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PICASSO was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, the first, the only son of Doña María Picasso y Lopez and her husband, Don José Ruiz y Blasco, a painter, a teacher in the city’s art school, and the curator of the local museum. The statement is true: it is to be found in all the reference-books. But perhaps it does not convey a great deal of information except to those Spaniards who can as easily visualize the Málaga of Alphonso XII’s time as English-speaking readers can the St. Louis of President Arthur’s or the Southampton of Queen Victoria’s—to those who know the economic, cultural, and social position of a middle-class family in that town and the pattern of life in nineteenth-century Andalucía as a whole. For even the strongest individual is indelibly marked by the culture in which he is brought up; even the loneliest man is not an island; and even Picasso carried his cradle with him to the grave. “A man belongs to his own country forever,” he said.

Picasso’s Málaga, then, was an ancient city in the far south of Spain, an essentially Mediterranean city, and after Barcelona the country’s most important seaport on that coast: it had been a great port for centuries before Barcelona was heard of, having a natural harbor as opposed to Barcelona’s open beach; but long before Picasso’s time the silting up of this harbor and the activity of the Catalans in building moles had reversed the position, and whereas in 1881 ships had to lie off Málaga and discharge their cargoes into lighters, in Barcelona they could tie up in their hundreds alongside the busy quays. Yet Málaga still had a great deal of shipping; its great bay provided shelter, and the smaller vessels could still use the harbor at the bottom of that bay, where the white town lies along the shore with the hills of Axarquía rising behind it, while the Gibralfaro rears up five hundred feet and more in the city itself, with a huge Moorish castle standing upon its top.

Compared with the booming town of the present day, the Málaga of 1881 belonged to a different world, a world innocent of concrete and in many ways much nearer to the middle ages than to the twentieth century: tourism has changed it almost beyond recognition. When Picasso was born Málaga still relied upon its ancient industries, shipping, cotton-spinning, sugar-refining, the working of iron, and the production of wine, almonds and raisins, and other fruit: the fertile, irrigated, subtropical plain to the west of the town supplied the cotton and the sugar-cane (the Arabs brought them to Spain) as well as oranges, lemons, custard-apples, and bananas, while the slopes behind produced almonds, the grapes for the heavy, potent wine and for the raisins; and iron-ore came from the mountains. The city of that time had only about 120,000 inhabitants as opposed to the present 375,000 (a number enormously increased by holiday-makers from all over Europe in the summer), and they lived in a much smaller space: there was little development north of the hills or beyond the river, and what is now land on the seaward side was then part of the shallow harbor. This made for a crowded, somewhat squalid city, particularly as there was little notion of drains and the water-supply was inadequate; a real city, however, with its twenty-seven churches and chapels, its four important monasteries (the survivors of a great many more before the massive suppressions, expropriations, and expulsions of 1835), its bullring for ten thousand, its still-unfinished cathedral on the site of a former mosque, its splendid market in what was once the Moorish arsenal, its garrison, its brothels, its theaters, its immensely ancient tradition, and its strong sense of corporate being. Then, as now, it had the finest climate in Europe, with only forty clouded days in the year; but in 1881 traveling in Spain was an uncommon adventure and virtually no tourists came to enjoy the astonishing light, the brilliant air, and the tepid sea. Only a few wealthy invalids, consumptives for the most part, took lodgings at the Caleta or the Limonar, far from the medieval filth and smells of the inner town. They hardly made the least impression upon Málaga itself, which, apart from a scattering of foreign merchants, was left to the Malagueños.

Their town had been an important Phoenician stronghold until the Punic wars; then a Roman municipium; then a Visigothic city, the seat of a bishop; and then, for seven hundred and seventy-seven years, a great Arab town, one in which large numbers of Jews and Christians lived under Moslem rule. The Moslems were delighted with their conquest: they allotted it to the Khund al Jordan, the tribes from the east of the sacred river, who looked upon it as an earthly paradise. Many Arabic travelers spoke of its splendor, Ibn Batuta going so far as to compare it with an opened bottle of musk. Málaga was a Moslem city far longer than it has subsequently been Christian, and the Arabs left their mark: even now one is continually aware of their presence, not only because of the remains of the Alcazaba, a fortified Moorish palace high over the port, and of the still higher Gibralfaro, from which the mountains in Africa can be distinguished on the clear horizon, but also because of the faces in the streets and markets and above all because of the flamenco that is to be heard, sometimes from an open window, sometimes from a solitary peasant following an ass so loaded with sugar-cane that only its hoofs show twinkling below.

The Spaniards who reconquered Andalucía came from many different regions, each with its own way of speaking; and partly because of this and partly because of the large numbers of Arabic-speaking people, Christian, Jew, and Moslem, they evolved a fresh dialect of their own, a Spanish in which the s is often lost and the h often sounded, a brogue as distinct as that of Munster: one that perplexes the foreigner and that makes the Castilian laugh. In time the Moors and the Jews were more or less efficiently expelled or forcibly converted, and eventually many of the descendants of these converts, the “new Christians,” were also driven from the country; but they left their genes behind, and many of their ways—their attitude towards women, for example. Then again there is a fierce democratic independence combined with an ability to live under a despotic regime that is reminiscent of the egalitarianism of Islam: no one could call the Spaniards as a whole a deferential nation, but this characteristic grows even more marked as one travels south, to reach its height in Andalucía. And as one travels south, so the physical evidence of these genes becomes more apparent; the Arab, the Berber, and the Jew peep out, to say nothing of the Phoenician; and the Castilian or the Catalan is apt to lump the Andalou in with the Gypsies, a great many of whom live in those parts. For the solid bourgeois of Madrid or Barcelona the Andalou is something of an outsider; he is held in low esteem, as being wanting in gravity, assiduity, and respect for the establishment. Málaga itself had a solid reputation for being against the government, for being impatient of authority: it was a contentious city, in spite of its conforming bourgeoisie. In the very square in which Picasso was born there is a monument to a general and forty-nine of his companions, including a Mr. Robert Boyd, who rose in favor of the Constitution and who were all shot in Málaga in 1831 and buried in the square; it also commemorates the hero of another rising, Riego, after whom the square was officially named, although it has now reverted to its traditional name of the Plaza de la Merced, from the church of Nuestra Señora de la Merced, which used to stand in its north-east corner. There were many other risings, insurrections, and pronunciamientos in Málaga during the nineteenth century, including one against Espartero in 1843, another against Queen Isabella II in 1868 (this, of course, was part of the greater turmoil of the Revolution), and another in favor of a republic only eight years before Picasso’s birth. But although many of these risings, both in Málaga and the rest of Spain, had a strongly anticlerical element, with churches and monasteries going up in flames and monks, nuns, friars, and even hermits being expelled and dispossessed, the Spaniards remained profoundly Catholic, and the Malagueños continued to live their traditional religious life, celebrating the major feasts of the Church with splendid bull-fights, making pilgrimages to local shrines, forming great processions in Holy Week, hating what few heretics they ever saw (until 1830 Protestants had to be buried on the foreshore, where heavy seas sometimes disinterred them), and of course baptizing their children. It would have been unthinkable for Picasso not to have been christened, and sixteen days after his birth he was taken to the parish church of Santiago el Mayor (whose tower was once a minaret), where the priest of La Merced gave him the names Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, María de los Remedios, and Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad, together with some salt to expel the devil.

In most countries this array of names would imply an exalted origin: but not in Andalucía. The Ruiz family belonged to that traditionally almost non-existent body, the Spanish middle class. José Ruiz y Blasco, Picasso’s father, was the son of Diego Ruiz y de Almoguera, a glover and by all accounts an amiable and gifted man with artistic tastes, a great talker; but in that subtropical climate there was no fortune in gloves, and Don Diego also played the double-bass in the orchestra of the municipal theater. This Diego Ruiz was born in Córdoba in 1799, well before Goya painted the “Tres de Mayo,” and he remembered the French occupation of Málaga very well indeed (his father, José Ruiz y de Fuentes had removed there during the Peninsular War), for not only did the French sack the city in 1810, but they also beat the young Diego for throwing stones at them. It is said that they beat him almost to death, for it was during a general’s parade that he threw his stones: however that may be, he recovered sufficiently to set up shop in due time, to marry María de la Paz Blasco y Echevarria, and to have eleven children by her. It is the Spanish custom to use two surnames on formal occasions, one’s father’s and one’s mother’s, often connected with a y, but to hand down only the paternal half: thus Diego’s son José was called Ruiz y Blasco, both the Almoguera and the Echevarria disappearing. Echevarria, by the way, is a name that has a Basque sound about it, and this may account for the often-repeated statement that Picasso’s father was of Basque origin. Then again a Spanish woman retains her patronymic on marrying and adds to it her husband’s, preceded by de, so that Diego’s wife was known as Señora Blasco de Ruiz.

As for origins, it has been attempted to be shown that the Ruiz family descended from one Juan de León, a hidalgo of immemorial nobility who had estates at Cogolludo in the kingdom of León and who was killed in 1487 during the war for the reconquest of Granada: his grandson settled at Villafranca de Córdoba; and he is said to be the ancestor of the Ruizes. It may be so; but the sudden and irregular appearance of the name Ruiz is not particularly convincing, even taking into account the strange anarchy of Spanish family names at that period. In any event this remote Leonese origin is scarcely relevant: for although, as Gibbon says, “we wish to discover our ancestors, but we wish to discover them possessed of ample fortunes, and holding an eminent rank in the class of hereditary nobles,” and although we sometimes succeed, the practical effect of the more or less mythical Don Juan on the Ruizes cannot have been very great four centuries and eleven generations later; nor can that of the Venerable Juan de Almoguera, Archbishop of Lima, Viceroy and Captain-General of Peru in the seventeenth century, who is stated to have been a collateral.

In more recent and verifiable times, however, there was another Juan de Almoguera, a Córdoban and a notary, who died in deeply embarrassed circumstances at Almodóvar del Río, leaving a widow and eleven children, the eldest of whom, María Josefa, married José Ruiz y de Fuentes, Picasso’s great-grandfather, while the tenth, Pedro Dionisio, became a hermit. He joined the Venerable Congregación de Ermitaños de Nuestra Señora de Belén in the mountains of Córdoba in 1792 and became their superior some twenty years later; his health was always poor and he could not always remain in his hermitage; nevertheless he nursed the sick most devotedly during the cholera epidemic of 1834. And when his community was suppressed, expropriated, and expelled at the time of the anticlerical outburst of 1835 he managed to retain a little of their land, a spot from which he could look out over the mountains. He died in 1856, at the age of eighty-one, and he left a vividly living memory: his great-grand-nephew Pablo often spoke of “Tío Perico, who led an exemplary life as a hermit in the Sierra de Córdoba.”*

The most diligent research has discovered little reliable information about Picasso’s maternal ancestors: they seem to have been obscure burgesses of Málaga for some generations; but Picasso’s maternal grandmother at least was tolerably well provided for, since she owned vineyards outside the town that supported her and her daughters until the phylloxera destroyed them. Her husband, Francisco Picasso y Guardeño, went to school in England, returned to his native Málaga, married Inés Lopez y Robles, had four daughters by her, and went off to Cuba: there he became a customs-officer and eventually died of the yellow fever, in 1883, the news taking some fifteen years to reach his family. The origin of the name Picasso, which is most unusual in Spain (the double s does not occur in Castilian), has resisted all inquiries: some writers have pointed to Italy and particularly to the Genoese painter Mateo Picasso, a nineteenth-century portraitist, and Pablo Picasso himself went so far as to buy one of his pictures. On the other hand, Jaime Sabartés, one of Picasso’s oldest friends, his biographer, secretary, and factotum, discovered a Moorish prince called Picaço, who came to Spain with eight thousand horsemen and who was defeated and slain in battle by the Grand Master of Alcántara on Tuesday, October 28, 1339. And there have been assertions of a Jewish, Balearic, or Catalan origin. These are not of the least consequence, however; the real significance of this unusual, striking name is that it had at least some influence in setting its owner slightly apart, of making him feel that he was not quite the same as other people—a feeling that was to be reinforced by several other factors quite apart from that isolating genius which soon made it almost impossible for him to find any equals.

To return to Diego Ruiz, the glover, Picasso’s paternal grandfather: in spite of his beating at the hands of the French soldiers, in spite of the near anarchy that prevailed in Spain almost without a pause from 1800 to 1874 (to speak only of the nineteenth century), in spite of the risings for or against the various constitutions, of the Carlist wars, the pronunciamientos, the continual (and often bloody) struggles between the conservatives, the moderados, and the liberals, in spite of the mutinous political generals, the loss of the South American possessions, the stagnation of trade, and the tottering national finances, Diego Ruiz, like so many of his relatives in Málaga, had an enormous family, four boys and seven girls.

The second of these boys, Pablo, had a vocation that must have rejoiced all his relatives: he entered the Church and did remarkably well, becoming a doctor of theology and eventually, although he had no gift for preaching, a canon of Málaga cathedral and his family’s main prop and stay.

The profession chosen by Salvador, the youngest boy, cannot have caused anything like the same satisfaction: he decided to study medicine at Granada, and at that time neither medicine nor medical men were much esteemed in Spain. Richard Ford, writing only a few years before Don Salvador began his studies, speaks of the “base bloody and brutal Sangrados,” observing that in all Sevilla only one doctor was admitted into good company, “and every stranger was informed apologetically that the MD was de casa conocida, or born of good family.” In Granada Don Salvador met a young woman, Concepción Marin, the daughter of a sculptor; and being unwilling to part from her he took a post at the hospital when he was qualified, at a salary of 750 pesetas a year. But although Spain was then a relatively cheap country he found that this sum, which at that time represented about $112, or £28, did not allow him to put by enough to marry and set up house; he returned to Málaga, practiced (the Reverend Dr. Pablo was useful to him and his patients included the French Assumptionist nuns and their schoolgirls as well as the convent of Franciscans, whom he did not charge), prospered, and in 1876, seven years after he had qualified, he married Concepción, who gave him two daughters, Picasso’s cousins Concha and María. Later Don Salvador became the medical officer of the port and he also founded the Málaga Vaccination Institute. He was a kind man and a brave one (in the anticlerical troubles he protected the nuns at the risk of his life), and from the financial point of view he did better than any Ruiz in Andalucía: it was as a successful, cigar-smoking physician that he attended Picasso’s birth, reanimating his limp and apparently stillborn nephew with a blast of smoke into his infant lungs. Later he also contributed to the support of young Pablo in Madrid and to the buying of his exemption when the time came for his military service.

But if Don Salvador’s choice of a calling met with certain reserves at first, his brother José’s can have caused nothing but dismay. Having some skill in drawing, a knack for illustration, he determined to become an artist, a painter; and for some years he persisted in this course. He acquired a fair academic technique; he had a craftsman’s talent and an ability to use his tools; but he had nothing whatsoever to say in terms of paint, or at least he never said it. He produced a large number of painstaking decorative pictures of dead game, flowers (particularly lilacs), and above all of live pigeons, a few of which he sold; and he painted fans. He lived with his elder brother, the Canon, who also supported his surviving unmarried sisters, Josefa and Matilde.

It is the sad fate of towns that have once been capital cities (and at one time Málaga was the seat of an independent Moorish king) that when they lose this status they become more provincial than those which never emerged from obscurity. Málaga was deeply provincial. Yet it did possess a struggling art-school, the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de San Telmo, which had been founded in 1849; and in 1868 the quite well known Valencian artist Bernardo Ferrándiz became its professor of painting and composition. He was followed by Antonio Muñoz Degrain, another Valencian (they had come to Málaga to decorate the Teatro Cervantes); and the presence of these two painters of more than local fame, more than common talent, coincided with a revival of interest in the arts—a small and temporary revival, perhaps, but enough to induce the municipality to set up a museum of fine arts on the second floor of the expropriated Augustinian monastery which they used as the town hall. José Ruiz succeeded his friend Muñoz Degrain at San Telmo and he was also appointed the first curator of the museum. His duties included the restoring of the damaged pictures, a task for which his meticulous craftsmanship and attention to detail suited him admirably: what is more, he had a room set aside for this work, and as the museum followed the ancient Spanish provincial tradition of being almost always shut, he did his own painting there as well.

It was a fairly agreeable life; he had a small but apparently assured income, and any paintings that he sold added jam to his bread and butter; he had many friends of a mildly bohemian character, some of them painters; and he delighted in the bull-fights, better conducted, better understood in Andalucía than anywhere else in the world: at all events it was the happiest life he ever knew.

But his youth was passing—indeed, it had passed: he was nearly forty—and his family urged him to marry. None of his brothers or sisters had yet produced a son, and the family name was in danger of extinction. They arranged a suitable marriage for him, and although he could not be brought to like the young woman of their choice he did make an offer to her cousin María—María Picasso y Lopez. Yet before the marriage could take place the Canon died: this was in 1878, and he was only forty-seven. His loss was felt most severely; and either because of this or because Don José felt little real enthusiasm for marriage, the wedding was not celebrated until 1880.

José Ruiz took a flat in the Plaza de la Merced, on the third floor of a double terrace recently built by a wealthy man, Don Antonio Campos Garvin, Marqués de Ignato, on the site of a former convent. Don José was now responsible for a wife, two unmarried sisters, a mother-in-law and, after 1881, a son. Then, in 1884, during a violent earthquake, a daughter appeared: three years later another: at some point María de Ruiz’s unmarried sisters Eladia and Heliodora, whose vineyards had been ravaged by the phylloxera, moved in. And in the meantime the municipality decided to abolish not the museum, but the curator: or at least the curator’s salary. Don José offered to serve in an honorary capacity; and as he had hoped a newly-elected council eventually gave him back his pay.

But these continual difficulties, the daily worry, overcame a man quite unsuited to cope with them: there was little that he could do, apart from offering to pay his rent with pictures, giving private lessons, and selling an occasional canvas. Fortunately his landlord was a lover of the arts, as they were understood in Málaga in the 1880s; or at least he liked the company of artists, and he accepted a large number of José Ruiz’s paintings. Several were found in his descendants’ possession some years ago; but it was thought kinder not to exhibit them.

Don José’s worries were real enough in all their sad banality, and many, many people can sympathize with them from experience; but there was also a factor that perhaps only another artist can fully appreciate in its full force. He was a painter; he was entirely committed to painting; and he was losing his faith in his talent—a few years later he gave up altogether. Whether he realized that his original vocation had been false, whether he found at the age of forty and more that he had been no more than one of the innumerable young people with “artistic tastes” and a certain facility who fling themselves into painting only to find that they have no real creative power, or whether he found that what he might have had inside him had now been crushed by domesticity, the artist sucked dry and rendered sterile by women, children, routine, teaching, the result was the same. In his son’s portraits we see a weary man, tired through and through, deeply disappointed, often very near despair. Again and again there is this sad head leaning on his hand, with an expression of profound, incurable boredom, the taste for life all gone; and having seen this José Ruiz one finds it hard to imagine any other. Yet he must once have been young: by all accounts he was a gay bachelor, a haunter of cafés, a witty young man, well liked. His son saw none of this.

The relationship between the father and son is obviously of the first importance for an understanding of Picasso’s character; but like everything else to do with him it is immensely complex and full of apparent contradictions. On the one hand Picasso dropped his father’s name, a most unusual step in Spain (the only other example that comes readily to mind is, curiously enough, Velásquez), and although Sabartés and others say that Picasso’s Catalan friends to some degree forced the change upon him, and although Ruiz is comparatively commonplace in Spain and difficult for the French to pronounce, these reasons and the rest sound very much like post hoc rationalization. On the other, all through his life Picasso quoted his father’s dictums on painting, finding wisdom in such gnomic utterances as “In hands you see the hand” and speaking of him with great affection and respect. Talking to Brassaï in the thirties he spoke of his bearded father as the very type of man. “Every time I draw a man, automatically I think of my father…. As far as I am concerned the man is Don José, and that will be so as long as I live…. He had a beard…. I see all the men I draw with his features, more or less.” Don José was a good teacher, with a considerable share of technical knowledge; and later, when he found that he could teach him no more he ceremonially handed his brushes over to the boy and never painted again. Could any castrating son ask more? He did all he could to further Pablo’s career; he stretched his canvases; he gave him an independent studio at the age of fifteen; he parted with all his money except for the loose change in his pocket to enable the nineteen-year-old to go to Paris; yet when he died in 1913 his son did not come to his funeral although Picasso was then at Céret, only about a hundred miles away, and although he was not then particularly short of money. Picasso did not bury his father; and late in his life, when he was eighty-seven indeed, he executed a series of etchings in which Don José appears, sometimes as a watcher of bawdy scenes, sometimes as a participant.

But these complications did not exist—or at least did not exist on the surface—in those early days in Málaga. Don José was the Man: tall, bearded, ageless, dignified, bony, with pale eyes and a grizzling sandy beard (his friends called him el Inglés), quite unlike his busy, plump, entirely human, black-haired wife, and so far removed from his son in every conceivable way that no one could possibly have guessed the relationship. He was the only man in a household full of women; and although it would be wrong and indeed absurd to say that every Spaniard regards women, apart from the sacred mother, as a race to be exploited either as sex-objects or as domestic animals, the notion is common enough in the Mediterranean world, both Moslem and Christian: a century ago it was commoner still, and in Spain it increased the farther south one went. Neither José Ruiz nor his son was likely to be wholly unaffected by it; and this was the atmosphere in which Pablo spent his early years, the only boy of his generation, cosseted by a host of subservient aunts and female cousins, many of whom accepted the doctrine of their inferiority, thus communicating the deepest and most lasting conviction to the young Picasso. His mother, however, stood quite apart: the relationship between them was uncomplicated love on either side, with some mixture of adoration on hers; and it is perhaps worth while recalling Freud’s words on Goethe, with whom Picasso has often been compared: “Sons who succeed in life have been the favorite children of good mothers.”

These early years were cheerful enough for a child who knew little or nothing about the struggle for existence and to whom the overcrowded, somewhat squalid flat was as natural as the brilliant and almost perpetual sunshine in the square. His father’s increasing gloom was no more than the normal attribute of the Man, and in any case Pablo did not see much of Don José, who went off regularly to teach and to work at the museum in a room “just like any other, with nothing special about it,” as Picasso told Sabartés, “perhaps a little dirtier than the one he had at home; but at least he had peace when he was there.” Besides, the final gloom, the total withdrawal, of Don José did not take place until he left Málaga: at this time he still visited his friends, particularly the admired Antonio Muñoz Degrain, and he still went to see every single bull-fight, taking Pablo with him as soon as the child was no longer a nuisance.

This man about whom the household revolved, the only source of power, money, and prestige, the women’s raison d’être, had as his symbol a paintbrush. Although he did not work at home, it was Don José’s custom to bring his brushes back to be cleaned; and from his earliest age Pablo regarded them with an awful respect, soon to be mingled with ambition. At no time did he ever have the least doubt of the paramount importance of painting.

José Ruiz could not very well work in his flat: it was full of women (to say nothing of the tame pigeons, Don José’s models, and every year the paschal lamb, a pet for a week or so and then the Easter dinner); and two of these women, the penniless aunts Eladia and Heliodora, spent their days making braid for the caps and uniforms of railway employees. What contribution their sweated labor made to the common purse history does not relate; it cannot have been very much, but even a few reales would have been useful in that secret, hidden bourgeois poverty. Only a woman of great good sense, accustomed to frugality, to managing with very little, and to wasting nothing, could have run such an economy: happily for her family Doña María, in addition to a great many more amiable qualities, possessed all these. Nothing was thrown away: the flat may not have been particularly clean, but appearances were kept up: and one of Picasso’s earliest memories was that of his grandmother telling him to say nothing to anyone, ever.

Many children have been told to avoid waste without hoarding great piles and heaps of their possessions, trunks, cardboard boxes, crates overflowing and filling house after house, leaving no room to live, nothing ever thrown away: many have been told to be discreet without growing secretive, if not hermetic, in later life: but these precepts sank deep into Picasso’s unfolding mind. As for the secrecy, which Françoise Gilot speaks of as so marked a characteristic in both Picasso and Sabartés, it is not altogether fanciful to invoke the Holy Office: with short breaks from the thirteenth century right up until 1834 Spain had suffered under the Inquisition, hundreds of years during which Spaniards learned to keep a close watch over their tongues. A relapsed Jew and a Quaker were publicly tortured as late as 1826, and in the Carlist wars (vividly present in his parents’ memory) the supporters of absolute monarchy hoped to bring the inquisitors back with their king. Then again, in some crypto-Jewish families (and there were a great many in Spain) the habit of secrecy was passed on even longer than the faith: by this I do not mean to imply that either the Ruizes or the Picassos had Jewish ancestors, though it is by no means impossible, but only to suggest one more reason for the country’s traditional discretion, since the tradition necessarily affected Picasso.

The household was poor, but with a poverty that did not exclude the presence of some agreeable things, such as a set of Chippendale chairs that had presumably reached Spain by way of Gibraltar and that eventually came down to Picasso, and some pleasant Italian pieces of furniture; and Aunt Josefa, at least, owned a gold watch and chain. Nor, in the Spain of that time, did poverty mean the absence of servants, any more than it did in Micawber’s England: there is, indeed, something a little Micawberish about Don José, if Micawber can be conceived without gaiety and without a bowl of punch. Don José too was a hopeless man of business; he too hoped for something to turn up; he too had a wife who never deserted him, although a flat in which the cooking had to be done over charcoal in little raised holes, the water and slops to be carried up and down some fifty stairs, and oil lamps to be cleaned, filled, and lighted every day must have been a trial to her constancy, servants or no servants.

The flat is still there, and since 1962 (the year of a great Velasquez commemoration) the house has borne a plaque recording Picasso’s birth; it is now numbered fifteen, and it makes the corner, being the most westward of the range of buildings erected by Señor Campos, two matching terraces that fill the whole northern side of the square. They were not built at the happiest period of Spanish architecture, and they do not compare well with the two or three remaining eighteenth-century houses on the west side, but they have a restrained, somewhat heavy dignity and they are at least conceived as a whole: the balconied façades are uniform and the proportions make sober good sense. Each number has its own door that opens on to a hall paved with white marble. Modest double flights of marble stairs lead up to the first floor, where they give way to tiles, growing shabbier as they wind up round the wells in the middle of the building; but all the way up, on each landing, there are fine doors, each with a bright brass judas. Lifts have been installed in some of the houses, spoiling the staircases; electricity-meters by the dozen line the halls; and no doubt the water-supply and drainage have been improved; but otherwise there has been little change, and the pigeons still fly up to the balconies in greedy, amorous flocks.

Little change in the square itself, either. Many of the plane-trees under which young Pablo and his sisters played are still there; so are the massive stone benches, calculated to resist the successive generations of children who have haunted the gardens since they were first laid out; so are the little plump lions on pillars that guard the side entrances, though their tails have suffered since Picasso’s day. Ninety years ago the paths were sanded: now they are covered with asphalt. The sand made it more convenient for the children to play one of their immemorial games, the tracing of arabesques, those calligraphic patterns with which the Moors (to whom images were forbidden) decorated anything they could lay their hands upon—buildings, carpets, manuscripts, astrolabes: part of the game was to begin the arabesque anywhere and to come back to the starting-place, finishing the whole in one sinuous stroke, never taking one’s finger from the ground. The sand has gone, but there is still plenty of dusty earth under the municipal plants, and the children of Málaga still play this game; and they still cry Ojalá, which may be rendered O may Allah will it.

It is certain that some of the very earliest Picassos were drawn in the dirt of the Plaza de la Merced; and as he had no inhibitions about the living form it is probable that they were not sterile abstractions. He very soon acquired a mastery of this technique, and it stayed with him. As a very old man in years he would still start a drawing anywhere at all, just as he had done when he was a little boy, amazing his cousins Concha and María by beginning a dog or a cock at any point they chose to name—the claws, the tail—or by cutting the forms out of paper with his aunt’s embroidery scissors on the same terms. Curiously enough this calligraphy never overflowed into his writing: except for some early labored inscriptions he always wrote like a cat.

Behind the respectable houses lining the east side of the Plaza de la Merced began the slums of the Mundo Nuevo and the Coracha, the gap between the hill of the Alcazaba and that of the higher Gibralfaro; a place full of ruins, with swarms of Gypsies and desperately poor Spaniards living among them. In those days the slums continued round the Gibralfaro; under the Alcazaba they still remain, a most desolate spectacle even in the sun—ruin, filth, makeshift hovels, excrement. The district was called Chupa y Tira (which Penrose happily renders “Suck and Chuck”), from its inhabitants’ way of eating nothing but shellfish soup, shellfish being free and abundant in the more polluted parts of the harbor, and of chucking the shells out of the window once they were sucked clean. This whole area provided the needier housewives of Málaga with an inexhaustible supply of servants, rough no doubt and illiterate certainly, but undemanding. Perhaps the great point of servants is not that they move dust, which does no great harm where it is, but that they bring children of the bourgeoisie into contact with earthy good sense, with real life, its virtues, values, and miseries comparatively undisguised. Picasso may have learned more from Carmen Mendoza, the powerful, strong-voiced, mustachioed woman who took him to school than he did sitting there at his desk (he was an exceptionally dull scholar); and his unrivaled capacity for making a slum of any house in which he lived, however elegant, may perhaps have been based upon his early experience of the Gypsies of the Alcazaba, many of whose values he shared. And it was certainly from them that he derived his taste for the only music that ever really touched him, the cante hondo. Its strange, un-European cadences, its passionate outcry above the sound of a guitar, could be heard—can still be heard—from those miserable booths huddled together out of odd planks and surrounded by filth. Canta la rana, y no tiene pelo ni lana, say the Spaniards: the frog sings, though she has neither fur nor wool.

Picasso had a prodigious memory, both for forms and for events. He could remember learning to walk with the help of a biscuit-tin, and he could remember his sister’s birth when he was three. The circumstances of his sister’s birth were striking enough, to be sure. Don José was gossiping with friends in the back room of an apothecary’s shop one evening in December, 1884, when the bottles shot from their shelves with a crash. Earthquakes are common enough in those fiery regions for no one to sit pondering when they begin. Everyone darted into the open, and Don José ran home, up the stairs, seized his heavily-pregnant wife, his cloak, his son, and ran down into the square. Pablo was wrapped in the folds of the cloak, but his face peered out, and he saw that his mother had a kerchief over her head, a sight hitherto unknown, and deeply memorable. They hurried along the Calle de la Victoria (it commemorates the Christians’ perhaps illusory victory over the Moors), right along to the far end, skirting the Gibralfaro, to Muñoz Degrain’s little one-storied house, built solidly into the rock. Degrain was visiting Rome at the time, but they settled in, and here Picasso’s sister María de los Dolores—Lola—was born. (This earthquake killed over a thousand, devastating the whole region, and the cholera epidemic of the following year killed at least another hundred thousand more.)

But even with this astonishing power of recall he could not remember when he began to draw. He had in fact been drawing even before he could talk, and his first recorded words (recorded by his mother) were “piz, piz”—all that he could manage of lápiz, a pencil. He drew in season and out, particularly at school. His parents sent him first to the parochial school and then, when he was declared a “delicate child” after some illness that was supposed to have affected his kidneys, to a private establishment dedicated to St. Raphael: at neither did he learn anything in the scholastic line, neither reading nor writing nor arithmetic. Somehow the rudiments of these arts seeped into him quite early, but they did not do so in the classroom: to the end of his life he was not at home with the alphabet, and although in later years he was as keen as a hawk where the calculation of merchants’ commissions was concerned, his spelling remained highly personal. The one thing he did learn at school was that other people were willing to admit that he was an exceptional being, not subject to the common law.

Even in a very easy-going establishment a child who sat, not minding his book but drawing bulls or the live pigeon he had brought in his bosom, and who got up without leave to gape out the window, would have been sharply rebuked at the least and more probably flogged; but not Picasso. He would often arrive late when his father rather than Carmen brought him (the school was on the way to the museum) and he would sit there staring at the clock, waiting anxiously for the moment when he would be released, sometimes nursing the walking-stick, pigeon, or paintbrush that he had wrung from Don José as a hostage for his return. It does not appear that he was a wicked, turbulent, or dissipated pupil, but rather that he belonged on another plane: the master and even more surprisingly the other boys accepted this and they neither complained nor imitated his example when he stood up and walked out of the room altogether, looking for the headmaster’s wife, to whom he was much attached. “I used to follow her about like a puppy,” he said.

Counting came hard: so did telling the time. Once when he was gazing from the classroom window he saw his uncle Antonio, Aunt Eloisa’s husband, who had a post in the town hall over the way. Pablo called out, begging his uncle to come and fetch him away—he was always very much afraid that they would forget him—and in reply to the question “When are you let out?” he replied “At one,” supposing that since one was the first of the numbers it would also be the nearest hour.

Don José does not seem to have troubled much about his son’s lack of progress in the subjects taught at school, but he did teach Pablo a great deal about drawing and later about painting. He was the heir of the tradition of Spanish realism, but of a tradition sadly diminished and watered-down over the generations by academic doctrine, and most of what he taught was of course purely academic, a photographic realism, very slightly touched with fantasy; but he did have some ideas of his own. For example, he would cut his pigeons out in paper and move them about on the canvas in search of a satisfactory composition: he also handled cardboard and glue with great dexterity. In other hands and in another atmosphere these ideas might have borne earlier fruit. However, he provided his son with a solid, firmly-disciplined basis, and never can a man have had an apter, more eager pupil.

This may well have been the time of their happiest relationship. The father knew a great deal about the craftsmanship of his calling; at that age the son can hardly have distinguished between technique and the purpose of technique; and Don José, less glum in those years, less battered by life, was vested with the nimbus of the omniscient initiator. Long, long after, Picasso recalled one particular picture of pigeons. He remembered it as an enormous canvas. “Imagine a cage with hundreds of doves in it,” he said to Sabartés. “Thousands of doves. Thousands. Millions. They were perched in rows, as though they were in a dovecote, a prodigious great dovecote. The picture was in the museum at Málaga: I have never seen it since.” Sabartés found it: the physically present birds amounted to nine: the canvas was quite small.

Picasso never threw anything away if he could possibly avoid doing so, and some of the drawings and paintings of those days in Málaga have survived, together with many more from the following years at La Coruña and hundreds from his adolescence in Barcelona. Of these Málaga pictures, that which is usually called the earliest and which is dated 1890/91 is a little painting of a picador: it is oil upon wood (the smooth cedar tops of cigar-boxes were useful to a child rarely indulged with canvases) and it shows a burly man in yellow seated upon a little miserable bony blindfolded old horse up against the pink barrier of a bull-ring. The spectators, two men (one in a bowler, one in a Cordovan hat) and an opulent woman, are so large that they make the horse look even more wretchedly small. The horse is unpadded—the eight- or nine-year-old Pablo had already seen some dozens disemboweled in the arena—and the picador with his armored leg sits right down in the deep Spanish saddle. The two are remarkably well observed; and my impression is that they are observed quite objectively: but I may be mistaken; there may be compassion for the horse.

The picador has a little of that wonderful quality which is often to be seen in children’s paintings, but not a great deal. And some of this quality may be owing to the holes that take the place of the people’s eyes, holes that do away with the surface and give their expressions an impassive fixity. These holes, however, were supplied by Lola, Picasso’s sister, when she was busy with a nail.

Upon the whole, these early pictures from Málaga and La Coruña that have survived rarely show anything of that almost impersonal genius which inhabits some children until the age of about seven or eight, then leaves them forever. Picasso’s beginnings were sometimes childish, but they were the beginnings of a child who from the start was moving towards an adult expression: and perhaps because of this the drawings are often dull. It may be that his astonishingly precocious academic skill did not so much stifle the childish genius as overlay it for the time so that it remained dormant, to come to life again after his adolescence and to live on for the rest of his career—an almost unique case of survival. Certainly, during many of his later periods he produced pictures that might well have been painted by a possessed child—a child whose “innocent,” fresh, unhistoric, wholly individual genius had never died and that could now express itself through a hand capable of the most fantastic virtuosity.

The routine of those days in Málaga must have seemed everlasting to a child: the flat full of people, school when he could not get out of it, perpetual drawing, mass on Sundays, the slow parade up and down the Alameda, families in their best clothes, bands of ornamented youths all together, bands of swarthy tittering girls, grave adults, innumerable relatives, connections, friends, and always the splendid sun—eternal, natural, and taken for granted. All this, with the sea at hand and the pervading warmth, formed the basis of Picasso’s life, the matrix from which he developed. A great deal of it remained with him forever: this Mediterranean world, his wholly real world, was the object of his nostalgia, the only place where he could really feel at home. All his life he loved the sun, the sea, a great deal of company; yet of these early influences one seems to have bitten much less deeply. He was brought up in a deeply Catholic atmosphere, with several unusually devout relations and a religious family tradition (quite apart from his uncle and namesake the Canon and Tío Perico, one of his cousins was destined for the priesthood), and although in some of its aspects the Church in Málaga may have been rather more a processional than a profoundly spiritual body, it is still surprising that Picasso should have been apparently so little marked. There are many contributory factors that can be brought forward for what they are worth: Andalucía, with its large population of crypto-Muslims and crypto-Jews surviving into the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century and its ancestral memory of the Inquisition’s way of dealing with them, was never the most fervent province in Spain; then again the extreme contrast between the slums of Chupa y Tira and the wealth of the Alameda on the one hand and the elementary teachings of the faith on the other may have had its effect in time; while the growing clericalism, not to say religiosity, of the Establishment, the renewed identification of the Church with power, wealth, and authority during Alphonso XIII’s minority cannot but have caused a reaction in an already strongly unconformist and anti-bourgeois mind. “My joining the Communist Party is the logical consequence of my whole life, of the whole body of my work,” he said in 1944; and later in the same interview, “So I became a member of the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since fundamentally I had been on their side forever.”

Yet no effort of will, no social consciousness, can undo the past nor give a man born and bred a Catholic the same foundation as a child brought up in another faith.

In those days when the Church still knew its own mind, when it spoke Latin, and when a personal Devil ruled over a blazing Hell filled with the hopelessly damned, damned for ever and ever, many a Catholic child was uneasy about dying. The inward eye more readily forms an image of Hell than of Paradise—in Last Judgments the damned and the terribly powerful, terribly eager fiends that carry them shrieking away are infinitely more convincing than the blessed: the torments can be felt, whereas the ill-defined happiness of a perpetual Sunday cannot—and the descent into the one, or at least into Purgatory for a thousand years, is so much more likely than admission to the other. Absolution is not the magic sponge that some Protestants suppose: it is conditional upon true and whole confession, contrition, reparation, and many other factors. To an anxious mind (and the young Picasso was an anxious child) it is difficult to be quite certain that what seems to be contrition is not mere remorse of conscience, sterile and invalid: it is difficult to be sure that what one has confessed is all that should have been confessed: and perhaps it is even harder for a Spanish child. Spanish Catholicism has always dwelt heavily upon the last things; the skull is a very frequent symbol, and Picasso was less unaffected than he seemed.

He rebelled against the Church, as he rebelled against everything else, but he retained a deep religious sense: deep, but also obscure, Manichaean, and in many ways far from anything that could possibly be called Christian. I am not referring only or even mainly to his fear of the end, although it reached such a pitch that the slightest illness made him uneasy, while as for death itself, he avoided all mention of it as much as ever he could, except silently in his art, and he often took refuge in anger: as he lay sick in the last weeks of his life an intimate friend, a Catalan, urged him to make a will. “Doing things like that draws death,” he cried furiously, and shortly afterwards turned his friend out of the room—he left no will, only a huge shapeless fortune to be wrangled over: no testament about anything at all except the eventual destination of “Guernica.” Nor am I speaking of such remnants of orthodox belief or perhaps of orthodox magic that led him to make Françoise Gilot promise him eternal love in a church, with the benefit of holy water, or to observe to Matisse that in times of trouble it was pleasant to have God on one’s side—did not Matisse too say his prayers when life was hard? What I mean is his sympathy with such mystics as El Greco and St. John of the Cross and his sense of unseen worlds just at hand, filled with forces good and evil, a sense so strong that he said it was nonsense to speak of religious pictures—how could you possibly paint a religious picture one day and another kind the next? How vividly present the immaterial world was to his mind can be seen from his conversation with André Malraux, which I quote later and in which he spoke of the spiritual essence of African carvings; and nothing shows his sense of the sacred more clearly than his telling Hélène Parmelin that a really good painting was good because it had been touched by the hand of God (whose existence of course he denied from time to time).

As for the traditional Catholicism in which he was brought up, a most significant aspect of Picasso’s relationship to it is his silence. Apart from such set-pieces of his boyhood as “The First Communion” and “The Old Woman Receiving Holy Oil from a Choirboy,” some adolescent Biblical scenes (including a fine “Flight into Egypt”) and a few imprecise hagiographical pictures, he produced almost nothing with an evident religious bearing until the Crucifixion drawings of 1927, his strange Calvary of 1930, and the 1932 drawing based on the Isenheim altarpiece. Then silence again until the Christ-figures in the bull-fight engravings of 1959, although many other painters, atheist, agnostic, Jewish, vaguely Christian, or ardently Catholic, were working for the Church. Some authorities see no religious significance whatsoever in the “Calvary” and some find it blasphemous; this surprises me, since Picasso’s statement on the Crucifixion strikes me as valid, moving, a furious cry of protest, the expression of a strong emotion that certainly lies within the wide limits of Catholicism. Although this is no more than a tentative hypothesis, it seems to me that Picasso, however desperately lapsed, did retain a certain residual Catholicism at some level of his being, an affectionate or perhaps a cautious respect for the old Church that showed itself in this silence and in the nature of these occasional outbursts. Apart from anything else, he looked upon his sacramental marriage as something different in kind from his other connections; and it is perhaps significant that as he came into the world with the rites of the Church, so he left it with at least some of them.

In 1891, in Málaga, the ten-year-old Picasso was more concerned with the ritual of the bull-ring than with any other sacrifice, and he recorded it diligently: but the days of his ordered, natural life were coming to an end. He now had a second sister, Concepción, born in 1887, and the flat was by so much the smaller; his father was growing even more withdrawn; and then, in a decision that caused great unhappiness, the municipality finally closed the museum. There had never been any margin for living in the Ruiz family, and this blow was disastrous.

In his distress Don José found a post at La Coruña: he was to teach drawing and decoration in the Escuela Provincial de Bellas Artes. La Coruña is in Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, a great way off in the north, and obviously the whole family would have to live there. All at once Don José became aware that his son was if not wholly illiterate then something very like it. Illiteracy and a total inability to add two and two would for the time being have mattered little in his native city, where friends and connections would naturally stand by the boy; but in a remote and savage province like Galicia the rules would have to be obeyed, at least by strangers, and to get into any school Pablo would have either to pass an entrance examination or present a certificate of competence. There was no possibility of his passing an examination in any subject but drawing, no possibility at all, so Don José went to see a friend who had the power of granting certificates. “Very well,” said the friend, “but in common decency the child should at least appear to be examined.”

The child appeared, and after some fruitless questions of a general nature, the child remaining mute, the examiner presented him with a sum, three plus one plus forty plus sixty-six plus thirty-eight, telling him kindly how to write it down and begging him not to be nervous. The first attempt was not wholly successful and the sum had to be written again: this time, when he showed it up, Pablo noticed that the examiner had made the addition himself on a scrap of paper, left obviously in sight. He memorized the figure, returned to his desk, wrote down the answer, drew a line beneath it with some complacency, and received his certificate.

This valuable paper was packed, together with all the family’s portable possessions, and the home in the Plaza de la Merced fell to pieces. Dr. Salvador helped his brother to a passage by boat, and at the end of that summer of 1891 Picasso first took to the sea, at the beginning of his long voyage.

*Family trees are always difficult to follow in a narrative: these are shown diagrammatically in Appendixes 1 and 2.