting upon it.
As I said earlier, Picasso has often been compared to Goethe, and certainly they had much in common, including the “virtue of lasting” and an extraordinary physical vitality; but whereas Goethe was an insider, solidly based in his social and national contexts, endowed with an elaborate education and with money, and supported on all sides by the culture of his time, Picasso was socially peripheral, his sense of national identity was at least troubled, his schooling had scarcely passed the elementary stage, and the culture of his time, such as it was, oppressed him on every hand. His eventual aim was to revolutionize a great part of this culture, and apart from his native genius all he had to help him in his intellectual formation for the task were his contacts in Barcelona and his early years in Paris: the Quatre Gats and Montparnasse were to be his Leipzig and Strassburg, his Greek, Latin, and philosophy.
As far as it was political at all, the general feeling at the Quatre Gats was of course left-wing. In this it was opposed to the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, the respectable haven of the academic painters, good Catholics, patronized by Church, state, and big business. The two groups did resemble one another in being separatist and in the fact that at least some of the Sant Llucs were devoted to Modernismo—Gaudi himself was a member—but as far as religion was concerned they were poles apart. The Sant Llucs sympathized with the strong rise of right-wing Catholicism so evident in Spain during the long regency of the Habsburg Queen Christina: whereas at the Quatre Gats, although plenty of mysticism was to be found, it was mostly of the cloudy, imported kind, pantheistic, wooly, scarcely of the native growth at all; and since there was also a strong anarchist element, downright atheism was sometimes added to the left-wing anticlericalism—a striking contrast to a young man fresh from the age-old rural piety of Horta de Ebro.
The anarchism, in its more general implications, struck a responsive chord in him: Picasso was increasingly conscious of the misery caused by the system and its injustice—the evidence lay all about him in Barcelona—and his awareness was increased by Nonell. In 1896 Nonell, who was eight years older than Picasso and who had been drawn to Modernismo earlier, went to Caldas de Bohí, a village with hot springs right up in the mountains, under the Maladetta, and notorious for its goitrous idiots. He made a series of drawings of them which he exhibited in the hall of the Vanguardia and at the Quatre Gats. They are masterly, disturbing drawings, with a strong, fluid line enclosing the highly simplified figures. They may be said to belong to Art Noveau, but they injected a vital hardness into the milk-and-water lakes and fairies, chlorotic maidens stuff produced by Puvis de Chavannes, Maurice Denis, and so many others at the time, and they made a considerable sensation. Nonell’s was a direct expression of true, unsentimental sympathy: when Picasso produced his hospital patients in the article of death and his raddled whores it is tempting to say that he went one better, for here the savagery is not only far more intense, but it is unjudging, a flat statement—empathy rather than sympathy. Yet, “one better” implies competition or at least influence, and it is dangerous to speak of influence where Picasso is concerned. So much was already implicit in his early work and he had preconceived so many tendencies before their public birth elsewhere that an apparent influence is often no more than another man’s discovery of something that Picasso had already found out for himself—a discovery more fully developed, perhaps, by the kindred spirit (van Gogh comes to mind), but not radically new to Picasso. In this case the savagery, the guts, which both he and Nonell brought to Modernismo was perfectly evident in Picasso’s childish work; and in this case as in so many others “reinforcement” is nearer the mark than “influence.”
Anarchism too had formed part of his early outlook, and the talk at the Quatre Gats can have done little more than illustrate and encourage an existing hatred for authority and a determined rejection of rules imposed from without.
The most esteemed anarchist at the Quatre Gats was young Jaume Brossa: he had no great opinion of the artists he beheld there—”neurotic dilettanti, only concerned with being different from the philistines and the bourgeois”—but he did feel that there was promise for the art of the coming century, the anarchists’ secular millennium. “Man, carried away by a just and iconoclastic pride, the result of the psychological atmosphere created in his intelligence, will no longer tolerate the slightest barrier to his free-ranging mind; and this exaltation of the individual means that not a single myth, not a single idol, not a single entity, human or divine, will remain to stand in the way of the total liberation of individuality. Some people may say that these theories imply a general dissolution; but as well as a negative they possess a positive spirit, one that renews and builds up lost powers and forces,” he wrote. And referring once more to the cult of the individual, of the Me, Brossa said, “it leads to a turning in upon oneself … and in its turn this withdrawal leads to the discovery of a compensation for disgust with life, that is to say the wonderful image of the world that lies deep in the camera obscura of the Me.” As Cirici-Pellicer observes, one could scarcely ask a fairer picture of Picasso’s progress. Destruction, repeated destruction, withdrawal from apparent reality, synthesis, new worlds, new powers, new visions: everything is here, including, it is to be hoped, compensation for some degree of disgust with life.
There was a great deal in the political anarchists’ creed that appealed to Picasso: Bakunin, for example, had said, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion,” and nothing could have harmonized better with his own views.
But although Brossa had clear notions of their ideology, he did not succeed in passing them on to Picasso, who was never a political animal. Nor did he succeed in passing on the anti-Semitism that infects some of Nietzsche’s followers, for Picasso, although given to superstition, was far, far too strong a personality for that kind of self-inflating myth.
What Picasso did draw in was a generalized anarchism and a deep sympathy for Catalan independence: the people around him preached contempt for bourgeois art, which some of them produced, and hatred for intellectual snobbery, which most of them practiced, but the very young and ingenuous Picasso either did not notice their inconsistencies or did not find them shocking: whether he needed the encouragement of the Quatre Gats or not, he remained the very type of anti-bourgeois, anti-snob all the rest of his days.
The disastrous war with America, the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, had plunged Madrid into gloom, introspection, and pessimism: it had no such effect on Barcelona, where, in spite of labor troubles, agitation, bombs, and repression the mood was sanguine, forward-looking, interested in the outer world. At the Quatre Gats Picasso swam in an atmosphere of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Wagner—an Associación Wagneriana met there regularly from 1900—Schopenhauer, the Symbolists, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, all new and exciting names in Catalonia; and although he was no great reader he came by at least a second-hand notion of their ideas.
He was no great reader. In their love for him some of his friends have maintained that he was: they admit that they never saw him with a book in his hands, but they assert that he read in bed, by night, and they mention books that he owned—Verlaine, for example, at a time when Picasso could neither read, write, nor speak French. Yet Picasso was one of the hardest-working painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, etchers that ever lived: “Where do I get this power of creating and forming? I don’t know. I have only one thought: work. I paint just as I breathe. When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired. It’s still often three in the morning before I switch off my light,” he said to Beyeler. He was also extremely convivial—loved a late gathering of friends; his days were full and sometimes his nights as well, since he loved working by artificial light. And as it made him uneasy to spend his idle nights alone he nearly always had a companion: not one of these companions has ever spoken of his reading in bed.
He illustrated books magnificently; he owned a considerable number, some of the greatest bibliographical interest; but he did not read a great many. This is not to say that he was not a keenly intelligent man, capable of profound understanding; yet his was an exceedingly quick and sometimes impatient mind, not very well suited for the slow accumulative absorption of prose. Verse was another matter: here the concentrated essence could be grasped almost as quickly as a picture or a carving; Picasso certainly read poetry and he certainly loved poets all his life—Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, to name but three. To be a poet was a passport to his kindness.
On the other hand he was always surrounded by men who did read enormously, some of them brilliant writers themselves; and his keen, retentive intelligence gathered more from their distillation than years in a library would have given him. As far as Barcelona was concerned, Nietzsche was available to him through the medium of Joan Maragall, one of the best of the Catalan poets and a great translator from the German. Picasso liked and admired Maragall, as well he might, for not only did Maragall destroy rhetorical convention and “risk his life on every line,” but his Excelsior was a noble expression of faith in the future of art for those brave enough to launch far out into unknown seas. Then again Nietzsche’s aphoristic manner was perfectly suited to Picasso: when the philosopher died in the summer of 1900, at the term of his long madness, the papers were filled with appreciations of him; and Picasso undoubtedly read papers. 1900 was also the year that saw the first performance of Tristan and Siegfried in Barcelona (well before Madrid, of course), and although no music other than his native cante hondo or the Catalan sardana ever meant much to Picasso, he was necessarily affected by the admiration for things of the North so general in Barcelona at the time.
The North was a capital place, seen from the shores of the Mediterranean: not only was it medieval—and the middle ages were golden to the Catalans—but it was modem too, with advanced ideas on sexual freedom. The area included Norway—Munch was already known in Barcelona, as well as Ibsen—and when the young Picasso was asked to illustrate a poem called El Clam de les Verges he produced a somewhat Expressionist young woman dreaming of a Man (his upper half floats in the middle distance of the night).
The poem and its illustration appeared on August 12, 1900, in Joventut, Pèl i Ploma’s rival, whose artistic editor was Alexandre de Riquer, a member of the Cercle de Sant Lluc; and some of it reads:
We are maidens, maidens
By the force of hateful laws that keep us enslaved. Night and day we seek the wild delights that we dream of … If the mind is not virgin must the body be so? No, no, let us be free, let us take pleasure in love! Tear our white virginal robe: it is a shroud, A shroud, and a frail one, hiding a treasure within.
Obviously the poem was written by a man, Joan Oliva Bridgman, but it does express a modest hope of what might be, and it is typical of the climate of the time. So is another, also written by Oliva and illustrated by Picasso: the excited verse, which begins “To be or not to be,” calls upon the reader to banish the dark smoke of base routine with the sacred light that pierces the shades of mystery—the reader is to be fully or not at all. There is no mention of the sea, favorable or otherwise, but Picasso, perhaps with Maragall in mind, drew a man guiding a boat through menacing waves towards the horizon.
The North also embraced England, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and at one time Picasso had some faint notion of going there; this was less out of love for the Pre-Raphaelites than from an opinion he had formed of Englishwomen from an account of the intrepid Lady Hester Stanhope. Señora Romeu was said to be an Englishwoman, while Señora Maragall was certainly related to the British Dr. Noble who built a seamen’s hospital in Málaga, and perhaps he found they did not quite answer his expectations; at all events London very soon yielded to Paris.
The North was the vague metaphysical goal; for most of the painters and literary men of the Quatre Gats Paris was the immediate and concrete aim. Quite apart from its being the center of artistic life and of everything that was new, it was accessible: all educated Catalans and a great many others spoke French, whereas few knew German and fewer still English—they were persuaded that Wilde was a poet. Many of the older men and some of the others had already been to Paris, bringing back a cloud of glory—Nonell had even exhibited in Parisian galleries. And it was Paris that provided the reviews, papers, and magazines that Picasso saw at the Quatre Gats.
There were many others, such as Casas’ and Utrillo’s Pèl i Ploma, Alexandre de Riquer’s Joventut, Catalunya Artística, and the English Studio, but it was the French Assiette au Beurre, the Gil Blas illustré, the Figaro, and the famous Revue Blanche that introduced him to Théophile Steinlen, Jean Louis Forain, and above all to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
These and the company of his many friends was his spiritual food. What he did for earthly nourishment it is difficult to say; and some of the self-portraits of these years show him looking wan and hungry. But he did sell a few drawings and pictures; Romeu commissioned advertisements and menu-cards; and Barcelona had many small shops up and down the Ramblas that specialized in tapabocas, little dishes to be eaten cheaply at any hour of the day or night: a shallow pipkin of sparrows stewed in their own juice was to be had for little more than a farthing, and although blackbirds or squids in their ink came dearer they were still very moderate, particularly as bread was thrown in; and bull’s flesh was cheap after corridas.
At all events he ate well enough to go for long walks. Sabartés mentions their expeditions to Tibidabo, the mountain that stands some five or six miles behind Barcelona, giving a magnificent view of the whole spreading city, the harbor, the sea, and the remote sierras: a heartbreaking climb for which all but the most energetic of the penniless young take the funicular railway. And to do an immense amount of work: he had moved from the Calle d’Escudellers Blancs to a large, unfurnished, well-lit garret workshop on the top floor of number 17, Riera de Sant Joan, high in the old city, which he shared with his friend Carlos Casagemas, a strange-looking young man, well educated (he had been trained for the Spanish navy until the American war put an end to any hope of a career in it), the son of the United States consul-general in Barcelona. Since there was no furniture they painted it on the walls: tables, chairs, chests, a sofa, the necessary safe, together with servants, a maid and a boy, to look after it. And wherever the furniture left room there were pictures, pictures that overflowed on to the walls of the ladder-like staircase.
No doubt many of them were outrageous; he always had a strong earthy sense of fun—to the end of his days shocking people amused him—and it was even stronger then. For example, on the ground floor of the house there was a grocery that sold fresh eggs from Villafranca, and he was attached to the daughter of the shop, so much so that he produced an advertisement for the eggs. The great men of the Quatre Gats, Rusiñol, Casas, Utrillo, and the rest, appeared, each holding an egg: the point of the advertisement was a comparison of their testicles with the eggs, from which it appeared that the fresh eggs of Villafranca were larger.
But there were others too, and if only they had been preserved or even photographed we should have a fascinating account of his development at this crucial stage when an infinity of potentialities were opening in his mind and when he was making those deliberate elections that were to prove vital for him and for the art of the twentieth century. Yet although the camera was usual by then and although he was highly valued by those who knew him, nobody recorded them in any way. Would there have been a hint of the sharp angles and interlocking planes of Horta de Ebro, a longing for the clean straight line after the curving lilies and languors of Art Nouveau, a precursor of Cubism? A foretaste of the Blue Period, so soon to come?
They valued him highly; and a group of his friends, Pallarès, Sabartés, and Casagemas among them, urged him to give a show of his drawings at the Quatre Gats, a show that would in a way be a challenge to the able, accomplished, established, and fashionable draughtsman Casas. Several men had shown there: Casas himself, Rusiñol, Utrillo, Nonell, Pichot, Canals, Mir, and Opisso. Picasso liked the idea, and in the winter of 1899/1900 he set to work on a series of portrait-drawings of the Quatre Gats habitués. Most of his friends appeared in this gallery. Among them Sabartés, slim in those days, but even then myopic, even at nineteen wearing that expression of weak meek obstinacy, skepticism, and deep unshakable self-satisfaction that is more apparent in some of the portraits of later years—a born and willing victim. Nonell, a strong round Mediterranean head, secretly amused, not unlike Picasso himself. (Indeed, almost alone among all those self-conscious people, affected, bearded, pipe-smoking for the most part, Picasso and Nonell had the look of real men, fully alive, who had wandered onto a stage full of minor actors playing dull, unimportant roles forever and ever, stilted creatures, devoured by their self-chosen parts.) Lluisa Vidal, one of the few women of the group, a former pupil of Eugène Carrière in Paris and a great admirer of his. Carlos Casagemas, who had an exhibition at the Quatre Gats just after his room-mate, Picasso: an anxious, haunted face, narrow, all jutting nose and receding chin: he was impotent, but it was not generally known at the time. Manuel Hugué, another fully human being, an admirable sculptor, extremely idle and utterly unreliable, much loved by the friends upon whom he lived, though forever penniless and somewhat given to stealing their possessions: the bastard son of a Spanish general, perhaps, and ordinarily called Manolo. Manuel Pallarès, who was less often to be seen with Picasso these days because of a long-drawn-out and difficult love-affair, but who remained a firm friend. Ramon Pichot, a painter, one of a large family all devoted to the arts, who lived in wild disorder in the splendid Calle Montcada—splendid not in the modern sense, with light and tree-lined space, but in that of the middle ages: a dark and malodorous lane, yet one lined with Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque palaces opening onto secret inward patios; one of them, restored, is now the Picasso Museum. (The Catalan version of Pichot is Pitxot, just as Carlos Casagemas comes out as Carles Casagemes: here I use the forms they used themselves in France.) Opisso, a talented draughtsman and the son of the Vanguardia’s art-critic: although in after days he told Cirici-Pellicer that “because of Picasso’s reserved character it was difficult to assert that they had ever really been friends.” In the same passage Cirici-Pellicer speaks of a somewhat later studio belonging to Soto where Picasso came to work and which he so filled with his own things and his own powerful personality that even Soto took to calling it “Picasso’s studio”; and he goes on to say, “This quite describes the overpowering, encroaching nature of the future creator of Cubism: those who knew him when he was young all agree that … one could only worship him or hate him. His worshipers have told us of his charm, his sound, quick, precise, clear-cut judgment, his immense gifts for improvisation and for perfect imitation [he could instantly produce a pastiche of any known artist, and this talent, indulged with unthinking freedom, brought the charge of plagiarism from the envious or the obtuse], his way of drawing a nude, starting with a toe and sweeping round with one sure, unfaltering line, and of his wonderful steadfast perseverance in his work…. On the other hand, his enemies have told us of his pig-headedness, his boundless self-confidence, his skill at seeing just where he could make a way for himself, and of his contempt for the work of those around him.”
This is not wholly objective testimony: Cirici-Pellicer was out of sympathy with Picasso’s later work; Opisso knew no fame comparable to Picasso’s, but remained set in the late nineteenth century, when, he affirms, the work of the one could be mistaken for the work of the other: so much so that a collector once gave ten thousand pesetas for a charcoal drawing by Opisso, supposing it to be a Picasso. Yet it is worth recording because of the light it throws on the reactions of his friends to the eighteen-year-old Andalou, a small, commanding figure of no physical size at all but of a caliber hitherto unknown.
The drawings and a few other works were ready in February, 1900. Neither Picasso nor his friends could afford frames, so they were hung with drawing-pins, more or less at haphazard. The general effect was indifferent, and from the commercial point of view amateurish: nothing like the smooth efficiency of the Saló Parés, where the citizens of Barcelona were accustomed to buying their pictures.
Drawing has always been less generally valued than painting, and at that time, in spite of Casas’ success, it was held in particularly low esteem. A contemporary artist has given the scale of values that obtained in Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century: first the painter of religious subjects; he was a somebody, a señor. Second the portraitist: he was understood to possess a natural gift for catching a likeness and he was granted the respect due to a photographer. Third the landscape and genre painter, and he was little better than a halfwit. Last, and far below any classification by number, the draughtsman: he was scarcely an artist at all. And in this case the draughtsman was known to come from Andalucía, the home of idleness, levity, Gypsies, bullfighters, and wild extravagance, and to be absurdly young. He had no network of cousins, no local interest. Few people came, apart from the artist’s friends; and of those few none bought.
In the end the unsold drawings passed to Pere Romeu; he gave some to their originals, and after his death his widow sold the rest, many to the Barcelona collector Graells.
But these amounted to only a small part of Picasso’s work in 1899 and 1900. What can usefully be said of the countless drawings, the great number of paintings of these eighteen months? Only that they range from what academic realism ought to be to Modernismo and beyond, a range that includes a kind of proto-Fauvism and Expressionism, together with darts in many other directions, most of them enough to satisfy the most exigent, and some deliberate reminiscences of El Greco and Toulouse-Lautrec. Yet just as “influence” has little meaning as far as Picasso is concerned, so isms do not signify a great deal: they never really fit him and he never even fits his own, or rather those that theoreticians impose upon him; nor his “periods” either. Both isms and periods are mentioned in this book, since they do have a certain utility, but they are mentioned sparingly and with strong reserves: apart from such clearly-conceived theories as Divisionism most seem to be post hoc, approximate labels, fortuitous in origin and often misleading in application.
On the other hand, a repeated theme, a steady preoccupation, is something else again; and at this time Picasso was particularly concerned with windows, as he had been earlier and as he was to be again. The first of the present series is quite straightforward, a drawing of the window over the way from his in the Calle d’Escudellers, a window with a young woman in it, sewing: she is labeled Mercedes. The next is the same window, but closed and blind: a painting this time—the gray house, the iron bars of the balcony, the yellow curtain behind the glass, all strangely important. Then comes a painting of his own window, the lower part veiled with a piece of translucent cloth: just that and nothing more. The cloth is suffused with amber light; the dark brown crossbars and frame stand out against the pale, featureless day beyond. The picture belongs entirely to the twentieth century; it is devoid of literature and it is profoundly satisfying: it is the truth, or a truth and a significant one, about that window and that light. Nothing could be farther from Art Nouveau.
After that another window, closed but showing a suggestion of a landscape beyond, green and white: the room is dark, the inner window-sill is draped with something so deeply gray as to be nearly black; and here again there is that feeling of great unspecified significance.
Still more windows appear, but not alone; they form part of sick-bed or death-bed scenes (his concession to the “decadence” of the time), and they are always closed. In later years Picasso’s windows grew broader; they were often wide open to a world full of sun and color and doves. But in these Barcelona days only one swings back to let the glow of the tawny, sunlit town into the vague gloom of the room: Lola Ruiz stands in front of it, wearing a ghostly white dress. There is something white on the floor beside her, possibly paper with which she is about to light her brother’s fire.
Another very striking picture indeed is that which he called “El Greco’s Bride,” one of the very few he gave a name. It is a masklike greenish egg-shaped face, bald, sexless; the highly formalized convex forehead and the arches above the blind eyes sweep down the long straight nose in a manner that he was to recognize six or seven years later, when he first saw African sculpture. Yet the mask itself, again like some carved in Africa, gives the impression of concavity as it hangs there upon its white, black-bordered cloth scattered with violets below, reminding one of the Holy Face of St. Veronica, with which the general idea may have originated—there were plenty to be seen in Spanish churches.
Then again he painted a plunging view of the Riera de Sant Joan from his studio: and he painted it as no one else would have done. The people far below, the little cart, take their urgently living form from two or three strong brush-strokes, and the heavy impasto swirls about to give an effect of aerial height. It has been said that in this period of extraordinarily rapid development Picasso passed through every stage except Impressionism; but surely this is his contribution?
Of course there are a great many other pictures, most of them still entirely representational, and innumerable drawings; among them a number concerned with poverty, illness, sick-beds and death; bars, café, theater and dance-hall scenes, such as a café-chantant on the Paralelo; a good many whores, including the Lautrec-ish La Chata, a tough one, smoking a cigarette; bull-fights too and bullfighters; studies for posters; nudes, sometimes treated geometrically; and some self-portraits. The Barcelona museum has a dozen and more, and they range from the boy who arrived in the city and the awkward youth of 1896 with large red ears and his hair all over the place to the self-possessed through rather desperate young man of later years. They are interesting not only because he was an interesting person with an interesting face but also because he never saw it twice in the same way. They are all unflattering, they all have that somewhat melancholy, unfocused look of a man gazing in a mirror; but the man in the glass cannot make himself out. Sometimes the face is young, sometimes old, sometimes angular, sometimes (as his friends saw it) round; but although one is labeled Me and although another carries the repeated inscription “Yo el Rey” the nature of each is different; there is no sure, total grasp of the subject, never the unfailing certainty of his portraits of Don José, for example.
In all this outpouring there is a great variety of approach and a great variety of achievement. An aesthetic so personal and so radically new as Picasso’s necessarily had a long and painful gestation; and his anxiety, doubts, and hesitations are apparent in his work.
If a man has had premonitions of what in an entirely different context would be called the beatific vision, and if expressing it in his own language of paint entails the destruction of what he and his fathers have understood by painting, it is understandable that he should have periods of doubt about the validity of his revelation: particularly if he is surrounded by people who can have almost no notion of what he is about—by people who swim in the present and the recent past while he is well out into the future. A man reaching as far as Picasso was reaching even then is necessarily lonely: he cannot follow; he can only lead. But he can only lead when he is sure of himself and when he is on the top of his form, when mood, health, light, food, sleep, women, freedom from interruption are all in favorable conjunction.
It is no part of this book’s aim to represent Picasso as a paragon of all virtues nor indeed of any; he was quite capable of turning out dull pictures and some that most people would call thoroughly bad. These horrid lapses, which would not matter in any of his contemporaries, were perhaps more the effect of gratitude, kindness, and hunger than conviction: when Romeu asked him to do advertisements and menu-cards for the Quatre Gats he produced things in the worst Art Nouveau manner, the thick treacly line, the vulgar, silly romanticism rendered with a sickening virtuosity. And there is a somewhat later portrait of his friend Sebastià Junyent, one of the few labored and technically inept pictures that Picasso ever painted, which can only be explained by tenderness for his model.
The general impression this period gives is that of eager restless search, of deep and sometimes very unhappy thought, yet with cheerfulness often breaking through. It is true that much later Picasso said, “I do not seek: I find.” But he was always much given to stunning his interlocutors, particularly the more earnest souls; he was extremely impatient of talk about art and he loved a pointed saying far more than what some would call the literal truth, plodding and often essentially false: He would speak according to his mood and according to his audience; he hated to be even very slightly manipulated—the oracle that can be made to work—and his collected sayings contain a mass of mutually exclusive statements. A writer with a point to make could prove any thesis he chose to advance by selecting those that support it. For instance, he also said, “I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search incessantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.”
This second remark certainly seems to fit the years 1899-1900 even more than it does the rest, for not only did he run in every direction, using his already formidable battery of techniques—pen, pencil, gouache, watercolor, pastel, tempera, oil—but he added etching and wood-engraving, his first essays in which date from 1899, and probably sculpture, though here the date is less certain.
The story of his first etching has often been told: his friend Canals showed him how to prepare the plate, how to draw the line through the protective coating with a needle so that the metal was exposed, and how to dip it into the acid so that the mordant should bite into the bared copper, thus giving a recess for the ink in the subsequent printing process. Picasso drew a massive picador, booted and spurred, holding his pike, with a fair-sized owl on the ground beside him; but he could not grasp the fact that printing would reverse the image, and the picador’s pike came out on the wrong side of the picture. This did not puzzle him for a moment: he at once entitled the etching “El Zurdo,” the left-handed picador.
The wood-engraving, a bullfighter holding his cloak, is less well known: here the technique is far more difficult, because the line has to be cut into the wood with a graver and no mistake can be corrected, but Picasso handled this new and unforgiving tool with almost the same ease as his pencil: the line is easy, fluent, unconstrained.
He learned a great deal in Barcelona: but he was outgrowing Modernismo whereas most of his friends at the Quatre Gats were still devoted to its somewhat faded innovations. His friend Junyent did say, “The nineteenth century has died with the consolation of seeing the splendor of a great art on the horizon of the infinite, a lofty art, strong, complex, earthy and spiritual,” but he also observed that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais had reached the highest point ever achieved in painting.
The more Picasso heard of Paris, particularly in this year of 1900, the year of the Exposition Universelle, the talk of the western world, and the more he learned of France from the papers he saw, the more provincial Barcelona seemed. A great deal of its modest intellectual ferment was closely connected with nationalism, separatism, Catalan autonomy; and none of this, nor Catalan politics, affected him essentially: in spite of all their kindness for him and of his for them, he remained an outsider in Barcelona. Certainly it had given him a great deal, and certainly it was a tough city, as tough as Marseilles or Naples, with bombs, violence, strikes, repression, a sinister secret police, and the extremes of wealth and poverty: and the Quatre Gats were thorough-going in their amusements in spite of their pipes and their whimsy—morphine was readily available, and both cocaine and the more economical laudanum were to be had over the counter at the nearest chemist’s shop. But Picasso was growing tired of their humorless Sturm und Drang: he had already poked fun at them with his picture of Sabartés, labeled “Poeta Decadente,” draped in a cloak, crowned with a wreath, holding an iris in his hand, and standing in the midst of flames in a dark graveyard. Picasso could be desperately unhappy and he could be moody to the point of getting up in the middle of a conversation and of walking out of the café without a word; but he was never dreary: nor was he reverent. For a being so overflowing with life, the sight of these people taking their decadence so seriously had begun to be wearisome now that it was no longer new.
Several of the Quatre Gats went to Paris that year, partly to see the exhibition; several were already more or less settled there; and Picasso, Pallarès, and Casagemas made plans to go too. These plans were complicated not only by the general lack of money but by the possibility that Pallarès might obtain a commission to decorate a chapel at Horta; but as the year wore on they grew more substantial.
By the autumn of 1900 Picasso had become reconciled with his family, and in October it was with his father’s reluctant consent and his mother’s active support that he set off for Paris with Casagemas. Pallarès had in fact received his commission and he could not be with them at the Estación de Francia, but he was to join them in a week or two.
“And the money for all this, where did it come from?” asked Sabartés.
“Pallarès, Casagemas and I were going to share. My father paid for the ticket. He and my mother came to the station with me. When they went home, all they had left was the loose change in his pocket. They had to wait until the end of the month before they could get straight. My mother told me long after.”
By dawn Picasso had crossed the Pyrenees at last. They were well behind him and the train was tearing northwards through France at an exhilarating pace unknown to Spain, belching smoke. A thousand kilometers from the frontier it drew into Paris: they crept from their third-class carriage, deeply covered with smuts, loaded with easels, color-boxes, portfolios, baggage. For a moment it was still Spain, with Catalan and Spanish all around them, tourists for the exhibition, immigrant workers with shapeless bundles; then as the stream flowed off the platform into the open it was Paris. A Paris as dirty as Barcelona or even dirtier but infinitely more full of color: brilliant posters everywhere—Chéret, Bonnard, Steinlen, Forain, Toulouse-Lautrec; sandwichmen; women dressed in bright colors rather than the black of Spain; startling umbrellas. Everywhere the enormous roar of the iron tires of horse-buses, drays, carts, and wagons on the crowded stone-paved streets, littered deep with dung, speckled with the bills handed out by the sandwichmen and thrown away; and mingling with the accustomed omnipresent reek of horse-piss and dung, the new sharp smell of petrol fumes. (Picasso always had a very strong sense of smell.) A bewildering great city, vaster by far than Barcelona or Madrid, and immensely active—no leisurely Spanish pacing here: the French language all round them, a babel of signs, street-cries, directions, people talking, policemen, carters, cab-drivers bawling in their native tongue; and Picasso, the eternal outsider, did not possess a word of it.
But he did at least know one thing: artists in Paris lived in Montparnasse. Rooms and even regular studios were to be had cheaply in Montparnasse. Junyent was already living there, and they went to see him at once. Although this might only be a short stay, hotels were out of the question, and they must find a room, preferably with some furniture in it.
They had hit upon a place in the rue Campagne-Première, just off the boulevard Montparnasse, and Picasso was on the point of taking it when he ran into Nonell, who was on the wing for Barcelona, portfolio packed and ready to depart. He at once offered them his studio in the rue Gabrielle, far over on the other side of Paris, on the hill of Montmartre, close to the Sacré Coeur.
There was no refusing so handsome an offer, and when Pallarès arrived in a few days’ time, too soon for them to have had his letter so that they could meet him at the station, he found them comfortably installed, quite at home, with two young women, Germaine and Odette.
It was clear that Picasso was quite pleased with Odette, in his cheerful way, although he could not communicate verbally with her at all: it was equally clear that Casagemas was very, very much more affected by Germaine. Presently Ramon Pichot came to see them and a third girl was produced, Germaine’s sister Antoinette. (Pallarès was already deeply in love in Spain; and he was some ten years older than the rest.) How five of these shifting relationships developed is far from clear, but the sixth, Casagemas’ longing for Germaine, grew steadily more obvious.
Picasso was much attached to Casagemas; they were intimate friends, and he knew about his impotence—in fact, he had introduced Casagemas to Rosita, one of his favorite Calle d’Avinyó girls, in an effort to help him. Exactly what he did to deal with this present situation has not been recorded except in his subsequent pictures, which are open to various interpretations. What is certain is that later he felt the outcome as deeply as it was possible for him to feel anything.
A hypothesis, based on his pictures and a few other circumstances, is this: he tried to detach Germaine from Casagemas—no very difficult task, perhaps, once the poor man’s condition had become evident—and then possibly to transfer her to Pichot, whom in fact she eventually married. If he thought that by taking the girl away from Casagemas he would cure his friend’s unhappy passion, he was wrong: he may have succeeded with Germaine, but Casagemas still went about with her, and his desperate love grew day by day.
In any case these days were filled to overflowing for Picasso, and he had little time to look after his friend. There was such a very great deal to be seen: the enormous wealth of the Louvre; the vast, spreading Exposition Universelle itself, which included exhibitions of art in the new-built Grand and Petit Palais and, in the Champ-de-Mars, a retrospective of French painting over the last century—acres of official pictures, but also David, Delacroix, Ingres, Daumier, Courbet, Corot, the Impressionists.
All this was exciting for the foreign artist, but less so for the native. The Paris of 1900 had grown used to Impressionism and although Monet, Sisley, and some others were still painting purely Impressionist pictures, the first impetus had long since died away. The group’s last exhibition had taken place fourteen years before amidst a violent quarrel about who was Impressionist and who was not, and their successors had never had quite the same impact. Neo-Impressionism produced some wonderful pictures, but Seurat had died in 1891, and apart from Signac and perhaps Cross there were few painters whose divisionist or pointillist technique looked anything more than the application of another man’s rules. There was much talk of Synthétisme, and the Nabis, with Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Vallotton, Vuillard, and Bonnard were carrying on with modern painting in their quiet, domestic way, sometimes galvanized by their connection with Gauguin; but the strong current had been broken, and although there was still a feeling of newness and discovery in the air, the younger artists had no clear rallying-point. The writers of the time, always ready with theory, tried with some success to persuade them that they were or should be Symbolists in the literary sense. They lived in an odd mixture of fin-de-siècle aestheticism and the slowly-crystalizing new outlook, between Mallarmé and Jarry as it were much of the confused, eclectic Art Nouveau with which they were surrounded looked backwards, and so did the Rose-Croix of Joseph Péladan and his followers; yet many of the young men had seen something of van Gogh, Gauguin, and even Cézanne.
The Parisians of 1900 were not starved for painting. Every year the huge official Salon des Artistes français showed room after room of unbelievably debased academic pictures—slick portraits, illustrations of trifling, often sentimental anecdote, picturesque nooks, and very, very curious nudes—while the dissident Société nationale des Beaux-Arts did much the same, though in their Salon might be seen the now semiofficial watered Impressionism. Yet neither of these Salons was always and entirely devoid of worth: the young Matisse was happy to show at the Nationale, and the Beaux-Arts professor who taught him and for whom he retained a respectful affection all his life, the amiable Gustave Moreau, regularly sent his pictures to the Artistes français, where Rouault also exhibited. But it was at the third Salon, that of the Indépendants, that the new painting was really to be seen. The Société des Indépendants was founded by Seurat, Signac, Redon, and their friends in 1884, and at their second exhibition they hung four pictures by Henri Rousseau, commonly known as the Douanier, while in the years before 1900 they also showed Bonnard, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, the then virtually unknown and quite unsalable van Gogh, and many other splendid painters.
This was the atmosphere in which Picasso was to live, but for the moment it was not the pictures shown in any of the Salons nor yet the crowded Exposition that gave him his view of the living art of Paris. His most profitable days were spent walking about the streets. In the first place there were the posters everywhere, and then such shows as the Revue Blanche’s Seurat retrospective, and of course the commercial galleries. There were fewer than there are today, and most were concerned with old masters or established academics; but among those dealers who handled modern painting some rose far above the shop-keeper level. Durand-Ruel in the rue Laffitte encouraged many of the younger men, including Odilon Redon, Bonnard, the Nabis and the painters of the Rose-Croix, who were also to be seen at Le Barc de Bouteville’s place; Bing’s Galérie de l’Art nouveau showed Munch; Berheim-Jeune van Gogh; and Ambroise Vollard, also in the rue Laffitte, was devoted in a more than commercial sense to Cézanne, whom he had inherited from Tanguy. Although the State had refused to accept Caillebotte’s Cézannes as a gift in 1894, Vollard bought no less than two hundred, holding important exhibitions in 1895 and again in 1899, while he also showed several of the new painters, including Picasso’s friend Isidre Nonell, as well as publishing books such as Verlaine’s Parallèlement with illustrations by Bonnard. And then there was the struggling Berthe Weill, who did her best for all the young; sooner or later almost every famous name in twentieth-century painting from Matisse to Modigliani passed through her shop, though with very little profit to herself—as late as 1909 she sold “a pretty little van Gogh” for sixty francs. In his wanderings Picasso saw a great deal in these shops and their windows: he made his first-hand acquaintance with Cézanne and Degas and Gauguin, for example, and it was now that he came to realize what a truly great painter Toulouse-Lautrec was.
There were other factors that kept him from keeping a close watch on Casagemas, and one was his conviviality. He had quantities of friends whom he saw every day, an abundance of animal spirits, and a great deal of energy. He may have been something of a foreigner in Barcelona, but here in Paris he was a thorough Catalan; and like those American expatriates who never move outside the American colony, he stayed almost entirely in his own well-populated Paris Catalonia. He did meet Steinlen, then at the height of his fame, but apart from that and the girls in Nonell’s studio and a few other contacts he remained in the little world to which his ignorance of French confined him.
Yet he also longed to know Paris as a whole, and being a great walker he explored it thoroughly on foot, at least in a north and south direction. Muffled in a great-coat against the northern air and carrying his sketchbook, he would emerge into the rural Montmartre and hurry down the hill. Rural it was in those days, in spite of the growing night-life, a village with quiet, unpaved, tree-lined lanes, vineyards that still held out against the spreading town, and genuine, if motionless, windmills; there was even a sloping stretch of waste-land covered with bushes called the maquis, where people shot cats and called them rabbits; and Parisians used to take their summer holidays in Montmartre, for the benefit of the air. But Paris was building fast, and it was building in stone, much of it from the nearby quarries. His route soon led him to new and busy streets where houses were going up at a great pace and where a singular noise rose above the din of wheels and the clop of hooves—the masons sawing their blocks of stone. These great blocks, white, pure, and sharp-angled, rose up through rectangular wooden towers—Cubism for those who could see it—and these towers were also covered with brilliant posters, a form of art practically unknown to Barcelona. The masons sang as they worked, and the streets were filled with the cries of greengrocers pushing their barrows, the call of glaziers walking along with a frame of glass on their backs in the hope of broken windows, and that of coopers, offering to sell new barrels or to repair old ones: wandering dealers in old clothes, too, and the rhythmic howl of Savoyards, wheeling a boiler, with a tin tub and buckets to carry the hot water upstairs, in case anyone should choose to take a bath.
Still farther down and nearer the Seine with its bateaux-mouches, river-buses, barges, and general shipping, his path brought him to fashionable quarters: a luxury unheard of in Barcelona and an even greater contrast between rich and poor—the familiar international rags on the one hand and then men in tall shining hats and morning-coats, women of an astonishing elegance, and a colored elegance. Color everywhere, above the filth, and perhaps the most brilliant of all the countless soldiers: France had half a million men under arms, waiting for the inevitable war against Germany; and most of them wore baggy crimson trousers, splendid Impressionistic dashes in a crowded street.
Then across the water and right up to Montparnasse, leaving the great exhibition and its innumerable tourists far behind. Here there were dozens of Catalans, many of whom he had known at the Quatre Gats—Casas, Utrillo, Fontbona, Isern, Pidelaserra, Junyent—and here were some of the most important contacts he was ever to make, contacts that he did not seek but found. How kind they were to him, particularly these older, established, French-speaking men who were in a position to give their kindness an evident form! They introduced him to their friends, in spite of his singular garments—loud checks, decadent ties, a vile “English” cloth cap—and in spite of a certain roughness of manner: for although in some areas he was the most sensitive man living, in others he could be strangely obtuse: no one ever succeeded in really civilizing Picasso. They introduced him to Steinlen; and among others he also met Josep Oller and Pere Manyac.
The first was a middle-aged Catalan who had lived in Paris since his childhood and who had done very well. He owned the Moulin Rouge, the Jardin de Paris, the Nouveautés theater and a race-course or so. He too liked the young Picasso, and he gave him a pass that admitted him to all the Oller establishments, to a night-life that he could never have afforded and one that provided him with an immense amount of raw material.
The second was also a Catalan, the son of a Barcelona manufacturing ironmonger in a large way of business. His name was sometimes spelled Manyac, sometimes Manyach, and sometimes Mañac: Picasso spelled it Manach. Finding himself on bad terms with his father in the early nineties, he came to Paris; and there, having artistic leanings, he set up as a picture-dealer, acting as an intermediary between the Catalan painters and the Paris market. He was perfectly fluent in French and he knew a great many people, including Berthe Weill, “the good fairy of modern art.” It was he who introduced Nonell, Sunyer, Canals, and Manolo to her, and on this occasion he produced Picasso, whose work impressed him deeply. Berthe Weill at once bought three pictures, an oil and two gouaches of bull-fights, for a hundred francs; and Pere Manyac, his opinion fortified by her approval—what more convincing than payment in cash?—offered to take Picasso under contract.
These contracts are perhaps somewhat less known in England and the United States, but they were and are common practice in France: they stipulate that the artist shall make over the entirety of his production to the merchant in exchange for a stated sum, usually to be paid by the month. In principle the whole of the artist’s work becomes the merchant’s exclusive property, although a clause often gives the artist the right to retain say a dozen pictures for himself. In this case there was no such clause; and the stated sum was a hundred and fifty francs a month, then about five pounds sixty or twenty-two dollars.
When one reflects that a good Picasso of this period, his “Moulin de la Galette” for example, would fetch at least fifty thousand times this amount, the contract seems a little hard, if not unconscionable, particularly as Picasso would produce two hundred pictures a year and sometimes many more, to say nothing of his drawings. But on the other hand Manyac could not tell how soon the public would share his taste nor whether they would ever do so at all: and he did not know, nor could he guess, Picasso’s enormous dynamism and the consequent volume of work that the contract would cover. He was taking a risk; he was not at all rich, having no gallery of his own and living in a two-roomed flat; and although perhaps he was a keen dealer with an appetite for profit, he cannot be called a shark. Picasso’s portrait of him, in Washington, shows a big man with uneven eyes, deeply puzzled.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say what a hundred and fifty francs represents in our money: needs have changed so widely, and the pattern of life is no longer the same. As far as exchange-rates go, the franc was worth 9.4 old pence or a little over 19 cents in 1900: but here are some figures that may give a better notion of what money meant to the Parisians at the beginning of the century. (To be exact, they were compiled in 1903; but the cost of living was fairly stable in those years.) Of the 883,871 households in the city, 71.1%, classed as poor, had an average annual income of 1,070 fr (£43), and they paid 275 fr of this in rent; the 16.2% who were called comfortably off had 5,340 fr a year; the 5.4% of rich had 28,925 fr (£1,157); and the 1.3% of very rich 282,500 fr. In those days a workingman’s average daily wage was four francs fifteen, a good cook earned sixty-five francs a month, and a judge of the court of appeal a thousand. A copious dinner with wine in a moderately good restaurant cost two francs fifty; a common eating-house would feed one for a franc, with bread and wine thrown in; and one could go from one end of Paris to the other on a bus for fifteen centimes. A hundred and fifty francs was not wealth nor anything like it, but a man could live with less: it meant a well-filled belly, wine, tobacco, and shelter.
Few unknown painters, just nineteen years old, who had never seen a hundred and fifty francs all in one golden mass, nor yet the promise of a year’s independent carefree living, ever had such an offer; fewer still would not have been overjoyed, filled with an elastic excitement and delight renewed every waking day for weeks; and none would have refused to sign it. Picasso signed: but his joy was diminished if not done away with by the state of Casagemas. He perceived that the unhappy man was drinking himself sodden, and that he was getting worse day by day.
It is said that Picasso had promised to spend Christmas with his family in Barcelona. He may well have done so: in his unwillingness to give immediate pain he would very often make large promises for tomorrow, next week, next month, or another time, but he rarely felt bound where the future was concerned. Whether or no, as December wore on it became clear that Casagemas would have to be taken away: he was in great danger in Paris.
Between the train that had brought Picasso north and the train that was now taking him south again, only some sixty days had elapsed. They were sixty days into which he had crammed an enormous amount of experience: he had seen a very great number of pictures; he had seen the exhibition, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais (with friezes colored at so much the yard by a host of needy painters, including Matisse and Marquet), the great telescope, the moving pavement, and the official pavilions of the various nations including that of Spain, in which there were pictures by Moreno Carbonero and other worthies known to Picasso, but only Zuloaga excited much favorable comment: the papers called him the new-born Goya. As for the attractions, he probably left them to one side; they were expensive and rather dreary for the most part: “One hoped to discover Sodom and Gomorrah,” said one visitor. “All one found was the Dead Sea.” He had seen a brilliant night-life very unlike the dives of Barcelona; and although his had been no more than a foreigner’s Paris he had seized some essential aspects, both within himself and in the form of several paintings and many, many drawings. And as well as his sick, distracted friend, he took with him a contract that meant his freedom, his living, and perhaps recognition.
Yet Casagemas was his main concern. After a few days at home in Barcelona, which did Casagemas no good, Picasso took him down to Málaga: the sun, the total change of air and scene, the New Year festivities with aunts, uncles and cousins would set him up.
But the sun of Málaga was cold, Picasso’s family distant. The Ruiz affair and his conduct in Madrid were still rankling. They did not ask him or his unkempt and now unpresentable friend to stay and they had to take a room at a fonda: even there the woman of the house would not let them in until Picasso told her who his relations were. Málaga was no longer his home.
He felt it very deeply indeed. Presently the Ruiz and even the R vanished from his signature for ever. And after some days of going from café to wine-shop to brothel with Casagemas he saw that his effort had brought him not only a mortal affront—it had not only destroyed his Málaga forever—but it had also been useless. He could do nothing for Casagemas. The unhappy man kept himself steadily drunk and he sat there hour after hour in those dreary brothels; but all the brothels in the world would do no good to him.
Nevertheless Picasso went on trying. Málaga had failed to provide the affection, the family atmosphere, and the New Year cheerfulness that an affectionate heart would have expected, but at least it had Gypsies, the cante hondo and the guitar, and Picasso knew where to find them. He took Casegemas there, and he drew the singers and their audience. But it was no use. Casegemas vanished, taking the train northwards.
There was no point at all in remaining in Málaga: Picasso fled from the unhappy place—he never saw it again—and went to Madrid. Why Madrid I cannot tell, unless he had already conceived the plan of collaborating with Soler, who appears in the next chapter: though a desire to avoid Casagemas may have had something to do with his decision.
Casagemas traveled on, reaching Paris early in 1901. He was in better physical shape now and on February 17 he wrote a large number of letters: Manolo came to see him in the boulevard de Clichy and Casagemas welcomed him kindly, promised him help, and asked him to dinner that same evening. On the way they posted the letters.
In the restaurant just at hand they were joined by Pallarès, the Catalan art-collector Alexandre Riera, Odette, and Germaine. It was a good dinner and they drank several bottles of wine. Casagemas seemed nervous and on edge, and towards the end of the meal he stood up to make a speech in French, which Manolo did not then understand. While he was still speaking he darted his hand to his pocket: Germaine saw the pistol coming and ducked; the bullet only grazed the back of her neck. Manolo grappled with him, but Casagemas wrenched the gun up to his temple, fired, and died within the hour.