Читать книгу Picasso: A Biography - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 12

IT was in Madrid that Picasso heard of Casagemas’ death. Apart from the immediate shock it did not seem to affect him a great deal at first: his painting showed no evident signs for several months.

He was extremely busy in the capital, for he and a friend of his who lived there had decided to found a literary and artistic review: it was to be called Arte Joven—joven being young—and it was to bring Catalan Modernismo to the Castilians, playing the part of Pèl i Ploma and Joventut in Barcelona, but in a more decided and more generally left-wing manner—not that it was to be in any way a political review, however.

This friend, Francesc d’Assís Soler, a Barcelona Catalan, had already published some pieces in the intellectual magazines, and he was to be the literary editor. He was also to provide the money: not that he had much, but he was the son and the Madrid representative of the manufacturer of a wonderful Electric Belt that would cure almost anything, especially impotence in men, and he did at least possess the few pesetas that would launch Arte Joven and keep it going until advertisements and increasing circulation should set it on its independent feet.

Soler already knew Madrid and many of its inhabitants, including several of the “generation of ‘98,” then very much the avant-garde in Spanish letters, such as Pio Baroja and his brother the painter, Martinez Ruiz, who wrote under the name of Azorín, and Bargula, and when the first issue of Arte Joven came out, dated March 31, 1901, and priced at fifteen centimos, it contained not only Baroja’s Orgía macabra but three noble sonnets by Miguel de Unamuno, no less. There was also a letter from Barcelona by Ramon Reventós and some translations from the Catalan. And just as Casas, the art-editor of Pèl i Ploma, filled the review with his own work, so Picasso did almost all the illustration of Arte Joven; and among his drawings, pastels, and decorations there blazed and sparkled the indispensable Belt, the only paying advertisement in the paper.

The other numbers had pieces in favor of Nietzsche by Pompeu Gener and in favor of anarchy and of killing the law by Azorín: but Arte Joven’s anarchism was of the armchair kind, and neither Azorín nor the editors were in much danger from his article, since all it recommended was abstention from voting in the elections. They also contained advertisements for the Quatre Gats, for the Belt of course, and for a book to be written by Soler and illustrated by Picasso. It was to be called Madrid, Notas de Arte, a pictorial and poetic discovery of the city on the lines of Verhaeren’s L’Espagne noire, the Spanish translation of which had woodcuts by Dario de Regoyos, the friend of Gauguin. The advertisement shows the two authors side by side and it is the only example among the many self-portraits in which Picasso makes himself appear serious and respectable, intelligent, earnest, and sensitive: like Soler he is wearing a fine black silk stock, his hair is carefully arranged, and he has done away with the disastrous little bristly beard that made him look so like one of the four cats in an advertisement he did for Romeu. Several of his drawings for the book appeared in Arte Joven, together with portraits of his friends both in Madrid and Barcelona, bar and café interiors, women, ranging from a flowered Pre-Raphaelite yearning head (perhaps his very last bow in that direction) to a truly sinister stout middle-aged whore in a dark doorway numbered 69, and a good many “social” scenes of bourgeois and the like, remarkable for their direct cruelty.

But the book never came out, and after five issues Arte Joven appeared no more. Picasso had been living hard in Madrid. First he had stayed in a boarding-house, where they regaled him with fried eggs; but fried eggs, his figure for high luxury, were beyond his means and the regular hours irked him; presently he moved to a place of his own, and since he meant to stay in Madrid indefinitely he took a lease for a year. This lease he preserved, together with innumerable other papers long since out of date; it survived removal after removal, part of a steadily growing mass of mingled junk and precious drawings, all stuffed into worn cardboard boxes; and some forty years later Sabartés chanced upon it in one of the slums piled upon a piece of furniture in the dining-room of Picasso’s house in Paris. The agreement, dated February 4, 1901, covered one room on the top floor of 28 Calle Zurbano.

“Handsome street,” said Sabartés. “Fashionable district.”

“Yes,” said Picasso. “But I lived in a garret. No fire; no lighting. I was never so cold in my life.”

All he could afford was a camp-bed with a straw mattress, a deal table, and one chair; and at night he worked by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle. He had lived hard before and he was to live hard again, working furiously all the time, and it never worried him unduly—it certainly never checked his flow. He put up with lack of water, drainage, and light as an ordinary part of a painter’s life; as far as food was concerned he was naturally abstemious, and although he smoked continually he drank little wine and his apéritif was mineral water. But even his Spartan frame had its limits; the cold numbed his generous Mediterranean spirit; and here in Madrid there was the paper to look after too. He and Soler had to try to find subscribers and to sell advertising space; they did not know how to do it and they failed. It was not for want of effort: Picasso went to great lengths, even writing to one of his Málaga uncles, presumably not Salvador but the husband of an aunt, asking him to take the paper. “What are you thinking of?” replied the uncle. “And what kind of a man do you think I am? This is not what we had hoped for from you. Such notions! Such friends! If you go on this way…”

He also had to satisfy Manyac, who expected regular deliveries according to their contract, but who expected in vain: at no period of his life did time mean much to Picasso, still less punctuality; and writing a letter, finding an envelope, a postage stamp, were only a little less of a torment than doing up a packet and sending it away—the hand that could model the most satisfying statue of a goat known to man could only with the greatest reluctance be brought to make a parcel. And even then the resulting bundle, with its inadequate paper and odd bits of string, could scarcely confront the post.

Then again Modernismo was only now reaching Madrid, that un-European town. Picasso had already had years of it in Barcelona and a most concentrated dose in Paris, where a great deal of the enormous exhibition sagged and drooped in Modern’ style. His own work had for some time been reaching far beyond this stage, and the prospect of living through it again, of promoting it in Arte Joven, cannot have been agreeable. Besides, although Art Nouveau was to live on for many years, growing steadily more debased, industrialized, and commonplace as the first genuine excitement died away, it had already given what little it had to offer. Yeats, looking back at the year 1900, said, “Everybody got down off his stilts … nobody drank absinthe in his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church.” Picasso was perfectly in tune with the Zeitgeist; he was already ahead of it in many ways and he was soon to be recognized as one of its chief formers: yet here he was in 1901, surrounded by amiable people who were just getting ready to mount on their stilts for the first time. If Barcelona had seemed provincial after Paris, Madrid, apart from the Prado, was a desert.

It has also been suggested that he fell out with Soler and there is nothing improbable in the suggestion: two men in an unsuccessful partnership are not likely to agree, and Picasso was at all times highly susceptible to any hint of an affront or an assumption of superiority. Furthermore Soler was tall, well dressed, and comparatively moneyed: Picasso was short, shabby, and poor. As a young man he was sensitive about clothes in a spasmodic way—something of a dandy when he could afford it—and here was another source of discontent. But far, far more important than these was the fact that the death of Casagemas was working in his mind.

Although he knew many interesting people in Madrid—he was popular among the literary men, who looked at him with some wonder as “the little Andalou who spoke with a Catalan accent”—although he had sold some pictures, and although the cruel Madrid winter was turning to a hope of that blazing sun in which he thrived, in May he abandoned his garret, his table, and chair and his dying Arte Joven and returned to Barcelona.

He brought with him a large number of pastels, a medium he was using a great deal at the time, though with a ferocity contrasting strangely with the gentle word, together with other works that may have included the “Dwarf Dancing-Girl.” Phoebe Pool quotes “an old friend” who remembered Picasso coming into the Quatre Gats on his return from Madrid, showing a copy of part of “Las Meninas” that he had just made at the Prado and then next to it his own “Dancing-Girl.” “Velásquez did this,” he said, “Picasso did that.” On the other hand the Picasso Museum dates the canvas “Autumn 1901,” and certainly it looks as though Picasso’s van Gogh tendency had been reinforced by his later and deeper study of the Dutchman’s work: in any case it is a violent, savage picture, brilliant in its conception, coloring, and execution. The vulgar, strident, indefinably malformed girl amounts to the same basic statement that Velásquez made with his dwarf attendant, but in a completely different idiom; and although at first glance one recoils from the cruelty, presently one sees that the apparent harshness overlies a deep fellow-feeling, a wholly unsentimental sympathy. Just as Toulouse-Lautrec points no accusing finger at his grotesque poxed alcoholics, reserving his real venom for the bourgeois whoremasters on the spree, so Picasso’s real kindness is apparent in his treatment of other outsiders; it is strikingly obvious too in his marvelous animal drawings. “In the end there is only love,” he said to Tériade; and at another time he said that you could paint nothing you did not love—women should not paint pipes, for example—and perhaps in this context love would be a better word than kindness.

But, as the critics pointed out, neither love nor kindness was evident in the pastels he showed at the Saló Parés. This exhibition, the first real, full-blown exhibition of Picasso’s career, was a gesture of reparation on the part of the senior members of the Quatre Gats; they had not done a great deal to help him gain a footing in Barcelona and Pèl i Ploma had published little of his work. Now his friends welcomed him back, and although this was only a flying visit, a stage on the journey to carry his promised, overdue pictures to Paris rather than send them, and to collect more, the review sponsored this show in the only worthwhile gallery the town possessed; it did so in style, and although since Ramon Casas also exhibited it was not a one-man show, the fact of sharing with so well-known a man was in itself a compliment.

Pèl i Ploma also published an appreciation of the artist, with his portrait drawn by Casas in Paris, with Montmartre, the Sacré Coeur, and the Moulin de la Galette in the background. The appreciation was written by Utrillo, a man whose opinion carried weight. After some disobliging remarks about the painters of Málaga, among whom Picasso would have accomplished nothing, and about official art in Barcelona, and after speaking of Picasso’s recent history, he went on, “Picasso’s is an exceedingly youthful art; it is the product of an observing eye that does not forgive the weaknesses of the people of our time, and it is one that reveals the beauty even of the hideous, a beauty recorded with the restraint and measure of one who draws because he sees, not merely because he can hit off a face from memory. The pastels shown here … are only one aspect of the talent of Picasso, an artist whose work will arouse a great deal of controversy but also the esteem of many who reject ready-made forms and who seek out art in all its manifestations … Pèl i Ploma bows low to the established artists of merit; it also does whatever it can to help the first flight of those who may become the great men of tomorrow.” Then, having recalled that in Paris Picasso was called “the little Goya” because of his looks, Utrillo went on, “We hope that this physical resemblance will not be belied; and our heart tells us we shall prove right.”

This was a kind reception for a nineteen-year-old foreigner in a clannish city where patronage was both scarce and jealously guarded, but Picasso was almost certainly not there to enjoy it. He rarely attended the opening of any of his shows: an understandable reaction, since an exhibiting painter has not only to expose his nakedness on the wall—a nakedness that is no longer under his control, that can no longer be altered, any more than a book that has passed its final proof—but he also has to stand there in his best suit with a dubious drink in his hand, while strangers ask him “what that is meant to represent” and while his friends, uneasily aware that they ought to buy something, conceal their determination not to do so by labored praise. And on this occasion he was short of time as well; as Sabartés observes, he darted through Barcelona like a meteor.

At all events, while the show was still on, and it lasted from June 1 to June 14, 1901, Picasso was in Paris. He had made the journey with Jaume Andreu, a Quatre Gats acquaintance: not a particularly interesting man, it seems, but Picasso needed company, and he rarely made any considerable journey alone.

Manyac was living in Montmartre on the top floor of 130 ter boulevard de Clichy, in the small flat Manuel Pallarès had occupied earlier in the year: he welcomed Picasso and the pictures he brought, invited him to stay and told him that he had already arranged an exhibition, not with Berthe Weill but at the larger, more important gallery run by Ambroise Vollard in the rue Laffitte.

Vollard was a remarkable figure among the Paris art-dealers: dingy, bearded, dusty, apparently bemused. He was one of the few who knew what painting, rather than the sale of pictures, was all about; and although he was not indifferent to profit he loved the living art of his time far more. Indeed he was so much ahead of the taste of his time that the commercial success of his gallery touches upon the miraculous, particularly as there was little of the salesman in his nature. Gertrude Stein had to struggle to buy a picture from him; and her description of his gallery is particularly convincing. “It was an incredible place. It did not look like a picture gallery. Inside there were a couple of canvases turned to the wall, in one corner was a small pile of big and little canvases thrown pell mell on top of one another, in the centre of the room stood a huge dark man glooming. This was Vollard cheerful. When he was really cheerless he put his huge frame against the glass door that led to the street, his arms above his head, his hands on each upper corner of the portal and gloomed darkly into the street. Nobody thought then of trying to come in.”

He came from Réunion, far away in the Indian Ocean; he still had a strong Creole accent and the murk of Paris weighed upon his spirits; he was only thirty-three at this time, yet he looked middle-aged. Perhaps a nostalgia for the tropics was a factor in his love for painters with the sun in their belly, above all Cézanne. Since his great purchase he had not sold many of the pictures—with a few exceptions even the educated public remained indifferent or even hostile—but at least this did mean that there were plenty of Cézannes to be seen in the gallery when the young Picasso was introduced to its owner.

The show, which opened on June 24, 1901, was another shared exhibition, the second man in this case being the Basque Iturrino, a man in his thirties, much esteemed by Vollard; but there were seventy-five Picassos on the wall—bull-fights, nudes, flower-pieces, night-life and café scenes—as opposed to thirty-six Iturrinos, and the critics took more notice of the younger man. For although the Galérie Vollard may not have been as smooth as Durand-Ruel farther along the street or the fashionable Bernheim-Jeune, an exhibition there was taken seriously by the Paris press, and the critics appeared in numbers. Gustave Coquiot, one of the most influential, was enthusiastic about Picasso; so was the perspicacious Félicien Fagus, who wrote in the Revue Blanche itself. Although he indulged in the art-critic’s favorite game of influences, detecting no less than nine—Delacroix, Manet, Monet, van Gogh, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Forain, and Rops—and although he said that Picasso’s enthusiasm had not left him time to work out a personal style of his own, the general tone of the review was strongly favorable: “prodigious skill—youthful, impetuous spontaneity. Picasso is a painter, wholly and beautifully a painter, and his exaltation of his subjects is enough to prove it. Like all absolute painters he worships color for its own sake, and each subject has its own. He is in love with every theme, and for him everything is a theme—the flowers hurling themselves out of the vase towards the light, the flight of the vase itself and even of the table beneath it, and the dancing light-filled air all around them…. The danger for Picasso lies in this very impetuosity, which may well carry him away, leading him to an easy virtuosity, an easier success.”

There is no doubt about the critics’ reception of the exhibition; but although some writers confidently state that all the pictures were sold, while others maintain that the show did fairly well, Vollard himself says that it was not a success. What the merchant considered a success is less plain, yet whether pictures were sold or not, it cannot have made much immediate material difference to Picasso, since most of the money, if not all of it, would have been divided between Manyac and Vollard.

What this exhibition certainly did bring him, apart from praise, was the friendship of Max Jacob, an exceptionally percipient, witty, poverty-stricken critic, poet, and writer who was deeply impressed by Picasso’s work and who sought his acquaintance.

Picasso was living with Manyac in the boulevard de Clichy; he had the second, the larger room at the back; and he still moved about in his Spanish and Catalan world: Pichot, now firmly attached to Germaine; Paco Durio the sculptor, Gauguin’s friend; Fontbona; and many others, including the resourceful Manolo—it is said that on being called up for his military service in Spain he found himself in a cavalry regiment on frontier duty, and that he at once rode his horse into France, sold it, pawned his uniform and weapons, and took the earliest train to Paris, disguised as a monk.

Max Jacob was then twenty-five, but he looked much more; he was an extremely gifted man, well-read, short, bald, charming, sharp-tongued, salacious, fantastic, painfully sensitive and vulnerable, terrified of women, and hopelessly impractical: the son of a Jewish tailor in Quimper. He left an appreciative note at the gallery and Manyac asked him to call on Picasso at the boulevard de Clichy. “He was surrounded by a swarm of poor Spanish painters, who sat on the floor eating and talking. He painted two or three pictures a day, wore a top hat just as I did and spent his evenings behind the scenes in the music-halls of those days, drawing portraits of the stars.” They shook hands, smiled repeatedly, and then, being unable to communicate, shook hands again. Jacob examined the canvases—Picasso had already painted scores since his arrival—and more Spanish friends appeared. Presently formality died away; someone cooked a dish of beans and they sat about in the dust, eating them. Dinner being over, they all of them, except for Picasso, who had no gift in that direction, uttered sounds intended to represent an orchestra playing Beethoven. The next day Picasso and his friends returned the call, flooding into Jacob’s little room on the Quai aux Fleurs: after a long, long time some of the Spaniards went away; Manyac, the interpreter, fell asleep; and Picasso and Jacob, left to themselves, gazed at the Daumiers, the Gavarnis, and the Dürer woodcut on the walls. In some way Picasso conveyed his wish to hear Jacob’s poetry, and he listened to it for what was left of the night. At dawn they separated, and Jacob gave Picasso the Daumiers, the Gavarnis, and the Dürer.

They saw a great deal of one another after that, although Picasso was working at his usual steam-engine pace: sometimes they used Oller’s pass to go to places such as the Moulin Rouge where Picasso not only enjoyed himself but also stored up material for one side of his painting. Yet this second Paris was not all success or the promise of success, not all this new friendship and wandering about the brilliant town by night. Among other things, Picasso’s relationship with Manyac was turning sour. Few men can successfully mix business and friendship: and perhaps one has to be a creative artist to live in close proximity with another, if indeed it is possible at all, creative artists being so very often, and perhaps necessarily, the most selfish and exigent of men. Picasso’s was a naturally dominant personality; his life was irregular even for a Spaniard; his habits squalid; the flat exceedingly small. Envahissant has often been used in connection with him, a word for which the English “encroaching” or “overwhelming” are inadequate approximations. For some years he used to summer with friends of the present writer in a town where many Spaniards lived, most of them Republican refugees: he would walk about in the afternoon, often meeting with old acquaintances or making fresh ones, and his hostess never knew whether there would be five for dinner or twenty-five, nor whether they would sit down at eight o’clock or eleven. However, she and her husband had a very great affection for Picasso, a deep respect for his painting, and they were perfectly happy to suit their ways to his. Manyac was made of less noble stuff, and presently he began to resent this influx of friends, the virtual annexation of his home.

But the merchant was of little importance compared with the shade of Casagemas. Picasso was living within a few paces of the café where his friend had killed himself (he painted its interior); the studio that Nonell had lent them was only just round the corner; Pichot and Germaine were always in view; and Picasso could scarcely go to a single place in the Paris he knew that was not haunted by the poor tortured suicide.

In the late, dead season of the year Sabartés arrived in Paris, solely with the idea of following Picasso. Many things astonished him—the lightless sun like an orange through the fog, the sight of Picasso waiting for him at the station although it was only ten in the morning, an unheard-of hour for him to get out of bed. But he was still more astonished when Picasso took him back to the boulevard de Clichy and showed him his recent painting.

It had changed entirely. There were, to be sure, pictures in what might be called his Toulouse-Lautrec manner, which had begun during his earlier visit—pictures such as the sumptuous ram-you-damn-you harlot in her high collar of jewels or the delightfully perverse “Jeune Femme” with auburn hair and a vast complicated hat—but others at first glance seemed to have no connection with the Picassos that Sabartés had known in Barcelona. There were several Maternities, grave, somber studies of the ancient theme, one at least of the most poignant beauty; there were the fierce, brilliantly-colored pictures that resulted from the fusion of Picasso’s own vision, or rather one of his visions, with that of van Gogh, whom Picasso specifically named to Roland Penrose as the strongest influence on him in 1901, and it is most probable that the “Dwarf Dancing-Girl” was among them; portraits, such as those of Coquiot, as variegated as playing-cards; there were Harlequins already, those sad, lonely figures in the outsider’s uniform that were to haunt his work, his private mythology, for so many, many years; there were paintings of Casagemas alive and dead, of mourners at an open coffin, and among the studies a limp, drooping nude that he afterwards used to place around one of his rare drawings of Christ crucified; there was an ambitious great picture sometimes called the “Evocation” and sometimes the “Burial of Casagemas”; there was Casagemas himself, seen close to, in his coffin with a huge radiant “van Gogh” candle burning beside him; and then, as from another world entirely, an impressionistic boulevard de Clichy; a girl standing in a hip-bath in his room (it has a Toulouse-Lautrec poster on the wall, probably stolen from a hoarding while the paste was still wet) sponging herself in a flood of light; and a most satisfying still-life, as deeply satisfying as a Cézanne: but above all, Picasso’s universe had been invaded by the color blue.

Blue was nothing new to Picasso: “Blue, so full of grace” was the color he loved best, although in early days he did not use it a great deal; and only recently, in Spain, he had turned to it more frequently. Indeed, it is likely that he had already painted his entrancing blue nude with long black hair and her hands open in offering before he came to Paris in 1901. But his friend had not particularly noticed the beginnings of the new trend, and now he was amazed to find that this blue, or rather a slightly colder blue, was drowning all the other colors: the earlier Casagemas of this year came from the brilliant, varied palette Picasso was using in the summer of 1901; the later head was drained of vividness; and with the “Burial” Picasso was fully into that stage soon to be called his Blue Period.

It is a strange picture, full of private symbolism, and it was the result of much thought: Picasso had already made the first studies for it before leaving Spain. It is composed in three tiers, connected by a rising helix: below, in the right-hand foreground, the door of a funeral-vault stands open; the corpse in its shroud and the mourners, all cold blue or touched with green, are grouped about it; they are deeply grieved and two stand locked in one another’s arms (Picasso had studied this attitude closely during the last years in pictures with titles such as “The Embrace”). From the mourners one’s eye rises to the middle plane, where a bowed figure from one of his Maternities, a blue-cloaked woman carrying a baby, walks on cloud, preceded by two running children: behind her and in a somewhat different focus, outside the rising spiral, stand two nudes, while before her and in much the same relation, three whores, naked but for their striped colored stockings, look up towards the highest plane, where a white horse carries a dark-clothed man up and up into whiter clouds. His arms are stretched out as stiffly as though he were nailed to a cross and a naked woman clings about his neck, pressing her head to his.

Analysts, iconographers, and art-historians have written a great deal about this picture, naming the various influences—El Greco, Redon, Cézanne—that they detect, pointing out the religious, profane, and psychoanalytic symbols as they understand them, and trying to give a coherent literary interpretation of the whole: if industry and erudition could command success Picasso’s statement would now be devoid of mystery. If he had given the picture a title their task would have been easier; but he hated doing any such thing. He hated mixing two entirely different kinds of language, and nearly all the titles given to his pictures were invented by merchants or critics or, as in the case of the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” by friends. And it is not impossible that this absence of titles may also in some degree be due to his reserve, his secrecy, and his dislike of being penetrated. However, the one point upon which all agree is that this picture and those which followed it show Picasso’s deep concern with Casagemas; and it is worth pointing out that in his essay on Picasso Jung speaks of the blue and of the figures that peopled his world during this period as symbols of his “descent into Hades, into the unconscious, and of a farewell to the upper world.”^*

In a sense this may well be so. But superficially at least Picasso was capable of abrupt changes of mood and of great cheerfulness in company: life was not all inspissated blue.

“What do you think?” he asked, referring to all these new and disturbing pictures.

“I shall get used to them in time,” replied Sabartés; and Picasso, quite unmoved, hurried out to find him a room in a nearby hotel—a double room, since Mateo de Soto had also arrived from Barcelona and had been staying with Picasso for the last few days, a visit that made Manyac uneasy.

It was not only the streams of poverty-stricken Spaniards that made Manyac low in his spirits: it was also this unpredictable change in Picasso’s painting. The bull-fights and other “Spanish” pictures he had brought with him from Barcelona and the brightly-colored canvases he had painted during his first months in the boulevard de Clichy were marketable: at this rate Picasso might be a profitable investment. But nobody would buy these latest pictures: the merchant hated the Blue Period entirely. How rarely tradesmen know their own business! Not one would buy a single painting from van Gogh in his lifetime; and Manyac, with the wealth of the Indies in his hands, urged Picasso to keep to a sound commercial line. The wealth of the Indies, for the Blue Period contains some of the most generally accessible pictures he ever painted, and in time their prices soared to heights unknown for a living painter. Why this should be so has puzzled many observers, including Picasso. It is as though cultivated (and immensely wealthy) lovers of the arts, who would never think of requiring music to tell a story, still longed for a certain degree of literature in their pictures: as though, on being asked, “What is that meant to represent?” they wished to be able to give an answer. (In later days Picasso himself, when asked by a woman “what that represented,” replied, “Madame, that represents twenty million francs.”)

In most of the recollections of those early days in Paris, it is of the cheerful young Picasso, overflowing with an extraordinary vitality, that one reads, the leader of the bande à Picasso, fooling about all night, haunting low cafés, music-halls, the circus. Yet the other Picasso, the very lonely man, working for six and working in solitude, striking out into an unknown sea, never certain of his direction except when he was in the very act of painting, was there and his pictures prove it: but clearly a man who works alone is, as a worker, largely invisible.

The loneliness of the creative artist has often been described; but can it ever be emphasized enough? People may hinder him, but since by definition self-expression is not the expression of any other man, none can help him. It is as though the artist were walking a tightrope, with only room for one; and although an ordinary hack may stagger along in no great danger, six inches from the ground, the fall of an enormously gifted, enormously ambitious man with something important to say is a plunge into a measureless abyss. Picasso certainly had something very important to say, and although Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, and above all Cézanne were of value to him in his preparation for saying it, the essence of the matter was his alone; he either succeeded or failed entirely by himself; and if he failed his life had no meaning. Death and creation have this in common, that a man is entirely alone in both.

Even in a time when a strong, living tradition carries an artist along, the amount that a man as exceptional as, say, Uccello, owes to it is surely very slight; in the young Picasso’s day painting, as a corporate activity that he could respect, was dead, and he had to rediscover it for himself. For himself and by himself: even if he had been acquainted with them, the pleasant, comfortable Nabis, the avant-garde of the time, would have had no idea of what he was talking about; van Gogh had killed himself eleven years before; Gauguin was in Tahiti; Cézanne was equally inaccessible in Provence; Toulouse-Lautrec was in his grave. Picasso did not yet know Braque or Matisse, and although he moved about with a crowd of gay, amiable companions, as though he were afraid of being alone when he was not working, only one of them was a man of anything remotely like his size; only Max Jacob was a man with whom, if it had been his way, he could have talked about the deeper implications of his painting. It was not his way at that time, and although he did go profoundly into these matters with Braque and Derain in their Cubist days, it was not his way in later life either: he preferred producing the evidence of his views to talking about them, partly no doubt because words are essentially beside the point where painting is concerned, and also perhaps because his deep-seated reserve made him unwilling to expose his private springs—no one was so adept at evading a question on aesthetics as Picasso: to avoid being pried into and made to commit himself he would use mockery, bad faith, and self-contradiction with baffling skill. But even if he had chosen to take Max Jacob into his confidence, the barrier of language would have prevented it. By this time he had picked up a rudimentary sort of French, but it was totally inadequate for such purposes; and even if he had been as fluent as Bossuet no amount of words could have said so much, nor so accurately, as a single picture.

One of the most eloquent pictures of this period is the self-portrait that he painted late in his stay. It is a half-length of a man muffled in a dark greatcoat, standing against a background featureless except for a darker upright bar on the extreme left: from the somber coat and the almost black hair his pale face stands out with startling intensity, and from a distance you think it might be a van Gogh. Then you see that it is a Picasso, and with a shock you realize that it is the artist himself. He has a collar of beard, a ragged mustache, and his singular great eyes are sunken and diminished. They look somewhat down, focused on infinity, and they have something of that same loneliness which is to be seen in his famous blue portrait of Sabartés, painted in this same year: the picture that is often called “Le Bock.” (It shows Sabartés waiting in front of a tall mug of beer, and like many of Picasso’s portraits it was painted from memory.) But whereas the loneliness of Sabartés was due to his being alone in a foreign city and to his being so myopic that he was cut off even from that strange world, Picasso’s was the loneliness of a man cut off by genius, one who is beginning to realize that on anything but the superficial plane he can communicate only in a language that will not be generally understood for years, if at all. Sabartés’ could be cured by the eventual appearance of his friends in the café; Picasso’s could only be alleviated, never completely removed.

The face in this self-portrait is no longer youthful: Picasso had been living hard, he had been ill, and he suffered much from the winter cold; but there is much more to it than that. This face is marked by a different kind of suffering altogether, by doubt and inner conflict and deep unhappiness.

“He believed that Art was the child of Sadness and Pain,” says Sabartés. “He believed that unhappiness suited reflection, and that pain was the basis of life.” It is easy to make fun of a pronouncement of this kind; but no candid observer, looking at this portrait and the other pictures he painted at the time, will deny that Picasso had a right to utter it, nor that he paid the full price for his opinions.

Yet this haggard face belonged to the same young man who racketed about Montmartre, the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse, and the music-halls. It was largely the music-halls that accounted for the top-hat mentioned by Max Jacob; and he mentioned the hat not because it was as rare and formal an object as it has since become—in 1901 the top-hat, though hard pressed by the bowler or derby, was still common even on the lower fringes of the middle class—but because it was unusual in a young painter, who would ordinarily have worn a beret or a felt or, in the case of Picasso, a broad-brimmed anarchistical sombrero. However, Picasso was an odd mixture of lavishness in some things and parsimony in others: equipping himself for Paris was important to him at the age of twenty and although his income scarcely allowed for any clothes at all he set about it so thoroughly that Vollard speaks of him as being “dressed with the most studied elegance.” He bought a fine black coat, a white silk scarf, a gardenia on occasion, and this top-hat. He was proud of it, and he made an India-ink drawing of himself in his glory, looking a little self-conscious, with a background of bare-bosomed women.

This is a very different portrait from the big oil: yet both are genuine, both are aspects of the same being. But a very short study of the two shows which says more about the subject: the sadness was deeply engrained, the gaiety superficial and intermittent, though intense.

Where the hat was kept, Sabartés does not relate, although he gives a convincing description of the slum to which Picasso had reduced two-thirds of poor Manyac’s flat—the “Burial of Casagemas” propped up against the wall to hide what even Picasso felt should not be seen, the little table covered with books and papers that were put on the floor when they wanted to eat, the newspaper table-cloth, the heaps (which were on no account to be mixed) never moving from the floor but gradually taking up more and more of the restricted space, the pictures accumulating along the walls—but at all events Picasso did not wear it for his ordinary evening’s entertainment: a top-hat would have been somewhat out of place at the Zut.

This was a deeply squalid little establishment in what was then the Place Ravignan, itself a deeply squalid unpaved unlit stretch of mud high up in Montmartre, not far from the boulevard de Clichy and just round the comer from Picasso’s first studio, the one Nonell had lent him; it was surrounded by mud walls and a few low houses, and by night it was haunted by the local apaches, who were said to scalp their victims. The Zut was run by a guitar-playing character called Frédé, who served little but beer, and that only when his credit with the brewers was good: the main room had a floor of beaten earth, some tables and benches, and it was usually filled with a mixed band of painters, sculptors, models, vague young women, and of course the neighborhood toughs. Picasso, Manolo (very much at home in this atmosphere), Pichot, Durio, and other Spaniards went there so regularly that Frédé gave them a small, filthy room to themselves. At this stage they were still shy of going into the main room, where all the people knew one another and where everybody spoke French, and this little den was better than the outer bar, the entrance, with its three barrels and nothing else: at any rate they had fun there, and although they were sometimes interrupted by differences of opinion next door (harsh words and the thumping of benches and tables always, knives and pistols on occasion), they grew so fond of the place that they decided to decorate it, and perhaps even to get rid of some of the vermin. Frédé whitewashed the walls and cleaned the lamp; Sabartés and Soto hung paper garlands, helped by a girl they picked up on the way (she also swept the floor), and Pichot and Picasso painted pictures. Picasso had brought all he needed—a little blue—and while Pichot did an Eiffel Tower and an airship in one comer, he dipped his brush and, says Sabartés, “with the tip he drew a group of nudes, all in one continuous line of blue. Then, in a space that he had left, a hermit.” Someone cried out “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” and he stopped at once: but there was still the rest of the wall to cover. He turned back to his work, never lifting his brush except to take more blue. “He did not seem to hear us talking, nor even to realize that we were there…. Next to the group of nudes there appeared a half-length portrait of me, larger than life, in an oratorical pose, holding a paper in my hand.”

Portraits: Picasso loved them, and he was immensely gifted for this strangely discredited form of art; many of his friends, merchants, critics, women, and children were his models, but until he saw old age gazing back at him from the looking-glass one day his most usual subject was himself. There was no vanity, no complaisance, in this, but a profound, objective, and probably always unsatisfied curiosity; yet whereas all his portraits of, for example, Sabartés are instantly recognizable as the same man, even under the utmost distortion, the Picassos still continued to vary so widely, particularly in the drawings, that sometimes experts differ as to their identity—they wonder whether it is Picasso at all.

He drew and painted a hundred different aspects of himself; but at least for this period there is one aspect, perhaps the most important of all, that is not represented. We have no self-portrait of the man whose iron determination to express himself as he thought fit could not be broken by any force whatsoever, certainly not by poverty, discouragement, success, or persuasion: none that shows his incorruptible strength of purpose.

Picasso was fond of money: he was eager to get it when he was young and all his life he preferred keeping it to spending it—above all he hated being parted from it against his will. His parsimony could reach a point where an enemy might call it sordid avarice, a trait connected with his dread of death, perhaps. For example, when Sabartés was his secretary, in Françoise Gilot’s time, Picasso was a very wealthy man with several homes; yet according to her he kept his old friend on the equivalent of thirty pounds or $150 a month, barely enough for him and his wife to live, with strict economy, in a minute flat in a dreary part of Paris. Or there is the wholly reliable testimony of Brassaï, who, though very poor in 1943, could not induce Picasso to pay for proofs of the photographs he was taking for a book on Picasso’s sculpture. And there are many other instances, early and late, which show that money was of great importance to Picasso: but when it was a question of changing his style for material gain, or even of keeping to a manner he had thought valid and satisfying only a few months earlier, there was nothing to be done—the money counted no more for him than it would have counted for Saint Francis. Again and again he threw away the prospect of fortune with unfeigned indifference.

If he had made a portrait of this quality, and if Manyac had understood it, the merchant would not have tried to stem the flood of blue. As it was, he wasted his breath and embittered their relationship to such a degree that at length Picasso, who had spent all his money, went to the extreme length of writing to Don José for the fare home.

Days went by: the money did not come. Picasso suspected Manyac, who knew what was afoot, and early one morning, when he and Sabartés had spent the night in Durio’s studio, the three friends crept up the stairs of the house in the boulevard de Clichy, hoping to get there before the postman. They were too late, but the letter was there, pushed under the door; and Manyac was there too, lying face down on his bed, fully dressed, and moaning, “The letter, the letter…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fontbona il trabaile vocoup mes il ne fait rien

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

Envoys moi quelquechose crit de vous pour la “Pel & Ploma”—

Adie mon ami crit moi

ton ami

PICASSO

Rue de la Merced 3 — Barcelona

Espagne

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

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

Fontbona works a great deal but he achieves nothing

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

Send me something you have written for Pèl i Ploma

Good-bye my friend write to me

Your friend

PICASSO

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

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

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

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

A vast bed under the sloping ceiling almost filled the room, so that the painter had to lie down if the sculptor wanted to move about; while a single round window, like a port-hole, provided all their working light. Nevertheless, Picasso managed to paint an admirable Maternity, a mother and child by the sea, in pastel; and he did a great deal of drawing. The rent was small, something in the nature of five francs a week for both, but even so it was beyond their means, and Max Jacob observed that “neither Picasso nor the sculptor used to eat.” From time to time he brought them fried potatoes.

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

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

For a while life was kinder; they ate omelets, beans, and Brie. But Max Jacob was not quite suited to a fixed employment and he gave so little satisfaction at the shop that in spite of the tie of blood, of his evident distress, and indeed of his imminent starvation he was turned away.

In later years Picasso told the story of a sausage that they bought in their last extremity of destitution: it was, it seems, a great bargain, bought from a stall in the street; but on being brought home and warmed it swelled, swelled, and at last exploded, leaving nothing but its skin and the reek of putrid flesh: it cannot have been so amusing at the time, however, particularly as most of his valuable contacts were behaving in much the same way. Nobody would buy his pictures. It is true that some people did try to help him: Berthe Weill showed his work no less than three times during this year, for a fortnight in spring, a fortnight in summer, and now for a full month in the winter: they were mixed shows, and in two of them the almost unknown Matisse was of the company, though he and Picasso did not meet. Félicien Fagus, who had praised Picasso in 1901, praised him still, while Charles Morice at least took notice of him in the influential Mercure de France. Fagus’ article in the Revue Blanche was less in connection with one of these exhibitions than with the Spanish painters in general, those “who had recently invaded Paris, bringing with them a freshness untainted by the least academicism, a painting neither weary nor exploited”: but most surprisingly in one of his good sense he ended, “They do not yet have a great man, a conquistador who absorbs everything and renews everything, the originator of a fresh epoch, the creator of a boundless world.” For his part Morice, writing in December, 1902, spoke of “the extraordinary, sterile sadness that weighs upon the whole of this very young man’s work—a body of work that is already beyond counting. Picasso, who was painting before he learned to read, seems to have been given the mission of expressing everything that exists, and of expressing it with his brush. It might be said that he is a young god who wants to refashion the world. But a gloomy god. The hundreds of faces that he has painted all grimace. Never a single smile. One could no more live in his world than in his leprous, scaling houses. And his own painting is shut in. Hopelessly so? There is no telling. But undoubtedly it has power, ability, and talent.”

As it became increasingly obvious that he would have to go home again he offered all the pictures that Berthe Weill had been unable to sell, to anyone who would give two hundred francs for the lot. This was in January, the cruelest month, and to warm them a little—warmth being a substitute for food as well as a blessing in itself—he burned his drawings and his watercolors, a great heap of them.

He remembered this as the hardest time he ever went through, not only because of the hunger and the cold but above all because of his disgust, deep discouragement, and near-despair. Yet it came to an end: Madame Bernard bought the “Maternity” alone for two hundred francs. On January 13, 1903, Picasso drew another of his auques, showing the story of Max Jacob—Max writing a book, taking it to a publisher—reading it aloud—leaving the publisher’s office with his hat on one side, crying Olé, olé!—dining at Maxim’s with women of the town—being given a crown of laurels and a ham by Fame—and almost immediately afterwards he took the train for Barcelona.

Before leaving he went to Montmartre and asked Pichot to keep his pictures for him: in the course of the next year or so Pichot mislaid them entirely, and if they had not eventually been found, stuffed away out of sight on the dusty top of a cupboard, “there would,” said Picasso, “have been no Blue Period, because everything I had painted up until then was in that roll.”

If Picasso was speaking seriously he must have had an idea of the Blue Period quite unlike that of the art-historians, since many of the finest Blue pictures were painted during the following eighteen months in Barcelona, and since the period does not come to an official end until 1904: but it is a thousand to one that he was doing nothing of the kind—he almost never spoke of the official periods at all, but said, “that was painted at the Bateau-Lavoir, that at Céret, that in the boulevard de Clichy,” and so on. At all events his palette showed little change until he returned to Paris, met his first relatively permanent mistress, and exorcised the ghost of Casagemas.

For Casagemas was with him still: Picasso lived at home in the family flat, and, above all at first, he ate at home; but he worked in the very studio in the Riera de Sant Joan that he had shared with Casagemas, his friend Angel de Soto having taken it some time before. Here he was surrounded by the immediate presence of his friend; even the pictures, the furniture, and the servants they had painted together were still there; and presently he began a series of drawings that was to culminate in one of the most significant pictures of this period, that which some dealer or critic entitled “La Vie” and which, although its allegorical content is open to many interpretations, is certainly concerned with Casagemas’ death and the part Picasso played in that tragedy.

But although the drawings began early, the picture itself was not painted until the end of 1903 or more probably in early 1904, and Picasso did a great deal before then. First he picked up the threads of his old life, going to see Pallarès, Sabartés, his friends at the Quatre Gats, and many, many others. And then, although he was never concerned with politics, the atmosphere of Barcelona in 1903 was enough to force itself upon a man with much less social awareness, much less human solidarity, than Picasso. Revolutionary agitation among the students was so great that the authorities closed the university altogether; there were seventy-three strikes in that one year alone, some accompanied by riots; the repression was exceptionally harsh and bloody; and the hunting down of anarchists and “subversive elements” went on with even greater zeal. Unemployment increased; the fate of the poorer working people and of the outcasts, the old, the blind, the crippled, grew more desperate still. This was reflected in Picasso’s painting: 1903 was the year of the “Old Jew” (an ancient blind beggar with a little bright-eyed boy guarding him), the “Blind Man’s Meal” (a thin figure, quite young, seated at a table, holding a piece of bread and feeling for the pitcher), and of the “Old Guitar-Player”; of many lonely whores, drinking without joy and waiting interminably, of “La Celestina,” a dignified wall-eyed bawd (bawds are a great feature of the Spanish tradition: another Ruiz, the Reverend Juan, arch-priest of Hita in the fourteenth century, wrote about one, and both the young and the old Picasso drew and painted dozens, though few men can have needed their services less), and of “The Embrace,” a recurring theme, here exemplified by a naked pregnant woman clasped to a naked man, their bowed heads merged in great but motionless distress. Picasso was deeply concerned with poverty, with blindness (poverty’s ultimate degree), and with solitude; and his means of communicating his concern at this period has been labeled mannerist because of a similarity between his treatment of emaciated limbs, angular postures, and elongated hands and that of El Greco or Morales. The label is useful, no doubt, and certainly Picasso had the greatest respect for El Greco; but perhaps it is even more to the point that he, like so many other Spanish painters who could really see, lived in a country where extreme poverty was endemic and where emaciated forms were common—a country, too, which was the first to receive the greater and the lesser pox, with its attendant blindness, from the New World, and where both were so very widely spread.

Hands: Picasso studied them from his earliest days to his last, and it is easy to pick striking examples of his use of those almost autonomous creatures to say widely different things. One is the “Guitar-Player” of 1903, whose tall, gaunt figure is cramped into the rectangle of the frame and whose raised left hand, stopping the strings at the top of the diagonal formed by foot, knee, the guitar, and the guitar’s long neck, suddenly arrests the line with four pale transversal bars across the darkness, forming a point of tension that counterbalances the sharply-bowed blind head. Another is a somewhat later watercolor of a madman, whose gesticulating, reasoning fingers are far more lunatic than even his hairy face.

But not all the work of the Barcelona Blue Period is sad; far from it. Picasso often went to see his friends the Junyer-Vidal brothers, who had inherited a haberdashery, so that Sebastià now devoted more of his time to cotton thread and knitted drawers than to painting. Picasso spent many an evening behind the shop, and since he could not be easy without a pencil in his hand, he drew on the backs of their trade-cards and sometimes on their bills: the drawings were generally amusing and often bawdy, though many harked back tenderly to his peasant days with Pallarès at Horta; and the brothers kept them, forming a collection of scores or even hundreds.

Another friend was Benet Soler, a tailor who is said to have worked in Paris; he had a shop in the Plaza de Santa Ana, a few steps from the Quatre Gats, and he loved pictures, especially Picasso’s. In exchange for clothes he accumulated one of the finest collections of the Blue Period ever gathered under one private roof, including a great many drawings and even some curious engravings done, as Soler’s daughter told Josep Palau, with the point of a needle in the flat triangular chalks that tailors use for marking cloth. What is more, Picasso painted the tailor’s portrait several times, just as he painted so many of his friends, particularly Sebastià Junyer-Vidal, Angel de Soto, and Sabartés; and this year he undertook a family piece, a calm, good-humored triptych showing the whole household and their dog.

There were many other portraits this year, among them perhaps that of Corina Romeu, though it is sometimes dated 1902. If it does belong to 1903 it may have been a farewell present, for in July the Quatre Gats closed its Gothic doors; when they opened again it was to admit only the members of the Cercle de Sant Lluc, the new masters of the place. This was a severe blow to Picasso and his friends: they had met so often at the Quatre Gats and it had been there for so many years of their youth that it had come to seem eternal. They were lost without it, for the more recent Guayaba was not the same thing at all; and Picasso, for one, was driven to even harder work. Then came a second blow. Pèl i Ploma died, to be succeeded by Forma, from which Picasso was excluded, although the leading figure in the new review was still Utrillo.

Picasso wrote to Max Jacob from the Riera de Sant Joan: as usual he put no date, but from his mentions of work and boredom he was probably writing after the death of the Quatre Gats. The letter is written on the official paper of Soto’s father, an inspector-general of internal customs, and it is illustrated back and front with the view from the studio window—churches, roofs, a bell-tower.

Mon chere Max je te ecrite en face de ce que je t’ai desine premier-mente il y a beaucoup temps que je ne te ecrit pas et vrement ce pas pour ne penser pas à toi cet pasque je trabaille et cuant je ne trabail pas alors on se amuse ou on se enmerde. Je te ecri ici à l’atelier je ai trabaiye toute la journe

¿Ce que on te donne de vacances dans Paris Sport o Paris France? Si ce que on te donne alor tu dois venir à Barcelona me voir tu peux pas penser con ça me feras plesir.

Clocher à Barcelone

Mon vieux Max je panse à la chambre de Buolevard Voltaire et à l’omeletes les aricots et le fromage de Brie et les pommes frite me je pense osi à les jours de misere et se bien triste, et je mant souviens de les espagnols de la Rue de Seine avec degut je pens rester ici l’ver prochain pour fer quelquchose

Je te anbrase ton vieux ami

PICASSO

My dear Max I am writing to you looking out onto what I drew for you first it is a long time since I wrote to you and really it is not because I do not think about you it is because I work and when I am not working why then I have fun or I am bored black I am writing to you here in the studio I have worked all day long

Do Paris Sport or Paris France give you holidays? If they do you must come to Barcelona to see me you cannot imagine how that would please me

A bell-tower in Barcelona

My dear old Max I remember the room in the boulevard Voltaire and the omelets the beans and the Brie and the fried potatoes I also remember the wretched days of poverty and it is very sad, and I remember the Spaniards of the rue de Seine with disgust I think I shall stay here next winter to get something done

I embrace you your old friend

PICASSO

Picasso had contributed drawings up to the very last number of Pèl i Ploma: why was he excluded from Forma? At this distance of time it is impossible to say, but Josep Palau may well be right when he points out that a formalist aesthetic was gaining favor in Barcelona and that Picasso had been reproached for the want of that very quality and for “too much soul.” For some temperaments conflict of opinion is much the same as personal antagonism—artists who care deeply about their work rarely remain friends for long—and in any case Picasso was never an easy man to get along with.

He and Soto, for example, disagreed about how their studio should be used. The sharing should have been ideal, since Soto worked at the town hall, leaving the daylight hours to Picasso; but Picasso was a night-bird, and all his life he found it hard to leave his bed: often he would only start to work in the afternoon, going on far into the darkness by artificial light. But by then Soto would be back, and often he brought friends. When Picasso had been working well for most of the day this did not matter and they would all have a splendid time, with a bucket on the end of a rope bringing wine and ready-cooked food from the shop below; but when he had not—when their noisy presence broke even his powers of concentration and obliged him to leave his holy work, then his fury spread general gloom, if it did not provoke ugly scenes.

Early in 1904 they parted, but without quarreling; and as Picasso had sold some pictures he was able to move to a place of his own in the Calle de Comercio, a dreary broad street near, but not too near, his parents’ home and just by Nonell.

It was here that he painted the portrait of one Lluis Vilaró, a flour-merchant; and since he wrote Al amigo, recuerdo de Picasso, 15 Mz 1904 on the back, it is likely that the canvas was a present from the poverty-stricken artist to the wealthy businessman. Picasso, like his father before him, had long known the shameless greed of buyers, their appetite for free pictures, their conviction that they are doing a favor by paying anything at all, and their profound if unacknowledged belief that “painting is really play, not work”; and although he never descended to the anxious baseness with which many painters approach potential customers, the portrait Was probably thrown in as a make-weight for some pieces that Vilaró actually bought. This early experience was one of the factors that made him so exceedingly unwilling to be manipulated in later life—to have pictures wheedled out of him. He could be stone deaf to a hint, although at the same time he could be wonderfully generous when the impulse came from within.

Yet neither the immortalized flour-merchant’s hypothetical purchases nor other sales can have amounted to very much, for although Picasso could pay his rent he could not afford the more expensive materials (some people, in search of a simple explanation of this period, have suggested that it was all based on the cheapness of blue paint) and just then his father was busy stretching him an important canvas: perhaps the kind and it must be said long-suffering Don José still dreamed of another “Science and Charity.”

These details we owe, as we owe so much, to Sabartés, who had himself taken a couple of rooms not far away, opposite the Llotja. They were at the very top of an ancient house, and a narrow spiral staircase led up to them. In theory one room was to be a studio, but Sabartés had long since ceased to believe in himself as a sculptor; he was a modest creature, and a visit to the Egyptian rooms in the Louvre had quenched his ambition forever. In fact he took the place as much for the stairs and its dilapidated charm as anything else. Picasso came to see him, and almost at once the bare whitewashed walls were covered with murals, blue murals: first appeared a great nude, and then over against it a half-naked Moor hanging by the neck from a tree, his phallus erect in his death-agony and his one remaining slipper about to drop on to a couple making violent love beneath the tree, without a stitch between them. Then, turning to the oval window in the partition between the rooms, Picasso made it into an enormous eye; and beneath the eye he wrote, “The hairs of my beard, though separated from me, are just as much gods as I am myself.”

He painted these pictures at great speed, with the same total concentration that he had shown at the Zut, and, says Sabartés, as though the pure line were already there and his concentration allowed him to see it. Few people ever beheld them: the sculptors Fontbona and Gonzalez, Soto, the landlord, some prospective tenants, and the workmen who effaced them.

This does not apply to the important picture I have already mentioned, the big oil called “La Vie,” one of the largest of the Blue Period, the outcome of the many drawings that he made in the Riera de Sant Joan but painted in the Calle de Comercio. A very great many people have seen it, and a very great many have explained its meaning. The explanations differ, but they do possess one thing in common—the assumption that the interpreter knows more about Picasso than ever Picasso knew. In the course of a wide reading on the subject I have been surprised to find how often writers will say “unconsciously Picasso was expressing…”, “without being aware of it, Picasso absorbed…”, or (speaking of the mourners and the figure on the white horse in the “Burial of Casagemas”) “these were Picasso’s subconscious symbols for himself.”

For his part, the painter, speaking to Antonina Vallentin, said, “I was not the one who gave it that title, ‘La Vie.’ I certainly had no intention of painting symbols; I just painted the images that rose before my eyes. It is for other people to find hidden meanings in them. As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language…”

The images that rose before him in this case were four figures and two of his own paintings: on the left of the picture there is a girl, naked, standing very close to Casagemas and leaning both arms on his shoulder; Casagemas is wearing a slip, and his hand, held low, points at an older woman on the other side of the picture, barefoot, dressed in a dark, “classical” robe and holding a baby in its folds; her head, seen in profile, looks fixedly at the pair. At shoulder-level in the background a picture shows two nude women sitting clasped in one another’s arms, the younger perhaps comforting the older; below there is a larger picture of a woman sitting on the ground, her head bowed on her knees. The whole gives an impression of deep, static unhappiness.

It has been called a problem picture by those who are concerned with its literary content; and perhaps that is fair enough, in a way. At all events the preliminary studies are of unusual interest: they all show one or more pictures in the background, sometimes on an easel; most show the figure on the right, and in some cases it is not the severe woman with the child but an elderly man, who may in one instance be painting the pair on the left and in another holding out his hand for charity. In all the couple is to be seen, with little variation but the pointing hand; but whereas in the final version the man is the impotent Casagemas with his sex hidden by the slip, in the drawings he is Picasso himself, quite naked, unmistakably male. Yet neither in the studies nor the picture is the girl Germaine. Picasso could have painted her with perfect ease—a portrait without a model was nothing to him—particularly as she had already sat for him in 1902. He painted her again in 1905, and their curious relationship continued for at least another forty years, when he took Françoise Gilot to a little house in Montmartre where Germaine was living, a poor, sick, toothless old woman, confined to her bed. Picasso’s aim was to give her money, which was obviously his practice, and to exhibit her to Françoise Gilot as a memento mori. “When she was young she made a painter friend of mine suffer so much that he committed suicide,” he said.

“La Vie” was the result of a great deal of thought, perhaps too much for the spontaneity he so valued, for the figures are somewhat set, stiff, and over-organized; but to lay Casagemas’ ghost to his own satisfaction, by processes known only to himself, he would surely make sacrifices on the plastic side. However that may be (and it is mere hypothesis) the picture was ready in his head when the big canvas, almost certainly the one Don José had prepared, reached the studio; and Sabartés describes him setting about it at once, “roughing out a group as briskly as though he were attacking an ordinary picture.”

He also describes Picasso’s extreme nervous tension at this time, his need for inner silence, his mental exhaustion, his need for another air to breathe, a fresh atmosphere that Barcelona could not give him. Sabartés was his constant companion; and one day when they were with friends in a café the conversation grew boring, at least for Picasso in the darkness of his mood. While the others were in full flow, he glanced at Sabartés, said, “Are you coming?” and got up and walked off.

He scarcely spoke on the way back to the Calle del Comercio, nothing but, “What God-damned fools. Don’t you think them fools?” And Sabartés would have left him at the door if he had not pressed him to come in.

In the studio Picasso looked keenly at Sabartés, set a canvas on the easel, and said, “I’m going to do your portrait. All right?”

He needed a companion, a human presence, but a dumb one: he did not want to talk. Sabartés stood there, dutiful and mute, while Picasso worked in silent concentration. At last all that mattered was set down on the canvas, and putting away his brushes Picasso cried, “Well, why don’t you say something, brother? Have you lost your tongue? Anyone would think you were in a bad temper.”

He was happy again, voluble and gay. They went for a walk: the world was worth living in: people were no longer bores.

The next day he finished the portrait with a few strokes. It was a blue picture, certainly; but the sensual red of the lips, the brilliant gold of the tie-pin, were something new, the forerunners of a fresh approach.

*For the very curious essay itself, see the Appendix.