Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  This was the golden age to which Picasso’s Catalan friends looked back with a resentful nostalgia—the age when the Counts of Barcelona, who by marriage had become kings of Aragón, carried the Catalan tongue far beyond its original limits, conquering the Balearic islands, Sicily, Naples, Corsica, Sardinia, the Moorish Valencia, and all the Moslem country down to Murcia, an age whose architectural glories still filled their city.

  Even in the early seventeenth century Cervantes could speak of Barcelona as “the seat of courtesy, the haven of strangers, the refuge of the distressed, the mother of the valiant, the champion of the wronged, the abode of true friendship, unique both in beauty and situation,” but although the splendid buildings were still there, the glory was already gone. That unhappy marriage with the heiress of Aragón was followed in the course of time by the union of Aragón and Castilla in the persons of Ferdinand and Isabella. Their heir, the Habsburg Charles V, inherited a united Spain from which the last Moorish rulers had been expelled, together with vast possessions in America; and already Catalonia was an oppressed country, cut off from all commerce with the New World, the great fresh source of wealth. For centuries the Castilians had disliked their industrious neighbors, and the Emperor Charles, who knew little of Spain when he came to the throne, sided with the Castilians; and so it continued, generation after generation, with what the Catalans looked upon as one piece of oppression after another, and with bloody risings from time to time, until the end of the Habsburg line in Spain.

  In the bitter wars that followed—Marlborough’s wars—the Catalans supported the Austrian pretender: his successful rival, the French Bourbon who ruled Spain as Philip V, took Barcelona by storm and turned upon the Catalans with great severity. He suppressed Catalan as the official language, imposing Castilian in its place, abolished their ancient privileges, the Cortes and the fueros, closed the university of Barcelona, and built a citadel and a much-hated ring of walls to enclose and overawe the city.

  The policy of repression and assimilation continued with even greater force; local laws and customs were done away with; the language was discouraged. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this policy had some success; it certainly came close to destroying Catalan literature, although it was unable to kill the language itself—a language closely related to the Provençal in which many of the earlier poets wrote; a harsher language to the unaccustomed ear, but one capable of the utmost subtlety in the hands of such writers as Ramon Llull (Caxton published him in translation) or Ausiás March; and, with its comparative absence of vowel endings, perhaps the most masculine of Romance dialects.

  But there was always a resistance, both political and cultural; and with the coming of romanticism the Catalan poets began their Renaixença, a movement designed not only to revive the country’s literary culture but to express the nation’s wish for at least some measure of independence. The Renaixença was strongly supported, often by people with little concern with poetry or the arts: in 1841 the university was restored, and some years later the hated walls went down but still the Catalan was not master in his own house.

  The Barcelona that Picasso explored in 1895 presented some analogies with Joyce’s Dublin: there was the same nationalist revival, the same passionate resentment of a foreign government, the same memory of a glorious past now overshadowed, the same tradition of deep opposition to central authority, the same conviction of a higher culture oppressed by a lower; and historically there had been the same readiness to call in foreign aid to get rid of the oppressors. But the religious element was lacking; and whereas Joyce’s Dublin was desperately poor, Barcelona had been growing steadily richer ever since the restoration of the monarchy in 1874. The port was now handling eight thousand ships a year; the manufactures had increased enormously; the city had spread far beyond its ancient limits; and Barcelona’s taxes, though grudgingly paid, provided a great part of the government’s income.

  Yet these were the days of unrestrained capitalism, and Barcelona also possessed a huge urban proletariat. Picasso had been acquainted with squalor ever since he was born, but the misery of a great industrial city was something far beyond his experience; so was the reaction to this misery. For whereas the victims of the chronic agricultural depression in Spain suffered in silence, or at least without rioting, the intolerable conditions in Barcelona led to strong left-wing movements, to frequent strikes, and to anarchism. Anarchism was preached all over Europe and America at that time, but nowhere did it take such a hold as in Barcelona; and there it added a still more eruptive element to the general anti-government atmosphere. An anarchist had set off a bomb in the crowded Liceo theater shortly before Picasso’s arrival, on the grounds that “there could be no innocent bourgeois”; and the Ruizes had hardly settled down before another bomb was lobbed right into the great Corpus Christi procession. The Establishment called the bombs “infernal machines”: it had no sympathy whatsoever for those who thought that the existing order had to be destroyed to bring a decent society into being, and very little for those who proposed a less radical reform. But Picasso never belonged to the Establishment at any time, and protest, both moderate and extremely violent, appeared early in his work.

  It did not appear at first, however. As a boy he was no part of the community: although he had no difficulty in making himself understood, the city being bilingual, he had only to open his mouth to make it clear that he was a stranger and a stranger of no great consequence, for an Andalou was instantly labeled idle. Gypsyish, mercurial, and above all not serious, a very grave charge in hard-headed Catalonia. And since he had no gift for languages this was his status throughout his early adolescence. It was as an outsider that he discovered Barcelona, and perhaps for that very reason he saw the squalor and injustice more clearly than the natives.

  Little of this was visible in the new districts outside the walls, with their broad streets crossing at right-angles, but the heart of Barcelona lay in the old town, and that was where the Ruizes lived. The flat in the Calle Cristina soon proved too dark and inconvenient and after a short stay in the nearby Calle Llauder they removed to number three in the Calle de la Merced, a tall, five-storied house with a battered coat of arms over its gloomy entrance, facing equally tall houses on the other side of a street some four yards wide: a dank street into which the sun could hardly penetrate except at midday and the kind of house that Don José would naturally have chosen. It was only a hundred yards or so from the art-school and he stayed there for the rest of his life.

  Immediately northwards stood the still older Barrio Gótico, with its medieval houses and palaces by the cathedral, which itself was no distance at all from the Ramblas, the main artery of the old city, a broad, tree-filled avenue running right down to the port, with a fine shaded promenade in the middle, always crowded with people and enlivened by a flower-market, a bird-market, cafés—a continual flow of life. And on the far side of the Ramblas lay the densely-populated Barrio Chino, a rabbit-warren of deep, winding lanes, full of whores and sailors: picturesque slums, with their dark wine-shops lined with enormous barrels, seamen’s bars full of music, purple characters walking about, and the Mediterranean sun blazing down on the innumerable lines of colored washing hanging from the high façades, but slums nevertheless.

  It was a dirty city, upon the whole, with the middle ages lingering on in many parts of it, and the streets packed with horses, mules, and asses, carrying paniers or pulling carts, drays, wagons, carriages, omnibuses, cabs; a city smelling not only of horse and humanity but of the port, the fish-markets, hot olive oil, and the countless factory-chimneys.

  But it was an immensely living one, with nothing of that air of decrepitude and death so familiar in the rest of Spain, and it was inhabited by a race with the reputation of working extremely hard, of worshiping money and success, an unpolished, hard-headed nation. The removal of the court had long since changed the nature of Cervantes’ “seat of courtesy,” and Picasso’s Barcelona was emphatically a commercial city, one t
hat according to Jean Cassou “had never heard of good taste”: which, when one considers the castrating effect of good taste, was just as well for Picasso. Yet the prevailing materialism was tempered by a strong sense of religion, by a natural gaiety, and (whatever Cassou may say) by a certain feeling for the arts.

  It was Catalan businessmen who had launched Gaudí some twenty years before Picasso’s arrival; it was they who supported the thriving opera-house, the concerts, and the many choirs that sang Catalan songs both for pleasure and as a means of nationalist assertion. Their sensitivity to painting was less than it had been in the fifteenth century, when the municipality commissioned masterpieces from Huguet and Dalmáu; and one gallery alone, the Saló Parés (together with temporary exhibitions in the hall of the Vanguardia newspaper), was all that Barcelona could support in the way of living artists. Yet even at this time, when in every country but France painting was at its lowest, most dreary ebb, they did patronize their favorite Fortuny, they did possess an artistic club, dedicated to St. Luke, and it was their sons and even daughters who filled the busy art-school.

  This school was in the Exchange, a fine late-eighteenth-century building that incorporated the great Catalan-Gothic hall of its fourteenth-century counterpart built during the reign of Peter the Ceremonious. It was down by the harbor, its function being to accommodate merchants, shipowners, and marine insurers in their dealings, and the Catalans called it the Llotja, just as they called Peter En Pere. The official, Castilian, name was La Lonja, while En Pere came out as Pedro; and this dual system, which is to be found at every turn, makes it difficult for a writer to be consistent. The Catalans themselves often waver; Jaume Sabartés, a Barcelonan born and bred, signed his invaluable books on Picasso with the Castilian Jaime, and many a Catalan Joan uses the more familiar Spanish Juan outside his own country.

  This was the school that José Ruiz wished his son to attend. The elementary classes would have been an insult to his talent, but for entry to the higher schools of life, antique and painting two examinations were required, both of them of an adult standard, the minimum age being twenty.

  These examinations he had to undergo, for although Don José’s colleagues might be persuaded to accept that a short boy of thirteen was “apparently about twenty years of age” if in fact he really could draw as well as a mature art-student, they did not choose to make public fools of themselves by admitting a beginner, and they set him the tests in all their rigor. At this level they had nothing to do with ordinary school subjects, which perhaps was just as well: his first task was to draw a school model draped in a sheet; the second was a standing nude.

  A certain amount of legend has gathered about these examinations, and while some writers say that although a month was allowed, Picasso did the work in a single day; others prefer one hour instead of the permitted twenty-four.

  In fact the two surviving drawings are dated September 25 and 30, 1895, but even so there is no doubt that he produced them in a surprisingly short time. They ignored the art-school convention that would have turned the first model into a toga’d Roman and the second into a reasonably noble figure: Picasso drew exactly what he saw, a school model draped in a sheet and a stocky, ill-proportioned little man, very naked in the hard north light. But he did so with such extraordinary academic ability that there could be no question of the result; he was at once put down on the list of those admitted to the higher school for the academic year 1895-96. There were a hundred and twenty-eight of them, in alphabetical order, and he was the hundred-and-eighth, his second surname being spelled Picano.

  Most of the other names were typically Catalan—Puigvert, Bosch, Batlle, Campmany, Creus—and none achieved any wide notoriety. But number eighty-six was Manuel Pallarès Grau, who happened to be Picasso’s neighbor in his first anatomy class. Pallarès was a powerful rustic youth of rising twenty, an art-student of some standing, and of course he was much bigger than Pablo; but in spite of these differences they made friends at once. Indeed, the whole school accepted him, his personality and his obviously outstanding gifts doing away with the chasm between thirteen and twenty, a time when each year counts for ten. Here again it was taken for granted that Picasso was an extraordinary being, to whom common laws did not apply. Neither extreme youth nor extreme age ever mattered to Picasso where human relationships were concerned; all his life he met people he liked on the direct plane of immediate contact, unobscured by the accidental differences of birth, age, or nationality; and he and Pallarès, his earliest and certainly his most valuable friend in Barcelona, remained deeply attached as long as they lived.

  These first two years in Barcelona were comparatively quiet, industrious, and dutiful. It seems absurd to speak of any exceptional industry and sense of duty in a man who never stopped working all his life, whose output has been estimated at over fifteen thousand paintings to say nothing of his sculpture, engravings, and countless drawings, and whose sense of what was due to his art led him again and again to throw away success, critical and financial, when he was poor and needed both; but his later morality was his own alone, and here the words are used as they are understood by bourgeois families who want their son to “get on.” He lived at home, of course, and he attended the school regularly: he had put himself down for several courses, including History of Art and Aesthetics, and although in time he took to cutting these lectures, he was assiduous in all classes where there was a model. What is more, he perpetually walked about Barcelona with Pallarés, drawing with scarcely a pause, filling albums and sketch-books with street-scenes, horses, cats, dogs, whores, bawds, anarchist meetings, scores and scores of hands, paired and single, beggars, soldiers leaving for the unpopular Cuban campaign, soon to end in war with the United States. And he was busy at home, drawing and painting his family—a pastel of his mother, at least three portraits of his father, many drawings and paintings of the patient Lola—and preparing a big canvas for the spring exhibition of Fine Arts and Artistic Industries. It is a strictly academic picture, somewhat in the manner of the respected Mas y Fontdevila, and certainly painted under Don José’s supervision: it shows Lola in the white dress and veil of a girl at her first communion, kneeling before an altar with her father standing beside her. There is more Industry in it than one usually associates with Picasso, but within its limits it is an accomplished piece of work, and when it was shown (with the wild price-tag of 1500 pesetas—fifty pounds at the then rate of exchange) it met with a certain amount of mild praise.

  This was also the time when Picasso produced a sudden little output of religious pictures, including the charming “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” that he kept with him all his life: they amount to a dozen or more, and it is as though the fourteen-year-old Pablo were making a determined effort to be a “good boy.” At about this period, however, he also rid himself of his virginity: he and Pallarès went to all manner of places, and Picasso’s drawings show an early, exact knowledge of the female form, although the models at the school were all men. Picasso himself, when asked when he had first made love to a girl, held his hand a little more than a yard from the ground. One of these bawdy-houses was nearby, in the Calle d’Avinyó (Avinyó is the Catalan for Avignon, and to be consistent I should also put the Catalan carrer rather than calle; but calle is what the pilgrim will find written up on the wall), the very street to which the Llotja has recently been removed.

  With so much work to do—and the list should include the great number of careful studies from the school’s collection of plaster casts, one a prophetic charcoal drawing of a man carrying a lamb—and with such a close companionship with Pallarès, Picasso had not much leisure for the other students. He did make friends among them, particularly with Josep Cardona Furró, a sculptor, and with Joan Cardona Lladós, a draughtsman; but upon the whole they seem to have been rather a dull lot, and there is no record of the animated discussions of the new worlds of painting and philosophy that were to come a little later, when Picasso frequented the Quatre Gats, with its much maturer,
far more aware and living company.

  Yet even if these students knew little or nothing of Impressionism and still less of the Neo-Impressionists and Symbolists, they must all have been conscious of the Art Nouveau that was sweeping southwards from France, Germany, England, and the north in general, and that in its Spanish form took on the name of Modernismo. Santiago Rusñol, one of the most advanced of the earlier generation of painters and a poet (and one of the first men to buy Picassos), had organized several well-publicized Fiestas Modernistas at the nearby Sitges; and during the celebrations of 1895 two of his recently-acquired paintings by the then neglected El Greco were carried in procession. The sillier, more mawkish manifestations of later Art Nouveau make any association with El Greco seem strange, but the connection was more evident in 1895; and whether Picasso was at Sitges or not (most probably he was not) El Greco certainly had great influence on him when in time he reached Mádrid.

  Before seeing the Prado again, however, he was to spend another year at the Llotja and two summer holidays in Málaga. The first holiday, in 1896, was a period of the most surprising activity. Of the many drawings, pictures, and portraits that he produced in those months, two stand out as being quite exceptional; and neither shows the least trace of Barcelona. Although Picasso respected the professor of painting at the Llotja, Antonio Caba, the director of the school (an awful figure) and an able portraitist, in later life he said he did not like the pictures he painted when he was a boy in Barcelona: he preferred those of La Coruña. Now, back in his native town, he seems to have returned to that earlier state of spirit, with a greater power of expression and more to express.