PRAISE FOR THE BLUE PERIOD
“Luke Jerod Kummer’s tenderly crafted portrait of Picasso as a young artist, just starting out in a foreign country and grieving a great loss, cuts through the stereotypical bravado so often associated with the artist to add richly shaded layers of emotion, insight, and smartly noticed detail.”
—Rachel Corbett, author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin
“Lusciously written and deeply imaginative, Kummer’s debut is an edgy, elegant reimagining of a period in Picasso’s life that forever changed the art world. It takes readers from the heat of Spain to the underbelly of Paris, as we follow the artist through friendship, dizzying infatuation, sex, and tragedy as he tries to claw his way to success. A book that feels as passionate and bold as Picasso himself.”
—Karin Tanabe, author of The Gilded Years
“Luke Jerod Kummer’s The Blue Period is a vivid, well-researched re-creation of the world from which a great artist emerged and a richly imagined meditation on the relationships and tragedies that shaped both his life and his art.”
—John Biguenet, author of Oyster and The Torturer’s Apprentice
“Like the subject of this eloquent and incisive novel, Kummer proves himself a true artist with a top-rate imagination and a special gift for dialogue and description. An historian with artistic sensibilities, he paints a complete and colorful picture of Picasso during this period, ensuring a deeper understanding of him for future generations. This important debut novel shows that Kummer may have immortality in him as well.”
—Eddie Chuculate, author of Cheyenne Madonna
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2019 Luke Jerod Kummer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Little A, New York
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ISBN-13: 9781542049979 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542049970 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542049962 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542049962 (paperback)
Cover design by Isaac Tobin
First edition
Lydia Csató Gasman—I feared I’d found you too late but then discovered you were already here.
CONTENTS
START READING
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
PART TWO
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
I
II
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
I
II
III
CHAPTER 7
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
PART THREE
CHAPTER 8
I
II
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
I
II
III
IV
CHAPTER 11
I
II
CHAPTER 12
I
II
CHAPTER 13
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 14
I
II
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
There in the distance we behold a black cloud of swirling sands, gyrating in the wind. Terrified, you cling to me, watching death approach.
I fear not death. When it comes it shall find us standing firm, welcoming; our embrace rendering us one, arms entangled like feverish snakes . . .
C. Casagemas, Barcelona, ca. 1900
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
Madrid, February 1901
When you wake from siesta in winter with shadows long and the sun groomed to set, the days can seem to end almost before they’ve begun. A chill cakes the air. Squares empty. Soon, all that is left are vagrants, crazies, drunks, and the sorts of lovers who can’t go home, these bodies immune to the cold.
Ever since arriving to Madrid from the south more than a month ago, Pablo has carried an easel during these in-between hours to the magnificent Plaza de la Constitución. He is no stalker of fleeting, roaring light—no impressionist. Nor is he a Romantic slave to some idealized sky. Instead, he is captivated by the plaza’s ancient redbrick walls and rows of ironwork balconies stretching above imposing granite columns and arches. This is a place for pondering what’s gone and what’s next. And despite the promises he made to his family, Pablo has no idea what lies ahead. Just the other afternoon, he had an inkling to paint the outcasts, those who linger in the barren twilight.
But today, the nineteen-year-old artist sets up near a desolate café to paint a different image, one that’s been haunting him.
Pablo’s big dark eyes fix ahead as he shivers beneath a floppy hat pulled over his ears. His delicate hand—its fingertips escaping through cutoff knit gloves—continuously moves a thin round brush across the canvas’s gray background. He remembers how he and Carles fled Paris under the cover of night like assassins, not two weeks before Pablo wound up here. His poet friend’s ringing voice still follows him as he renders in dusky contours the woman he’s also left behind—hair of lampblack, gaze like lightning, canny smile of the Sphinx.
A storm of pigeons has gathered by the café to peck at the crusts of bomba rice that a pudgy restaurant worker scraped from a casserole and flung onto the ground. Pitched coos and the noise of their claws scratching against cobblestone echo within the plaza’s four walls. Searing red eyes bob up in the corner of Pablo’s vision.
How, he wonders, could a dishwasher have known such a cruel way to taunt me?
Pablo’s father painted pigeons—that’s the only goddamned thing the old man ever could paint—and Pablo despises them. He’s grown sicker of his homeland by the day. He longs for France and all the wonder it has left to reveal.
Above the din of the birds, Pablo hears racing footsteps just as the flock explodes into flight. A crop of hair, eyebrows, glasses, then a whole face appear over the top of the easel. Pablo looks up. It’s Cinto, the boyishly handsome medical student with lips that curve like Cupid’s bow. Pablo knows him from Barcelona. He’s soft with his words, cautious, sweet. Like Pablo, Cinto arrived in the capital around New Year’s. But he looks panicked, sweating with his jacket open and holding a crumpled letter. His short, exasperated breaths are white bursts in the February air.
“Carles,” he puffs. “Dead. In Paris. A pistol.”
Years later, Pablo will recall the inexplicable sensation when his life was ripped into two: the age when Carles was alive and another after he was gone.
“Pajaresco, he was with him,” says Cinto. “And that girl, the half Spanish. It’s what you said, Pablo! She made Carles crazy—killed him!”
Pablo looks down at the centuries-old pavement. It has heard inquisitors’ verdicts and bears the stains of heretics’ ashes. But in this moment, the stones remind Pablo of when he was small and his father showed him how to grind rock and make pigment. Nearby, a low pitiful sound comes from a lame pigeon left behind by the flock.
“No, Cinto,” Pablo replies, his paintbrush touching the supple neck of the woman who has emerged onto the canvas as if from a whorl of smoke. “I did.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER 2
Málaga, December 1884
It was the earthquake when Pablo was three that first married life with calamity.
Pablo’s mother had draped herself across a window seat in the salon ever since coming home from Midnight Mass with spasms the night before. He sat with his tiny feet swinging from a chair’s edge on the other side of the room, contemplating the way Doña María’s round cheeks grew taut each time a creature writhed beneath the plump midsection of her maroon gitana dress. The pouf of hair resting on a pillow behind her head quivered as she chomped her lip.
Don José poured his laboring wife a thimbleful of sherry and stood close to let her squeeze his willowy arm. He was her opposite. Where she was short, plump, and radiating Mediterranean warmth, he was tall and long faced, his blanched patrician cheekbones beset by a neat reddish beard. She sipped the syrupy liquid, and they watched the clock hands for two and a half hours until Don José decided his wife needed stronger medicine. Perhaps his physician brother, Salvador, could convince the pharmacy to open on Christmas. He told Pablo to keep an eye on his mother as he threw a silk cape around his frock coat and ventured into the darkness.
Don José was gone for a long time. Pablo snuggled up below where his mother was sprawled out. He rubbed her swollen calves. He retrieved his lápiz to amuse her with the lifelike pictures she always praised him for. Doña María looked down at him and mouthed thanks to the Lord for what she’d already received. Her precocious black-haired son, with dark eyes large as a baby orangutan’s, was pondering the most agonized smile he’d ever seen when the paper beneath his pencil began to vibrate and his studied lines grew into wild scribbles. Then, suddenly, it was as if Judgment itself were at hand.
Plaster from the ceiling of the third-floor apartment on Calle Merced began to fall around them in giant flakes, and Don José’s spooked pet pigeons bounced off the walls. Doña María, still moaning in pain, snatched Pablo by the scruff of his neck and crawled them through the blizzard of down and debris. They cowered in the pantry, foodstuffs tumbling onto their heads. Doña María whispered the rosary and pressed her son’s cheek to the belly of her dress. When Don José finally came bolting upstairs, she was too scared to speak.
“Hurry,” Don José ordered when he found them in the pantry, covered with ghostly white flour. “The next quake is coming!”
Small as he was, Pablo detected the Brandy de Jerez and pipe smoke hovering like the devil’s cologne and knew what Doña María was thinking: his father had returned carrying with him no tablets, no tonic, no tincture, and no wafer cachets because, in all those hours, he never did make it to the drugstore.
Don José pulled his wife to her feet and swaddled Pablo in his cape, slinging him over the shoulder like an onion sack. The Ruiz Picasso family fled through the fiery streets to a thick-walled one-story home standing directly on bedrock that belonged to Papa’s art museum colleague who was away visiting Rome.
The rumbling carried on the next afternoon, each episode an anxious eternity. Everyone in the province would run outside and find the horizon shaking like a branch in the wind. They’d scour the firmament for sun or stars—something fixed to know everything was not being torn asunder. Sacked by Moors, reclaimed in the Reconquista, now rattling off the ledge of the Iberian Peninsula, Málaga prayed six hundred more would not die as had happened on Christmas.
Three days after the first quake, Pablo’s sister was born between tremors. The family had huddled themselves inside two adjoining chambers in the center of the house, so Pablo heard the shrieking and believed his mother doomed. He saw the newborn when it was still glazed with blood and waxy white film, the head stretched and purple like an eggplant. It looked dead, and Pablo waited for someone to blow cigar smoke into the nostrils, which is how he’d heard Uncle Salvador had resurrected him from stillbirth. But then she moved, the way a beetle floating in bathwater does when prodded, flailing her limbs, pausing, flailing some more.
Before this, Pablo had not known such destructive or formative powers as evidenced by the earthquake or this momentous creation. Now acquainted, he understood that they would never be strangers to him again.
Home, even after the apartment was repaired and expanded with an additional room, seemed much smaller. Spinster aunts on both Don José’s and Doña María’s sides became full-time boarders, ostensibly to help with chores and childcare. At first, Pablo enjoyed having more people to entertain with his growing arsenal of charms. He was also initially inquisitive about the tiny being with a chubby face and wrinkled flesh. But their living quarters soon felt cramped, and he became fearful of her, too. What would she do to his household position as top-billed performer? After all, owning handsomeness, poise, and talent, he’d staked his claim. She had no right to try to nudge in.
But Lola fell harder for Pablo than anyone. He soon regained center ring and came to appreciate showing off for his new devotee, captivating the girl with savage faces, high-wire acts on the camelback sofa, and the same miraculous drawings that first elicited adoration from his mother and aunts.
As Doña María told everyone, her son’s first words had not been “Mama” or “Papa,” but “Piz! Piz!” as he screamed for his pencil every moment one wasn’t squeezed into his little fist.
Pablo always began his pictures by placing the graphite at a seemingly random point. Then, he would not pick it up until the image was complete. His audience never knew what would leap from mind to page. The game repeated endlessly. The family spent equally on rag paper and potatoes.
When Doña María needed to free herself for housework, she’d challenge her son with ever more complicated feats.
“Make for me a jack donkey with a limp,” Pablo’s mother cried. “Now I want a blind rooster searching for the start of day.”
Pablo also received religious commissions from Aunt Pepa, a dark and ancient woman possessing a mystical aura that she earned by spending each day kneeling in a broom closet she’d converted into a shrine. She wrapped herself in gauzy black garments and headdresses. Her fragrance was of rodent dander and incense. When she spoke, which was seldom, it was in verse and rhyme, reciting to Pablo tales of prophets and miracles, saints and martyrdoms. He became close to her in a way no one else was.
And with Aunt Pepa’s ancient Egypt spinning in his head, Pablo’s treasured lápiz became his very own staff of Moses, granting him power to conjure whatever he could conceive. He practiced fixing his vision to dissect an object’s every detail, reconstituting it in his mind and then on paper, magically.
“He was born with my big black eyes,” Doña María would say. “But they see the world like his father, the painter.”
Don José was, after all, the house’s famous artist, a commanding presence who would sit for long sessions in thrall to the easel before him. All his life, he’d emulated the old masters. He was a drawing instructor at the local Escuela de Artes y Oficios and worked as a curator and resident painter at the municipal museum of fine arts.
After noticing Pablo’s undeniable knack with a pencil, however, Don José started to see his son—the first male heir on either side of the family—as validation, proof he’d handed down the prodigious creativity coursing through his veins. And so, at age five, Pablo began formal instruction in the arts under his father’s expert and unceasing tutelage.
“First, the child must learn fundamentals,” Don José expounded to Doña María. “Here’s where many an artist fails.” But he was speechless as Pablo produced not only realistic images but also granted them life, as might a young Michelangelo or Carducho, that Italian who carried the Renaissance to Spain, just like Prometheus brought fire.
Many of Pablo’s earliest days were spent drafting figures alongside his father, but later that year, the family had no choice but to deposit their child each morning in a room that smelled of mold, where terrifying grown-ups scolded him and frequently sequestered him from the other kids, who mocked him for the pigeon feathers stuck to his uniform.
Pablo hated school. Why, he thought, learn letters and numbers when there aren’t any in my pictures? Who are these foolish boys and girls who can’t draw a line, even with a ruler?
Before noon, he would inevitably escape and scurry to Don José’s studio, and his father would have to drag him back screaming. Pablo fretted that his family might abandon him to this claustrophobic prison for good. As insurance, he began to take to class something his father loved—a paintbrush or a palette or one of Don José’s precious baby pigeons—believing the man would return for it, if not to his only son.
At breakfast one morning, Don José surprised Pablo with a set of watercolors. The boy was fascinated by the bright squares arranged like fantastically gaudy tiles in the japanned tin. But the paints on the page proved messy and difficult to manipulate. The colors, Pablo thought, got in the way of the lines. He felt no romance for them. As a result, when Pablo was nearing six, his father decided to push up introducing oil paints, which belong not only to art but also science. If he wasn’t learning in the classroom, at least he would at home.
On a brisk evening in early autumn, Don José untied a leather pouch at his workbench and dumped a few yellowish lumps onto a glass tray.
“We’re going to make pictures with rocks?” Pablo asked.
Out of his pocket, Don José took the pencil he’d confiscated from Pablo earlier that day after discovering that he’d refused lunch at school. “What’s this?” he asked Pablo.
“My lápiz!”
“That little silver rod inside the wood is stone. When you rub against paper, this makes lines and shadings.”
“Where does it come from?”
“The ground. Everything is from the ground,” Don José said. He pointed to the crumbles of yellow ochre, which looked faintly moist, and promised someday they would journey to a place outside Málaga where Pablo could dig them up himself. “Just like playing in mud.”
Don José then unlatched a maple box full of tin paint tubes and placed one on the workbench. It oozed yellow also. He told Pablo it was the same as those rocks. All you had to do was add a bit of linseed. Don José said when he was young, there were no tubes. “We mulled stones till the grains turned thin as snow and mixed it with the oil. Carried our paints in pig sacks, just like the old masters.”
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