Читать книгу Picasso: A Biography - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 13

WHAT sales, what subsidies, what savings carried Picasso to Paris in what proved to be his definitive removal is not recorded, although Sabartés (and Sabartés alone) does speak of an exhibition of his work at the Galérie Serrurier in February of 1904, with the catalog prefaced by Charles Morice. At all events he set off in May or June of that year, again in the company of Sebastià Junyer-Vidal.

In Paris they found Paco Durio on the point of leaving his studio at 13, rue Ravignan for another place nearby where he could set up a kiln, since his sculpture was taking more and more the form of ceramics: and they took over from him at once. Junyer, who had renounced haberdashery, soon went off to paint in Majorca, leaving Picasso the sole tenant of the studio. Number 13 was a ramshackle building made mostly of wood, zinc, and dirty glass, with stove-pipes sticking up at haphazard; it stood on so steep a part of the Butte de Montmartre that while one spectator, standing where the rue Ravignan broadened into a muddy little square, would see it as a one-floored shack, another, looking up from its back-entrance in the rue Garaud, would gaze at an irregular mass, five stories of rickety studios towering up and holding together by some especial grace. A vast comfortless hutch with no lighting, the most primitive sanitation, and only one source of water for all the tenants; an oven in the summer, when the sun poured through the many skylights, and so cold in the winter, with its thin plank walls, that Picasso’s tea, left overnight, would be frozen in the morning. At one time it had been called the Maison du Trappeur, because of the log-cabins in which fur-trappers dwell; but Max Jacob’s poetic eye detected a likeness to one of those vessels moored in the Seine for laundresses to wash clothes in, and from that time onwards it was called the Bateau-Lavoir. Some laundresses did in fact live there, together with seamstresses, a large number of painters, sculptors, writers, itinerant greengrocers, and actors, all watched over from a distance by Madame Coudray, the good-natured concierge.

Picasso’s studio was at the end of a long passage on the ground floor, counting from the rue Ravignan: a lofty, fair-sized place with vast beams and a small alcove at the far end that could be curtained off. There were no curtains however; and apart from an iron stove in the middle there was no furniture either. But Picasso was in touch with his Spanish and Catalan friends, and among them he found the sculptor Gargallo, who was packing up to return to Barcelona. Gargallo sold Picasso all his furniture for eight francs, to be paid in cash: a small folding bed, a mattress, a chair, a little table, and a bowl. But Gargallo’s studio was in the rue Vercingetorix, right over on the other side of Paris, in Montparnasse: Picasso and Manolo hired a hand-cart, loaded it, and with the help of a hungry young Montparnasse Spaniard they wheeled it across the city, Manolo directing the operation rather than doing any actual work. At last they reached the studio, high on the Butte, and the young Spaniard collapsed. He may really have expected the five francs he had been promised; but when Picasso pointed out that if such a sum were paid it would be impossible for them all to eat, he submitted, agreeing that it should be pooled and converted into one great general meal.

Spaniards and Catalans formed the greater part of Picasso’s acquaintance at this time. As well as the nomads there was a considerable settled colony, including Pichot; Rocarol, with whom he shared the Conde de Asalto studio; the then well-known Zuloaga; Canals, who had first shown him the technique of etching and who was now encouraging him to make another and a far more ambitious attempt; Durio; and of course Manolo, who, being left the use of one of Durio’s studios while he was away, sold all the Gauguins on its walls to Vollard. He also stole Max Jacob’s only pair of trousers, Max being then in bed, and brought them back only because no dealer would make him an offer.

The friendship between Manolo and Picasso was of long standing and it lasted all their life. Picasso admired Manolo’s sculpture and Manolo admired Picasso’s painting, but there was far more to it than that: Manolo was some ten years older than Picasso, a love-child who had been early turned out on the streets of Barcelona to pick up what living he could; he kept alive in the face of literally cut-throat competition, and in the course of this education he grew very sharp indeed, not to say piratical. Harsher words, such as bandit, thief, and pickpocket have been used; and the face that Picasso often drew is that of a lean and wary character, though curiously distinguished. But above all he was an outsider, a complete outsider, tough, self-reliant, and capable, and it was this that bound them together: piracy was a quality latent in Picasso too, and he esteemed the quality in his friend. What is more, Manolo was extremely witty and gay; even his victims—that is to say almost his entire acquaintance—bore him no ill-will; and Picasso had more fun with him as a companion than ever he had had with the melancholy Sabartés, who had now gone off to the New World in search of a fortune. It was a true companionship: each respected the other (and, by the way, neither of them drank; they both retained their lucidity at all times). Maurice Raynal knew both intimately, and when he was telling Brassaï about Manolo he said, “I was very, very fond of that man, and Picasso was devoted to him … Manolo was the elder by ten years and for him the young Ruiz was always ‘Little Pablo.’ And Picasso took more notice of him than of anyone else … he was perhaps the only person from whom Picasso would take criticism, teasing, contradiction.”

A fellow-tenant in the Bateau-Lavoir, a big, sleepy, beautiful young Frenchwoman named Fernande Olivier or Bellevallée, the detached wife of an insane sculptor, used to watch Picasso laughing with Manolo, talking all day long with his Spanish friends under the trees of the little square. Sometimes he also showed the local children how to draw chickens, hares, and what the cautious André Level terms “ruminants” in the dust. She wondered when he found time to work, and presently she found that it was in the quiet of the night, lit by an oil-lamp or sometimes by a candle.

At this point Picasso was twenty-two and Fernande about the same (some say older, some say younger): and although she did notice his small feet and hands she did not see anything particularly attractive about him at first—rien de très séduisant. She was not alone in this: a friend of Gertrude Stein’s described him as a “good-looking bootblack.” Nor could she place him socially; his days of purple and fine linen were over (there was no Soler in Paris and in any case Picasso’s dandyism had only been for the fun, a kind of dressing-up) and now he usually wore a boilersuit or the French workingman’s blue cotton jacket, with the red Catalan sash, the faixa, under it. But like everybody else Fernande was struck by his extraordinary eyes—huge, dark, and piercing, generally kind, always compelling; and by the immense vitality that flowed from him. She did not think him particularly young at the time; but she does observe that he stayed the same fairly mature twenty-two for all the twelve years they lived together. For that matter, photographs taken when he was well past fifty still show an absurdly boyish face, with the same black forelock drooping over his forehead; and even in 1952, when I first met him and when by the calendar he was over seventy, there was nothing at all of the old man about him: he was trim, compact, well made, his round head burned brown in the sun—age was irrelevant.