Read Picasso: A Biography Page 14


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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