Read Picasso: A Biography Page 16


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Clocher á Barcelone

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

  Je te anbrase ton vieux ami

  PICASSO

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

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

  A bell-tower in Barcelona

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

  I embrace you your old friend

  PICASSO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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