Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  Even now it is at the back of beyond: in 1898 it was more so. They took the train to Tortosa, where Pallarès’ brother was waiting for them with a mule. They piled their easels, canvasés, color-boxes, and baggage on to the mule and walked, first up the fertile valley of the Ebro, with its orange-groves still in flower and its rice-paddies, then they struck southward across the mountains for its tributary, the Canaleta. Sometimes one or another would perch himself on the baggage and ride for a while, but most of the time they walked, rising continually into a new air and a new vegetation—arbutus, rosemary, lentiscus, rock-rose, thyme—the highland country with vast stretches of bare mountain, forests of Aleppo pine, and wastes: only a few primitive villages in the fertile parts and an occasional isolated dwelling, a saw-mill where there was” running water, a charcoal-burner’s or a lonely shepherd’s hut. The road dwindled as they went, and in fifteen miles or so it was no more than a mule-track. In a deep and sunless gorge, haunted by vultures, it wound about on either side of the rapid stream, crossing it by fords in the less dangerous places; but by the time they reached the end they had traveled close on twenty miles, and there were only two hours to go—only three or four more great mountains to cross and they would be home.

  For one who had never been outside a town and who had never walked five and twenty miles in his life, even with the help of a mule, this was a striking introduction to a new world—a world in which it was natural to step out briskly in the falling dusk, because of wolves.

  A new world for Picasso: an ancient world for its inhabitants. The Pallarès and their neighbors had lived in this remote village since the night of time, living off the land as people had always lived, long before ships plied from Barcelona. The ancient ways, language, skills, and values came naturally to them: Manuel Pallarès himself could carry a two-hundredweight sack on his shoulders, plough a Meld, saddle a mule, or milk a cow without having to think about it. His father owned land in the plain surrounding the village, and an olive-mill, renowned for the purity of its oil; and the family, together with their animals, lived in a big, rambling house built round a courtyard. It made a corner with the lane now called Calle Pintor Ruiz Picasso and the village square, a finely-conceived, dignified little plaza with the church on one side and deep, massively-pillared arcades, on the top of Horta’s hill, the only flat place in it.

  In these parts the peasants do not live out among their fields, but warned by Moorish raids, brigands, civil wars, and insurrections, they huddle together in little more or less fortified towns or villages. Horta is happy in its site, an abrupt, easily-defended mound, and the houses are tight-packed from top to bottom, a fascinating mass of lines, angles, and volumes; it is also happy in its local stone, and the church is a handsome building, ancient, but done up in the seventeenth century, at about the same time as Pallarès’ house; while the smaller houses, which often bridge the lanes, are substantial, made to last for generation after generation: and they are mostly washed with blue.

  In the evening the steep narrow streets (often rising in steps and always carefully ridged for hooves) are crowded with animals coming home: mules, asses, cows, goats, sheep, and a great many busy dogs. They live in byres and stables on the ground floor, among the domestic hens and rabbits, filling the town with a pleasant farmyard smell and warming their owners on the floor above; and early in the morning, woken by countless household cocks, they go out into the plain, a great saucer rimmed with mountains. It looks flat from a distance but in fact it undulates, and the less fertile higher ground is covered with almond-trees and olives; there are figs and vineyards too, but this is near the limit for grapes. All round the rim dry-stone terraces carry more olive-groves as high as they will go: an enormous investment over the centuries, not of money but of time and labor (they being unmarketable in that economy), for a minute return. The lower part of the plain is taken up with arable and pasture, in strips; but there is not a great deal of fertile land, and the people of Horta have to work very hard indeed to wring a living from it. This is not the misery of central and southern Spain, where absentee landlords own huge estates and where the landless peasants are hired by the day in a buyer’s market, but it is a harsh life, and the possibility of disaster is always present. Apart from all the natural calamities of farming—cattle diseases, swine-fever, chicken-pest—the crops can often fail: moisture does not lie on limestone ground, and Horta is no great way from those parts of Aragón where wine is exchanged for water, in times of drought.

  In 1897 their works and days had scarcely changed since Hesiod’s time: the acceleration of history (in which Picasso was to play his outstanding part) had not touched the Terra Alta. On the contrary, with the chronic agricultural depression it had slowed down since the spurt of the seventeenth century, which had seen the rebuilding of Horta’s church and the square. Theirs was still essentially subsistence-farming; a bad year, a drought, could bring death from starvation, and they knew it. There was little cash in Horta’s economy and that little was guarded with extraordinary pains—heavy iron bars to the windows, deep peasant suspicion—an odd contrast with their overflowing hospitality. They practiced the ancient virtues of thrift and hard work; their ordinary diet was sparing, their feasts enormous, with measureless wine; they were intensely pious and correspondingly blasphemous, the commonest oath being “My shit in the face of God.”

  This may seem an unlikely background for a Llotja student, but Manuel Pallarès had early shown a gift for drawing, and although his father was of course the absolute ruler of the family, his patriarchal authority acknowledged by one and all, he was no more capable than another man of withstanding his wife’s steady, unremitting pressure. He would have preferred to keep Manuel on the land, but he had three other sons, and in any case the gross materialism of the petty bourgeois is no part of the Catalan peasant’s tradition. With tolerably good grace he resigned himself to parting with a capital farm-hand and with a considerable sum of money; and in time Manuel reached the Llotja, by way of Tortosa and a private art-school.

  Manuel Pallarès had a typical Catalan head, round, male, far from beautiful, a good deal of space between his nose and his mouth, with shrewd good sense shining from it. He fitted into his place the moment he came home, helping with the innumerable chores of a farm—no airs or graces at all. There was little about the land he did not understand, from building a stack to gelding lambs; and since he was a passionate hunter he also knew a great deal about the mountains and the game that lived in them.

  “Everything I know I learnt in Pallarès’ village,” said Picasso in later years: and “everything” included not only the use of the curry-comb and the scythe; an intimate acquaintance with the making of wine and oil; the harvesting of hay, corn, grapes, and olives; the shearing of sheep; the killing of a pig; and the milking of a cow; but also the ability to speak Catalan with total fluency as well as a deep understanding of essentials that no townsman can ever know directly.

  But he and his friend were also there to paint, and to do this they retired to a cave, miles and miles away in the mountains, in an uninhabited, deeply-wooded region called the Ports del Maestrat, almost in Aragón. The cave was inadequate, uncomfortable, and shallow as well as being inaccessible, but they had the curious idea of painting two large compositions there. Picasso’s father sent the canvas, the village carpenter made the stretchers, and they set off with a mule, provisions, a dog, a small boy, and Pallarès’ younger brother, Salvador. They went as far as the mule could go, made a fire, and camped for the night in the open air. The next day, carrying their easels and color-boxes, Picasso and Pallarès climbed up through the forest and eventually found their cave. Here they stayed for weeks and weeks, painting, drawing, walking about, bathing in the nearby stream, collecting firewood and sometimes fossils. They slept on a deep bed of scented grass and leaves, and just outside the cave they kept a great fire burning until late at night: every few days Salvador brought them food—bread, wine, rice, beans, potatoes, stockfish, salt p
ork, oil—and among other things Picasso learned to cook. He had a knife that served to split kindling, peel potatoes, slice the fat bacon, and feed him at table: he kept it forever, and Josép Palau i Fabre, the Catalan poet to whom this account is due, he having had it from the mouth of Pallarès himself, saw it at Notre-Dame-de-Vie some sixty or seventy years later.

  As the days grew shorter and the summer waned, thunder gathered in the mountains, and one night rain, driving right into the shallow cave, soaked them and all their belongings. A few days later a prodigious wind blew all night: at dawn they hurried to the place where they had been working, and they found that their pictures had been hurled far and wide, the stretchers broken. (Picasso had been busy with an Idyll and Pallarès with a Woodcutter.) They detached the canvases, lit the fire with the stretchers, and decided that this was enough. Salvador brought the mule, they loaded their battered pictures on to it, and returned to Horta.

  In the village they found men back from Cuba, in a dismal state. The war with the United States was over; the island was nominally independent; Spain had suffered a most humiliating defeat. Yet this could have little effect upon a community that had never felt itself bound to Mádrid by anything but taxes and conscription; the village welcomed the returning soldiers and then turned straight to its immediate, necessary tasks. Harvest would wait for no man, nor would the gathering of the grapes. The gutters ran purple with the washing of the lees, the presses creaked, and for weeks the lanes smelled of fermenting wine. Then came Saint Martin’s day, and Horta echoed with the shrieks of dying swine: their blood did not run down the streets, however; it was carefully preserved for that local treat—the butifarra, a bloated, black-mottled sausage. And as the olives ripened, turning color as the winter advanced, they had to be beaten down or picked, and the great millstone began to turn, grinding out their oil.

  Picasso helped wherever he could, but even saddling a mule or wielding a pitchfork has a knack to it: when the great dunghill in the central court was to be cleared away and taken to the fields he set to with the best will in the world, but presently his fork had to be taken away from him for his own protection, and he was put to carrying the dung in baskets and loading them into the paniers of the ass. He was well liked in the family and in the village, and when he went to the mill the people there would give him their particular delicacy, a great round of dark country bread, toasted, set to swim in the virgin oil, fished out when it began to sink, rubbed with garlic, sprinkled with salt, and eaten on the spot.

  At other times, apart from making a great many drawings, he worked at a painting called “Aragonese Customs.” It has not survived, but if a caricature in Blanco y Negro is to be believed, it was strictly representational—a woodcutter with an ax: a woman kneeling in the background. And he had the opportunity of painting what might have been an outstanding example of Spanish realism. The winter storms are furious in those parts, and during one of them an old woman and her grand-daughter were struck by lightning. In such cases an autopsy had to be carried out: the medical man invited Picasso and Pallarès, imagining that it would please them. His colleague should have come from Gandesa to help, but as it was raining he did not do so, and the doctor asked the sereno to proceed without him. All this took place in a dark night in a hut by the graveyard. The sereno took the saw kept for the purpose, lifted the child from her coffin, placed her on a table, and sawed her head in two down the middle to satisfy the doctor as to the cause of death. He was smoking at the time, and as he worked, his hands and his cigar became deeply spattered. Then came the old woman’s turn, but Picasso declined to stay for the second operation. Indeed, he did not even make a drawing of the first; yet might not this vertical division have had some effect upon his own treatment of the human head in later days?

  Life in Horta during the autumn and winter of 1898 was not all work, however: far from it. Picasso and Pallarès often went for walks—one took them to Gandesa. twenty miles for trousers to replace those worn out in their cave’—and they often went to the village café. But these mild joys were nothing in comparison to the traditional feasts. Apart from All Hallows, with its chestnuts and new wine, and Christmas, there was St. Anthony’s day in January, a most important festival at which horses, mules, asses, and sometimes oxen, beautifully groomed, adorned with plaits and ribbons, their hooves blacked and polished, are blessed outside the church, and at which the popular religious ballads called goigs are handed about, together with those prints, the remote ancestors of the strip-cartoon, which are called auques in Catalan and aleluyas in Spanish and which, in a series of charming woodcuts on a single sheet, show the chief events of a saint’s life. Very often, in Catalan feasts, the people are unable to wait for the day itself; and here too the main celebrations took place on St. Anthony’s eve. They took the form of a kind of free-running play, with plenty of room for improvisation, in which the saint appeared, was tempted by as many demons and fair women as Horta and the surrounding hamlets could provide, and did resist. Picasso did not: at least he did not resist the prodigious quantity of wine drunk on these occasions, and was found fast asleep on the staircase of Pallarès’ house.

  This vitally important period of his life, in which he acquired new values and a far wider understanding of the world, the best part of a year spent in completely new surroundings, produced no obvious, radical change in his drawing or his painting; and the volume of his work was understandably less—for one thing, he lacked materials.

  The drawing is even more assured, and there are some truly wonderful sheep and goats, studied essentially for their life and movement. The touch is more determined, and in some of the drawings he paid more attention to texture than before: in his intricate shading he used some methods new to him, but his general approach was still the same, in spite of a greater interest in light and darkness and the use of a heavier outline for the figure. And still there is this preoccupation with his name: a peasant in wooden shoes, sitting on the ground in front of a broken pipkin, is surrounded by P. Picazzo Picasso Picaz P. Ruiz Picasso Picasso Picas.

  In the paintings that have survived, much the same applies. Apart from the rural nature of the subjects, most of them might have been painted a year or so earlier; and there is one of a cart-shed which, with its strong light and deep brown shadow, harks back farther still.

  Upon the whole the drawings are more obviously brilliant than the pictures. There is a timeless quality about very good drawing which is lacking in the fin-de-siecle colors he was sometimes using then; yet among the paintings there were some landscapes in which hindsight can see the seed of that Cubism which was to flower in Horta itself some ten years later and others which give the lie to the statement that Picasso took nothing from nature itself but saw the world only through other men’s pictures, a statement made by those who had never seen this then invisible part of his work, and one upon which a great deal of theory has been founded.

  However, of these pictures it was certainly “Aragonese Customs” that pleased Don José most. Before it vanished it won another honorable mention in Mádrid, another piece of facetious criticism, and in Málaga another gold medal.

  He finished this picture in February, 1899, waited for the paint to dry, rolled the canvas up, made his farewells, and returned to Barcelona. There could be no more convincing evidence of his amiability among those he esteemed than the fact that in spite of his having stayed with the Pallarès three quarters of a year, he was urgently pressed to come back again.

  Chapter IV

  HORTA de Ebro had given Picasso a complete break, time and peace for reconsideration of everything that was important to him; it restored his health and strength to such a degree that he resisted the privation of the coming years; and even more important for the immediate future it provided him with the language of the country he lived in. He did know a little Catalan before going there, but he had not been obliged to use it: at Horta he swam in the language—not a word of Castilian around him for close on a year—and it had sunk in
deeply. He now spoke it without effort, using the language, says Sabartés “exactly, and with no literary turns or affected phrases.” Sabartés should have known, since he and Picasso went on speaking it together for the next sixty-nine years: but on the other hand, for Sabartés Picasso could do no wrong; and Cirici-Pellicer, a more objective witness, says that Picasso “usually employed a mixture of the two languages [Castilian and Catalan], which made his manner of expressing himself eminently picturesque.” Certainly he wrote it incorrectly. He was no good at languages: in 1911, after years and years of Paris, a monoglot French mistress, and the perpetual company of French friends he could still begin a letter “iyer de toute la journé je ne ai pas eu de letre de toi’; and to the end of his life he never lost his very heavy Spanish accent nor his highly individual approach to the French language.

  Picasso had a brilliant and original mind, but it did not do its important work in words; it was not primarily a verbal mind. It traveled into regions where words are either non-existent or irrelevant; he worked out no consistent verbal theory whatsoever, and his dicta on art can be made to say anything at all. He did utter some fine aphoristic flashes, some of which he undoubtedly meant; but what he really had to say he said in paint, sculpture, and line. He loathed art-criticism, analysis, and verbal aesthetics: his philosophy is to be seen on the wall, and rightly taken it is all of a piece.

  But as far as Catalan is concerned he was certainly fluent and perfectly comprehensible, and this meant that on returning to Barcelona he could form an integral part of the group of writers, painters, and poets who met at Els Quatre Gats, a café or tavern or beer-hall or cabaret modeled on Rudolphe Salis’ Chat Noir and Aristide Briant’s Mirliton in Montmartre. They were a mixed body of men, differing widely in tastes and abilities, but they were united in their love for Modernismo and for their own language: an habitué speaking only Spanish would have been an intruder. And since some were anarchists, believing that the new world would dawn when the last king was strangled with the guts of the last priest, and most were Catalan separatists, there might have been some danger in admitting an outsider to their intimacy. (Not that this should be exaggerated: the real, the hard-line anarchists who tried to put Bakunin’s ideas into practice were almost exclusively working-men, whereas the conscientious bohemians of the Quatre Gats belonged to the middle class—their anarchism was theoretical, and their separatism did not go far beyond singing “Els Segadors,” the nationalist song.) Picasso was well introduced, however; not only did he speak the language, but he already knew several of their members; and within a few weeks of his return he was perfectly at home there.