Читать книгу Picasso: A Biography - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 9

LA CORUÑA: a leaden sea and a weeping sky. Don José had looked forward with misgiving to this remote little town in a backward province, but he could never have imagined the cold, sodden reality: on seeing it, he withdrew into his humid lodgings, appalled. Until a southerner has had the living experience of it, he cannot possibly conceive the difference between the Mediterranean civilization, lived largely out of doors, and that of the north, where people huddle in unsociable family groups, each in its own house, to keep out of the cold and the rain.

The voyage had been arduous in the extreme, and rather than face the equinoctial gales off Finisterre and the full horror of the Bay of Biscay the family left the ship at Vigo, although this meant taking the train to Santiago de Compostela and then the diligence on to La Coruña—eight hours of a crowded, lumbering horse-drawn vehicle, something between a coach and a covered wagon, in the pouring rain with two small children and a baby: the road in a chronic state of disrepair.

Their arrival was inauspicious; they had left Málaga with the grapes ripening in the sun and the sugar-cane standing tall, perhaps the most delightful season of the year, and they reached La Coruña in time for the onset of the prodigious autumn storms. All this ironbound north and northeastern coast of Spain is exposed to the great winds that tear in over three thousand miles of Atlantic ocean, sweeping low cloud and vast sheets of rain before them; and the north-east corner is even more exposed than the rest. Galicia’s rainfall is the highest in the Peninsula, five and a half feet a year falling upon every square inch of Santiago, as opposed to London’s twenty-three and a half inches and New York’s forty-two. When it is neither blowing nor raining it is often foggy, as though the elements were hopelessly entangled; and this fog resolves itself into a cold, penetrating drizzle that streams upon the granite cliffs and the wet granite houses. There are pleasant days in the course of the year, when the sun peers through, lighting the pure sandy beaches, and when the deep fjords take on a certain charm; but then the warmth acts upon the piles of rotting kelp that the gales and furious tides (unknown in the Mediterranean) drive up to the high-water mark, and they breed swarms of noisome flies. In any case the Ruizes saw none of these fine days for the first months of their stay: autumn, winter, and spring had to pass slowly by before there was any hope of sun, as they understood the term.

These horrors impressed the young Picasso deeply, as well they might; but perhaps even more than by the incessant rain, the wind, the coal fires, the smoke-laden fog and the cold, he was shocked by the fact that in the streets the people spoke a different language. This was his first experience of being a foreigner, cut off; and for many small children the experience of hearing another language all round them, so that they are outsiders, debarred from the incessant, involuntary communication of the crowd and surrounded with secret, incomprehensible words, is deeply disturbing. The language spoken in La Coruña and the rest of Galicia is Gallego, a somewhat archaic variety of Portuguese, and although it is of course a Romance language other Spaniards do not understand it at all. The people can speak Castilian too, but among themselves it is Gallego: even now, with generations of military service and compulsory education in Castilian, a great many of them communicate in their own tongue, and in 1891 it was still more general. Figures for the turn of the century show 1,800,000 Gallegan-speakers out of a total population of just under two million.

The contrast between Málaga and La Coruña was very great indeed, but it could have been equaled in other parts of Spain, a country separated by its geography and its history into such markedly distinct regions that some of the early rulers took the title of emperor of the Spains, dwelling upon the plural. Navarra, Aragón, Castilla, León, and Catalonia were once sovereign states, so were Asturias, Estremadura, Jaén, Córdoba, Sevilla, and several others; and Galicia was one of them, a geographic, economic, and linguistic entity far closer in habits and culture to Portugal than to León or Castilla, and inhabited by a race with the reputation of being hardy, honest, industrious, stupid, and unpolished: indeed, the word Gallego had a certain currency in the rest of Spain as a term of reproach, meaning boor. Traditionally, in such cities as Madrid, it was the Galician who brought the water, coal, and wood, carrying it up innumerable flights of stairs.

This damp former kingdom, then, retained its individuality (and its diet) over the centuries, and the uprooted child Picasso was confronted not only with a strange language but also with strange forms and faces that to an Andalou scarcely seemed Spanish at all. The Moors did reach Galicia; but although they came from bitterly inhospitable regions, most being Berbers, they withdrew after no more than five years, unable to bear the climate. It is true that they were also encouraged to withdraw by the plague and the army of King Alphonso of Asturias, but the great point is that they went away without having bred there. No trace of the Moor remains in blood, customs, or architecture: these are the descendants of the native Iberians, the Suevi and the Visigoths, with perhaps the slightest touch of Roman.

Faced with this different civilization, the Ruizes retired into their second-floor flat in the Calle Payo Gómez and watched the rain beating against the windows. They discussed the weather interminably—there was a great deal of it to discuss—and Don José at least felt the cold reach to his heart. His wife had a new home to set up, three children to look after, and the strangeness of Galician shopping to cope with—the makings of a gazpacho were hardly to be found, far less a bottle of generous wine. This left her little time for introspection, and in any case hers was a much happier temperament. For Pablo and his sisters too the initial horror faded; there was, after all, a new town to be seen, a town built on a peninsula with a harbor on one side, a beach on the other, and cliffs at the far end. It was not much of a town compared with Málaga—about a third of the size—and its solitary delight, apart from the port and the bull-ring, was a Roman tower on the howling eminence at the end of the peninsula, an erection called the Torre de Hercules by the inhabitants and the caramel tower by Don José. With its later additions it soared up four hundred feet, still serving as a lighthouse; and when the great Atlantic rollers drove in to break with a measured thunder at the foot of the cliff and sent their spray up to the tower it had a splendor of its own.

The port was busy enough, but even when it was visible it was not to be compared with Málaga. The exports were hogs, horse-beans and roots (mostly for Cuba, then still a Spanish possession), and the imports mainly coal, arriving in dirty tramp-steamers from England and South Wales. The bull-ring was closed when they arrived, but even when it opened it was a disappointment. There is little comprehension of the corrida outside Andalucía, little grasp of those fine points that distinguish it from mere bull-baiting (or at the worst a vile butchery) and so raise it to the level of a savage, dangerous, poetic sacrifice. When the bullfighters are aware that the congregation does not know what the mystery is about, they will only perform, not officiate; and after a while, the season having come round at last, Don José was so disgusted that he gave up attending.

Picasso drew the tower, as he drew everything else in La Coruña. The early drawings are still childish, or rather boyish, many of them being illustrations to jokes about the weather; others, particularly those in the margins and blank pages of his schoolbooks, show the kind of battle that most schoolboys draw—Romans, savages, people with spears, swordsmen slashing away at one another. There are also some capital bulls. The school-books which Picasso preserved are in the museum at Barcelona: they resemble almost all school-books in being dog-eared, battered, and tedious, but they are of a considerably higher standard than might have been expected. One, which has selections from the classics and which Picasso adorned with a pen-and-ink Moor’s head and some pigeons far livelier than his father’s, has quite advanced Latin verse and passages from Cicero. How much Pablo made of it is another matter, but at least he had got into the school and he did well enough not to be sent away; furthermore at this time he wrote, or was compelled to write, a far more elegant, legible hand than he had ever used before or was ever to use again. The school in question was the Instituto da. Guarda, and Picasso was admitted to the primer curso, the first year of the secondary cycle: the next year, in 1892, he also matriculated at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, where his father was teaching, while at the same time he carried on with his studies at the Instituto.

At no time of his life was Picasso a willing writer of letters. In La Coruña he invented a way of communicating with his relatives in Málaga that called for little effort in the literary way: this was a small news-sheet “published every Sunday,” called sometimes Asul y Blanco and sometimes La Coruña, in which he drew local people, dogs, pigeons (one of his small advertisements reads “Pedigree pigeons purchased: apply second floor, 14 Calle Payo Gómez”), the “caramel tower” on a tray, and wrote short dispatches such as “The wind has started, and it will go on blowing until there is no La Coruña left,” or “The rain has begun already. It will not stop before summer,” or “At the time of going to press this publication had received no telegrams of any kind.” Then there were more jokes, some illustrated and most of this general nature: During an arithmetic examination: Master, “If you are given five melons and you eat four, what have you left?” Pupil, “One.” Master, “Are you sure that is all?” Pupil, “And a belly-ache.” Most of the people are struggling with the wind or the rain or both (La Coruña’s main industry seems to have been the manufacture and repair of umbrellas); and to show Málaga the extreme wild remoteness of these parts there is a drawing of the Galician bagpipes.

These too are still entirely boyish productions, with little hint of what was so soon to appear; and it is worth pointing out that the spelling entonses, for example, or asul, rather than the orthodox entonces and azul, shows that Picasso had retained his Andalusian way of speaking (the Castilian pronounces z and soft c as th, whereas the southerner makes no attempt at any such thing—nor do many South Americans, Andalusian in origin). These mistakes, together with others that have nothing to do with phonetics, also show that Picasso remained impervious to printed shape: which is strange, when one considers his astonishingly accurate recall of other forms, even then. And what is more curious still is his mirror-version of the final question-mark: this might have been influenced by the Spanish convention of starting a question with another question-mark, upside-down, but later he sometimes inverted the esses of his signature, and when he took to etching and engraving he could not or would not grasp that the printing of the plate necessarily reversed the legend. It is as though there were some confusion in the mental process that separates right from left.

These childish things were soon to be left behind, however, and although the facetious illustrative sketch reappeared at intervals, the young Picasso suddenly moved on to an extraordinary degree of maturity, to serious and as it were total painting. He might perhaps have done so a little earlier if his father had set about his education as a painter more seriously; but the separation from his friends, his native climate, his whole way of life, coming on top of his other reasons for unhappiness, quite crushed Don José’s spirit: he hardly ever went out, but stood at the window, watching the rain. When he did leave the house, it was to go to the art-school, just over the way, or to Mass: the then unchanging Mass was one of the few remaining links with his former life—that and the pigeons, which he still kept, and which he still painted from time to time, although with little enthusiasm, and that little diminishing fast. This is the Don José that his son painted, a man so deeply sad that it is painful to look at some of the portraits. Yet at this time he was still capable of making friends—his final withdrawal came later—and one of them was Dr. Raimundo Pérez Costales, an interesting man who had been minister of labor and of the fine arts under the short-lived and anarchical First Republic of Pi y Margall in 1873: according to Sabartés he was so much attached to Don José that when the Ruizes left La Coruña, Dr. Costales settled at Málaga in the hope that his friend would eventually return to his native town.

However, in time José Ruiz did turn his mind to a thorough-going artistic education for his son. He taught Pablo the techniques of pen-and-ink, charcoal, pastel, and crayon; later he promoted him to painting in oil and watercolor, though at the same time he insisted upon a great deal of drawing, of exact and conscientious drawing. As a teacher Don José was a strict disciplinarian, obeying the law to the letter and requiring both obedience and hard work; it was a rigorously academic training, of course, for even if Don José’s tastes had not lain in that direction, the school was under the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, a deeply conservative body. Picasso accepted the discipline happily, and in the antique classes he made drawings of casts that astonish the beholder not only with their accomplishment but even more with their power of giving the faded models back their life, a life that had been there when the statues were first carved and that his pleasure in the act of drawing restored to their degraded plaster shadows. What for most people is a hopelessly arid exercise was a delight to Picasso, and his art-school studies glow with pleasure: controlled, disciplined, and almost anonymous, but certainly pleasure.

Picasso told Brassaï, when he and the photographer were talking about children’s painting and infant phenomenons (they never last, said Picasso), that the precision of these academic drawings frightened him; and certainly there is something a little monstrous about their easy virtuosity when they are compared with the decorations that he was drawing at the same time in his school-books, a time when he was in fact no more than a little jug-eared boy of twelve or thirteen. Perhaps it was at this period that Picasso was first inhabited by his particular demon: not the more or less impersonal spirit that comes to children in their nonage, incapable of sin, but the fully adult creature that Sartre calls the vampire and that certainly, in the case of some writers, lives upon their blood. Except for Friar Bacon’s squat black dog, the demon has never, I believe, been isolated and identified, but it is a real presence, and those who have known this possession report the experience as both extraordinarily exalting—mind aglow, senses concentrated, hand flying, body, heat and cold forgotten—and as something with an element of dread.

Outside the school his work was much more free: among the surviving oils there are some little tentative pictures dating from 1892 and 1893, then a more assured cottage, probably of late ‘93, technically far more competent and painted on a properly stretched canvas; and then suddenly, with no apparent transition, the extraordinarily accomplished head of a man that Cirlot, an authority on these early years, places in circa 1894, that is to say when Picasso was twelve or at the most thirteen. It is a small picture (thirteen and a half inches by eleven and a half), though it looks much larger; the head and shoulders of a man, bald-fronted, tanned, with a short grizzled beard: he is shown almost in profile, looking slightly upwards and to the right, and he does not have the least air of sitting for his portrait. The background of a very light gray sets off this ruddy brown head and browner neck, but it does not cover the fine-grained canvas entirely; and the whitish shirt below the neck is only suggested. Picasso certainly meant to leave the picture in this state, for in the little portrait of his uncle Baldomero Chiara, which is firmly dated July 3, 1894, the paint shades off into the virgin paper, and in that of Dr. Costales (a fine old gentleman with mutton-chop whiskers and a deep fur collar) which he painted in 1895, the top of the canvas is quite bare. The picture is full of light, full of life, and the finely proportioned head—finely proportioned to the limits of the canvas—is quite wonderfully striking. An eminently Spanish picture, with the best of Spanish naturalism, absolutely nothing childish about it at all: it has little or nothing of the nineteenth century, nothing in the least sentimental, and Velásquez would have admired it, whether he knew the painter’s age or not. Indeed, it has a certain kinship with the head of the elderly man in Velásquez’ “Los Borrachos” at the Prado, which the young Picasso had never seen.

The next year, when Picasso was still thirteen, he painted many more pictures, several of which have come down to us. There is not much point in describing them in detail, but they show many different lines of approach, many different techniques, always more assured. Among them is his dog Klipper, one of the earliest in the long series of Picasso’s animals—cats, mice, apes, pigeons, an incontinent goat, turtle-doves, owls, and always dogs. Klipper is a brownish-yellow creature, a basic dog of medium size, more smooth than rough: an intelligent head with a large, knowing eye.

The picture has all the marks of a good portrait; and it is painted without the least trace of sentimentality. Picasso’s relations with his animals were very close: he had an extraordinary gift for entering into direct contact with them: could handle a wild bird or walk up to a furious dog when most people would have provoked an ugly scene: and the tired old cliché about the power of the human eye finds its justification in Picasso. He had in fact a most luminous and striking eye, a singular, penetrating gaze, always the first thing that people noticed. But these relations were quite unlike those which are usual in Anglo-Saxon countries. A child brought up on the spectacle of slaughtered bulls does not have the same reactions as one brought up on flopsy bunnies or the products of Walt Disney’s muse: Picasso did not shift his animals to a semi-human plane—he met them on their own. He loved cats, not the sleek castrated fat domesticated creatures, not pussies, but the rangy feral cats of the southern gutter, who will fly in your face at the drop of a hat. His animals lived according to their own codes, more or less, with no undue notions of right or wrong, nor of cleanliness, imposed from above.

Then there are more remarkable heads of poor, elderly men, masterly pieces of strong, sober Spanish realism, brown pictures. There is nothing of the picturesque peasant to be seen in these worn, stupid, hopeless people; even the torn shirt has no hint of the theatrical rags so common at the time. Yet only a very little earlier Picasso was drawing highly picturesque and rather feeble Moors and Moorish palaces: the development was extraordinarily rapid, and only months lie between the schoolboy doodling and the unbelievably accomplished throw-away pen and ink sketch of a Pantheon with a minute Velásquez, a pair of doves in flight, and some truly delightful putti, apparently bringing him a color-box.

To all these pictures Picasso preferred his “Barefoot Girl” and his “Beggar,” both painted in 1895; and these he kept with him all his life.

I will not describe “The Beggar,” which is a most able, confident study in the idiom of several others of that time, but the subtly different “Girl” must have a few lines. She sits on an uncomfortable straight-backed chair against a broken dark-green background, dressed in a long russet frock with a white cloth over her shoulders, her hands folded in her lap and one large chilblained foot dangling. She is a sad child, deep dismay struggling with sullenness in her face at repose: dismay not at her present situation, but at the world into which she has been pitched. She is of about the same age as the painter, and she sits there patiently; her immense, lustrous, asymmetric eyes gaze forward, a little down, at nothing. Here the technique is surer still, the brush-stroke firm and decisive on the dress, gentle and flowing on the face; and here there is much more personal involvement. Picasso did not spare her big hands, thick ankles, and coarse great feet; he was not in the least degree concerned with prettiness; but it is evident, not merely from her eyes and the pure oval of her face, that he was entirely with her.

Both these canvases were rather large for Pablo at that time, about two foot six by one foot eight, and it is said that the model for the second and perhaps the canvas too were given him as a present for his good behavior during the Christmas holidays.

Once Picasso had begun his true ascent, acquiring at the same time a mastery of his tools, Don José let him help with the details of the decorative pictures he still produced. He would, for example, cut off a dead pigeon’s pink legs and claws, pin them to a board, and tell Pablo to paint them in. In the course of a few months it became evident to both that even on the technical plane the boy’s painting was far beyond the man’s. José Ruiz could no more have painted that beggar’s head or the barefoot girl than he could have confronted a bull in the arena. He acknowledged it; solemnly handed over his brushes to his son, and never painted again.

It was perhaps an unfortunate impulse. The truth must in time have become even more obvious, but this gesture crystallized the situation and by so doing altered it, making it far more extreme. The young are often cruel; and there are circumstances in which they can be devoid of pity, especially towards those whose role it is to be strong and who are weak. Even now a father who abdicates, who declines the absurd role of the omniscient, omnipotent, infallible monarch of the glen, is liable to arouse a confused but strong resentment; and the status, thankfully laid aside, can never be convincingly resumed when at a later date it may become necessary: at that time, and in that place, such an action was more exceptional by far.

One of Picasso’s outstanding characteristics as a man was his kindness, and this was evident in his face, in his habitual expression; but he was no more all of a piece throughout than any other—indeed he had more contradictions in him than most—and he could be very hard. There are also discreet, muffled, imprecise rumors of marital discord at this period: José Ruiz, aging fast, cannot have been a very lively companion. It is not surprising that Pablo’s affection should have shifted almost entirely to his mother in such an event; nor that the Picasso, which had been absent from the signatures of most of these early paintings, should now reappear. The bold P. Ruiz is replaced by P. Ruiz Picasso after 1895, and with few exceptions the Ruiz vanishes altogether after about 1901. And most of his portraits of Don José are not signed at all, whereas those of his mother are.

Yet this does not mean any decided, lasting, definitive, and evident animosity between José and Pablo Ruiz: the portraits alone prove that, and there is a great deal of evidence for an enduring, though tempered, affection on both sides. Then again at this point the family was struck by a cruel blow that certainly brought its members together. Concepción, Pablo’s youngest sister, fell ill with diphtheria, and in spite of Dr. Costales’ devoted care she died: at that time the disease could kill in three or four days, and in Spain it did kill about half of those it attacked. Don José felt the loss most bitterly: she was the only one of his children who resembled him in the least, a fair-haired child, tall for her age, and slim.

But in any case the La Coruña days, with their dreary, oppressive atmosphere, the shut-in life so conducive of secret domestic war, were in their turn coming to an end. A former assistant of Don José’s, Ramón Navarro García, who taught figure-drawing at the famous art-school of the Llotja at Barcelona, wished to return to his native Galicia. When he proposed the exchange there could be no hesitation on José Ruiz’s part. Not only would they get away from the sad house, so very much sadder now, but Barcelona meant the Mediterranean once more, an escape from the gloom and rain of La Coruña; furthermore, the Llotja post carried a better salary: three thousand pesetas a year, almost exactly £100, or $482. At the end of the term the family packed their bags. They were to spend the summer holidays of 1895 in Málaga, taking the train, which would carry them there by way of Madrid. Picasso’s luggage included a great many pictures: he had tried to sell some in a little exhibition at an umbrella-maker’s shop (in the doorway, says Gómez de La Serna), but that had not been markedly successful; and he had given a few to Dr. Costales. The drawings and paintings that remained might be grouped in the following categories: juvenilia (though even among these there is the occasional prophetic pure, unhesitating line, especially in the bulls), boyish “historical” scenes, the interiors and other paintings that show the influence of his father’s friends Ferrándiz and Muñoz Degrain, sketch-books of great interest to the art-historian, drawings of hands (all his life he was preoccupied with hands, singly and in pairs), and these strong, firmly-painted canvases of his twelfth and thirteenth years. There were also two little things that could be lumped in with the juvenilia if they did not seem to have a particular significance for the later years—they are little cut-outs, a dog and a dove, that only need to be stuck to a canvas to be the first of all collages. And these small paper silhouettes are perhaps the only examples of his father’s direct influence in the whole collection.

A couple of days or so in Madrid, after the prolonged horror of a creeping Spanish train—more than thirty hours to cover the five hundred miles of line winding about the mountains, with four changes and innumerable stops—a Madrid at the height of its blazing summer, cannot have been very gratifying; nor can the travelers have been at their most receptive. However, Don José and his son did visit the Prado, and there for the first time in his life Picasso saw Velásquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Ribera, Goya, to say nothing of Valdes Léal, Murillo, and the host of illustrious foreigners.

Whether the immense indigestible wealth, the heat, his fatigue, and the lighting that made it almost impossible to see “Las Meninas” whole, oppressed him or not, he had recovered his spirits by the time they reached Málaga, four hundred miles farther on. They were welcomed, feasted, made much of. Their native air, their native speech and food, revived the returning exiles, and Pablo, still the only boy the Ruiz brothers had between them, was particularly caressed. He was always in his element at a party—conviviality was meat and drink to the abstemious Picasso all his life—and this may well have been the happiest holiday that he spent in Málaga. He was so taken up with having fun that his work, even his sketching, shows a falling-off in quantity. However, he did paint a picture of the kitchen, and he did make a very delicate pencil drawing of their old servant Carmen, with her sleeves rolled up as once she had rolled them up to lead him to school by force; and perhaps influenced by the familiar atmosphere recovered, he signed it P. Ruiz, as he had done in former days.

His relations were proud of him. Painting was now no longer the desperate career that it had been when Don José made his choice, and they may even have distinguished between the canvases he brought back from La Coruña and his father’s work. In any case, despite the shaky condition of the peseta, twenty years of peace had led the richer sort to buy paintings more frequently, and Muñoz Degrain, Moreno Carbonero, and other men they knew were doing well in Madrid, so well that the State bought their pictures for the Museum of Modern Art in the capital itself. Pablo’s manifest destiny was accepted without question: Dr. Salvador, who had grown more prosperous still, hired an aged seafaring man as model and gave his nephew a duro a day to paint him, five pesetas, a sum at least twice as much as a laborer could earn.

Towards the end of the summer they took to the sea once more, coasting along northwards past Almería, Cartagena, Alicante, and Valencia; and the September sea was so kind that during the voyage Picasso could paint, not hurried sketches of the shore, but oil upon canvas, and that of a considerable size. After three days of sailing, Barcelona came in sight, an immensely busy port with the vast city spreading wide on either hand, the sinister Montjuich to the left, Tibidabo rising behind, and mountains beyond: to the right, factory chimneys, gasworks, palm-trees, industrial suburbs.

As soon as he set foot on the quay, Picasso found that once again he was surrounded by a different language. All around him the people spoke Catalan, as incomprehensible as Gallego or even more so; and many of them were dressed in the fashion of their country—a red bonnet like a Phrygian cap, curiously plaited rope-soled cloth shoes, a broad red sash, a little waistcoat.

And as the Ruizes walked along to the lodging that a friend had found for them in the Calle Cristina, not far from their landing-place, this impression of being abroad grew stronger. For the Barcelona of 1895 was a wholly European city, something they had never known before; a huge, busy, and intensely Catalan city, with half a million people in it, all talking their own language and all living according to customs and values that were foreign not only to Málaga but to Madrid and the whole of the rest of the Peninsula. The thirteen-year-old Pablo could not have felt more a stranger if he had landed in Marseilles or Genoa: once again he was entirely uprooted.