Still more windows appear, but not alone; they form part of sick-bed or death-bed scenes (his concession to the “decadence” of the time), and they are always closed. In later years Picasso’s windows grew broader; they were often wide open to a world full of sun and color and doves. But in these Barcelona days only one swings back to let the glow of the tawny, sunlit town into the vague gloom of the room: Lola Ruiz stands in front of it, wearing a ghostly white dress. There is something white on the floor beside her, possibly paper with which she is about to light her brother’s fire.
Another very striking picture indeed is that which he called “El Greco’s Bride,” one of the very few he gave a name. It is a masklike greenish egg-shaped face, bald, sexless; the highly formalized convex forehead and the arches above the blind eyes sweep down the long straight nose in a manner that he was to recognize six or seven years later, when he first saw African sculpture. Yet the mask itself, again like some carved in Africa, gives the impression of concavity as it hangs there upon its white, black-bordered cloth scattered with violets below, reminding one of the Holy Face of St. Veronica, with which the general idea may have originated—there were plenty to be seen in Spanish churches.
Then again he painted a plunging view of the Riera de Sant Joan from his studio: and he painted it as no one else would have done. The people far below, the little cart, take their urgently living form from two or three strong brush-strokes, and the heavy impasto swirls about to give an effect of aerial height. It has been said that in this period of extraordinarily rapid development Picasso passed through every stage except Impressionism; but surely this is his contribution?
Of course there are a great many other pictures, most of them still entirely representational, and innumerable drawings; among them a number concerned with poverty, illness, sick-beds and death; bars, café, theater and dance-hall scenes, such as a café-chantant on the Paralelo; a good many whores, including the Lautrecish La Chata, a tough one, smoking a cigarette; bull-fights too and bullfighters; studies for posters; nudes, sometimes treated geometrically; and some self-portraits. The Barcelona museum has a dozen and more, and they range from the boy who arrived in the city and the awkward youth of 1896 with large red ears and his hair all over the place to the self-possessed through rather desperate young man of later years. They are interesting not only because he was an interesting person with an interesting face but also because he never saw it twice in the same way. They are all unflattering, they all have that somewhat melancholy, unfocused look of a man gazing in a mirror; but the man in the glass cannot make himself out. Sometimes the face is young, sometimes old, sometimes angular, sometimes (as his friends saw it) round; but although one is labeled Me and although another carries the repeated inscription “ Yo el Rey” the nature of each is different; there is no sure, total grasp of the subject, never the unfailing certainty of his portraits of Don José, for example.
In all this outpouring there is a great variety of approach and a great variety of achievement. An aesthetic so personal and so radically new as Picasso’s necessarily had a long and painful gestation; and his anxiety, doubts, and hesitations are apparent in his work.
If a man has had premonitions of what in an entirely different context would be called the beatific vision, and if expressing it in his own language of paint entails the destruction of what he and his fathers have understood by painting, it is understandable that he should have periods of doubt about the validity of his revelation: particularly if he is surrounded by people who can have almost no notion of what he is about—by people who swim in the present and the recent past while he is well out into the future. A man reaching as far as Picasso was reaching even then is necessarily lonely: he cannot follow; he can only lead. But he can only lead when he is sure of himself and when he is on the top of his form, when mood, health, light, food, sleep, women, freedom from interruption are all in favorable conjunction.
It is no part of this book’s aim to represent Picasso as a paragon of all virtues nor indeed of any; he was quite capable of turning out dull pictures and some that most people would call thoroughly bad. These horrid lapses, which would not matter in any of his contemporaries, were perhaps more the effect of gratitude, kindness, and hunger than conviction: when Romeu asked him to do advertisements and menu-cards for the Quatre Gats he produced things in the worst Art Nouveau manner, the thick treacly line, the vulgar, silly romanticism rendered with a sickening virtuosity. And there is a somewhat later portrait of his friend Sebastia Junyent, one of the few labored and technically inept pictures that Picasso ever painted, which can only be explained by tenderness for his model.
The general impression this period gives is that of eager restless search, of deep and sometimes very unhappy thought, yet with cheerfulness often breaking through. It is true that much later Picasso said, “I do not seek: I find.” But he was always much given to stunning his interlocutors, particularly the more earnest souls; he was extremely impatient of talk about art and he loved a pointed saying far more than what some would call the literal truth, plodding and often essentially false: He would speak according to his mood and according to his audience; he hated to be even very slightly manipulated—the oracle that can be made to work—and his collected sayings contain a mass of mutually exclusive statements. A writer with a point to make could prove any thesis he chose to advance by selecting those that support it. For instance, he also said, “I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search incessantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.”
This second remark certainly seems to fit the years 1899-1900 even more than it does the rest, for not only did he run in every direction, using his already formidable battery of techniques—pen, pencil, gouache, watercolor, pastel, tempera, oil—but he added etching and wood-engraving, his first essays in which date from 1899, and probably sculpture, though here the date is less certain.
The story of his first etching has often been told: his friend Canals showed him how to prepare the plate, how to draw the line through the protective coating with a needle so that the metal was exposed, and how to dip it into the acid so that the mordant should bite into the bared copper, thus giving a recess for the ink in the subsequent printing process. Picasso drew a massive picador, booted and spurred, holding his pike, with a fair-sized owl on the ground beside him; but he could not grasp the fact that printing would reverse the image, and the picador’s pike came out on the wrong side of the picture. This did not puzzle him for a moment: he at once entitled the etching “El Zurdo,” the left-handed picador.
The wood-engraving, a bullfighter holding his cloak, is less well known: here the technique is far more difficult, because the line has to be cut into the wood with a graver and no mistake can be corrected, but Picasso handled this new and unforgiving tool with almost the same ease as his pencil: the line is easy, fluent, unconstrained.
He learned a great deal in Barcelona: but he was outgrowing Modernismo whereas most of his friends at the Quatre Gats were still devoted to its somewhat faded innovations. His friend Junyent did say, “The nineteenth century has died with the consolation of seeing the splendor of a great art on the horizon of the infinite, a lofty art, strong, complex, earthy and spiritual,” but he also observed that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais had reached the highest point ever achieved in painting.
The more Picasso heard of Paris, particularly in this year of 1900, the year of the Exposition Universelle, the talk of the western world, and the more he learned of France from the papers he saw, the more provincial Barcelona seemed. A great deal of its modest intellectual ferment was closely connected with nationalism, separatism, Catalan autonomy; and none of this, nor Catalan politics, affected him essentially: in spite of all their kindness for him and of his for them, he remained an outsider in Barcelona. Certainly it had given him a great deal, and certainly it was a tough city, as tough as Marseilles or Naples, with bombs, violence, strikes, repre
ssion, a sinister secret police, and the extremes of wealth and poverty: and the Quatre Gats were thorough-going in their amusements in spite of their pipes and their whimsy—morphine was readily available, and both cocaine and the more economical laudanum were to be had over the counter at the nearest chemist’s shop. But Picasso was growing tired of their humorless Sturm und Drang: he had already poked fun at them with his picture of Sabartés, labeled “Poeta Decadente,” draped in a cloak, crowned with a wreath, holding an iris in his hand, and standing in the midst of flames in a dark graveyard. Picasso could be desperately unhappy and he could be moody to the point of getting up in the middle of a conversation and of walking out of the café without a word; but he was never dreary: nor was he reverent. For a being so overflowing with life, the sight of these people taking their decadence so seriously had begun to be wearisome now that it was no longer new.
Several of the Quatre Gats went to Paris that year, partly to see the exhibition; several were already more or less settled there; and Picasso, Pallarès, and Casagemas made plans to go too. These plans were complicated not only by the general lack of money but by the possibility that Pallarès might obtain a commission to decorate a chapel at Horta; but as the year wore on they grew more substantial.
By the autumn of 1900 Picasso had become reconciled with his family, and in October it was with his father’s reluctant consent and his mother’s active support that he set off for Paris with Casagemas. Pallarès had in fact received his commission and he could not be with them at the Estación de Francia, but he was to join them in a week or two.
“And the money for all this, where did it come from?” asked Sabartés.
“Pallarès, Casagemas and I were going to share. My father paid for the ticket. He and my mother came to the station with me. When they went home, all they had left was the loose change in his pocket. They had to wait until the end of the month before they could get straight. My mother toid me long after.”
By dawn Picasso had crossed the Pyrenees at last. They were well behind him and the train was tearing northwards through France at an exhilarating pace unknown to Spain, belching smoke. A thousand kilometers from the frontier it drew into Paris: they crept from their third-class carriage, deeply covered with smuts, loaded with easels, color-boxes, portfolios, baggage. For a moment it was still Spain, with Catalan and Spanish all around them, tourists for the exhibition, immigrant workers with shapeless bundles; then as the stream flowed off the platform into the open it was Paris. A Paris as dirty as Barcelona or even dirtier but infinitely more full of color: brilliant posters everywhere—Chéret, Bonnard, Steinlen, Forain, Toulouse-Lautrec; sandwichmen; women dressed in bright colors rather than the black of Spain; startling umbrellas. Everywhere the enormous roar of the iron tires of horse-buses, drays, carts, and wagons on the crowded stone-paved streets, littered deep with dung, speckled with the bills handed out by the sandwichmen and thrown away; and mingling with the accustomed omnipresent reek of horse-piss and dung, the new sharp smell of petrol fumes. (Picasso always had a very strong sense of smell.) A bewildering great city, vaster by far than Barcelona or Madrid, and immensely active—no leisurely Spanish pacing here: the French language all round them, a babel of signs, street-cries, directions, people talking, policemen, carters, cab-drivers bawling in their native tongue; and Picasso, the eternal outsider, did not possess a word of it.
But he did at least know one thing: artists in Paris lived in Montparnasse. Rooms and even regular studios were to be had cheaply in Montparnasse. Junyent was already living there, and they went to see him at once. Although this might only be a short stay, hotels were out of the question, and they must find a room, preferably with some furniture in it.
They had hit upon a place in the rue Campagne-Première, just off the boulevard Montparnasse, and Picasso was on the point of taking it when he ran into Nonell, who was on the wing for Barcelona, portfolio packed and ready to depart. He at once offered them his studio in the rue Gabrielle, far over on the other side of Paris, on the hill of Montmartre, close to the Sacré Coeur.
There was no refusing so handsome an offer, and when Pallarès arrived in a few days’ time, too soon for them to have had his letter so that they could meet him at the station, he found them comfortably installed, quite at home, with two young women, Germaine and Odette.
It was clear that Picasso was quite pleased with Odette, in his cheerful way, although he could not communicate verbally with her at all: it was equally clear that Casagemas was very, very much more affected by Germaine. Presently Ramon Pichot came to see them and a third girl was produced, Germaine’s sister Antoinette. (Pallarès was already deeply in love in Spain; and he was some ten years older than the rest.) How five of these shifting relationships developed is far from clear, but the sixth, Casagemas’ longing for Germaine, grew steadily more obvious.
Picasso was much attached to Casagemas; they were intimate friends, and he knew about his impotence—in fact, he had introduced Casagemas to Rosita, one of his favorite Calle d’Avinyó girls, in an effort to help him. Exactly what he did to deal with this present situation has not been recorded except in his subsequent pictures, which are open to various interpretations. What is certain is that later he felt the outcome as deeply as it was possible for him to feel anything.
A hypothesis, based on his pictures and a few other circumstances, is this: he tried to detach Germaine from Casagemas—no very difficult task, perhaps, once the poor man’s condition had become evident—and then possibly to transfer her to Pichot, whom in fact she eventually married. If he thought that by taking the girl away from Casagemas he would cure his friend’s unhappy passion, he was wrong: he may have succeeded with Germaine, but Casagemas still went about with her, and his desperate love grew day by day.
In any case these days were filled to overflowing for Picasso, and he had little time to look after his friend. There was such a very great deal to be seen: the enormous wealth of the Louvre; the vast, spreading Exposition Universelle itself, which included exhibitions of art in the new-built Grand and Petit Palais and, in the Champ-de-Mars, a retrospective of French painting over the last century—acres of official pictures, but also David, Delacroix, Ingres, Daumier, Courbet, Corot, the Impressionists.
All this was exciting for the foreign artist, but less so for the native. The Paris of 1900 had grown used to Impressionism and although Monet, Sisley, and some others were still painting purely Impressionist pictures, the first impetus had long since died away. The group’s last exhibition had taken place fourteen years before amidst a violent quarrel about who was Impressionist and who was not, and their successors had never had quite the same impact. Neo-Impressionism produced some wonderful pictures, but Seurat had died in 1891, and apart from Signac and perhaps Cross there were few painters whose divisionist or pointillist technique looked anything more than the application of another man’s rules. There was much talk of Synthétisme, and the Nabis, with Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Vallotton, Vuillard, and Bonnard were carrying on with modern painting in their quiet, domestic way, sometimes galvanized by their connection with Gauguin; but the strong current had been broken, and although there was still a feeling of newness and discovery in the air, the younger artists had no clear rallying-point. The writers of the time, always ready with theory, tried with some success to persuade them that they were or should be Symbolists in the literary sense. They lived in an odd mixture of fin-de-siècle aestheticism and the slowly-crystalizing new outlook, between Mallarmé and Jarry as it were: much of the confused, eclectic Art Nouveau with which they were surrounded looked backwards, and so did the Rose-Croix of Joseph Péladan and his followers; yet many of the young men had seen something of van Gogh, Gauguin, and even Cézanne.
The Parisians of 1900 were not starved for painting. Every year the huge official Salon des Artistes français showed room after room of unbelievably debased academic pictures—slick portraits, illustrations of trifling, often sentimental anecdote, picturesque nooks, and v
ery, very curious nudes—while the dissident Société nationale des Beaux-Arts did much the same, though in their Salon might be seen the now semiofficial watered Impressionism. Yet neither of these Salons was always and entirely devoid of worth: the young Matisse was happy to show at the Nationale, and the Beaux-Arts professor who taught him and for whom he retained a respectful affection all his life, the amiable Gustave Moreau, regularly sent his pictures to the Artistes français, where Rouault also exhibited. But it was at the third Salon, that of the Indépendants, that the new painting was really to be seen. The Société des Indépendants was founded by Seurat, Signac, Redon, and their friends in 1884, and at their second exhibition they hung four pictures by Henri Rousseau, commonly known as the Douanier, while in the years before 1900 they also showed Bonnard, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, the then virtually unknown and quite unsalable van Gogh, and many other splendid painters.
This was the atmosphere in which Picasso was to live, but for the moment it was not the pictures shown in any of the Salons nor yet the crowded Exposition that gave him his view of the living art of Paris. His most profitable days were spent walking about the streets. In the first place there were the posters everywhere, and then such shows as the Revue Blanche’s Seurat retrospective, and of course the commercial galleries. There were fewer than there are today, and most were concerned with old masters or established academics; but among those dealers who handled modern painting some rose far above the shop-keeper level. Durand-Ruel in the rue Laffitte encouraged many of the younger men, including Odilon Redon, Bonnard, the Nabis and the painters of the Rose-Croix, who were also to be seen at Le Bare de Bouteville’s place; Bing’s Galérie de I’Art nouveau showed Munch; Berheim-Jeune van Gogh; and Ambroise Vollard, also in the rue Laffitte, was devoted in a more than commercial sense to Cézanne, whom he had inherited from Tanguy. Although the State had refused to accept Caillebotte’s Cézannes as a gift in 1894, Vollard bought no less than two hundred, holding important exhibitions in 1895 and again in 1899, while he also showed several of the new painters, including Picasso’s friend Isidre Nonell, as well as publishing books such as Verlaine’s Parallèlement with illustrations by Bonnard. And then there was the struggling Berthe Weill, who did her best for all the young; sooner or later almost every famous name in twentieth-century painting from Matisse to Modigliani passed through her shop, though with very little profit to herself—as late as 1909 she sold “a pretty little van Gogh” for sixty francs. In his wanderings Picasso saw a great deal in these shops and their windows: he made his first-hand acquaintance with Cézanne and Degas and Gauguin, for example, and it was now that he came to realize what a truly great painter Toulouse-Lautrec was.
Picasso: A Biography Page 11
