Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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      It was perhaps an unfortunate impulse. The truth must in time have become even more obvious, but this gesture crystallized the situation and by so doing altered it, making it far more extreme. The young are often cruel; and there are circumstances in which they can be devoid of pity, especially towards those whose role it is to be strong and who are weak. Even now a father who abdicates, who declines the absurd role of the omniscient, omnipotent, infallible monarch of the glen, is liable to arouse a confused but strong resentment; and the status, thankfully laid aside, can never be convincingly resumed when at a later date it may become necessary: at that time, and in that place, such an action was more exceptional by far.

      One of Picasso’s outstanding characteristics as a man was his kindness, and this was evident in his face, in his habitual expression; but he was no more all of a piece throughout than any other—indeed he had more contradictions in him than most—and he could be very hard. There are also discreet, muffled, imprecise rumors of marital discord at this period: José Ruiz, aging fast, cannot have been a very lively companion. It is not surprising that Pablo’s affection should have shifted almost entirely to his mother in such an event; nor that the Picasso, which had been absent from the signatures of most of these early paintings, should now reappear. The bold P. Ruiz is replaced by P. Ruiz Picasso after 1895, and with few exceptions the Ruiz vanishes altogether after about 1901. And most of his portraits of Don José are not signed at all, whereas those of his mother are.

      Yet this does not mean any decided, lasting, definitive, and evident animosity between José and Pablo Ruiz: the portraits alone prove that, and there is a great deal of evidence for an enduring, though tempered, affection on both sides. Then again at this point the family was struck by a cruel blow that certainly brought its members together. Concepción, Pablo’s youngest sister, fell ill with diphtheria, and in spite of Dr. Costales’ devoted care she died: at that time the disease could kill in three or four days, and in Spain it did kill about half of those it attacked. Don José felt the loss most bitterly: she was the only one of his children who resembled him in the least, a fair-haired child, tall for her age, and slim.

      But in any case the La Coruña days, with their dreary, oppressive atmosphere, the shut-in life so conducive of secret domestic war, were in their turn coming to an end. A former assistant of Don José’s, Ramón Navarro García, who taught figure-drawing at the famous art-school of the Llotja at Barcelona, wished to return to his native Galicia. When he proposed the exchange there could be no hesitation on José Ruiz’s part. Not only would they get away from the sad house, so very much sadder now, but Barcelona meant the Mediterranean once more, an escape from the gloom and rain of La Coruña; furthermore, the Llotja post carried a better salary: three thousand pesetas a year, almost exactly £100, or $482. At the end of the term the family packed their bags. They were to spend the summer holidays of 1895 in Málaga, taking the train, which would carry them there by way of Madrid. Picasso’s luggage included a great many pictures: he had tried to sell some in a little exhibition at an umbrella-maker’s shop (in the doorway, says Gómez de La Serna), but that had not been markedly successful; and he had given a few to Dr. Costales. The drawings and paintings that remained might be grouped in the following categories: juvenilia (though even among these there is the occasional prophetic pure, unhesitating line, especially in the bulls), boyish “historical” scenes, the interiors and other paintings that show the influence of his father’s friends Ferrándiz and Muñoz Degrain, sketch-books of great interest to the art-historian, drawings of hands (all his life he was preoccupied with hands, singly and in pairs), and these strong, firmly-painted canvases of his twelfth and thirteenth years. There were also two little things that could be lumped in with the juvenilia if they did not seem to have a particular significance for the later years—they are little cut-outs, a dog and a dove, that only need to be stuck to a canvas to be the first of all collages. And these small paper silhouettes are perhaps the only examples of his father’s direct influence in the whole collection.

      

      A couple of days or so in Madrid, after the prolonged horror of a creeping Spanish train—more than thirty hours to cover the five hundred miles of line winding about the mountains, with four changes and innumerable stops—a Madrid at the height of its blazing summer, cannot have been very gratifying; nor can the travelers have been at their most receptive. However, Don José and his son did visit the Prado, and there for the first time in his life Picasso saw Velásquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Ribera, Goya, to say nothing of Valdes Léal, Murillo, and the host of illustrious foreigners.

      Whether the immense indigestible wealth, the heat, his fatigue, and the lighting that made it almost impossible to see “Las Meninas” whole, oppressed him or not, he had recovered his spirits by the time they reached Málaga, four hundred miles farther on. They were welcomed, feasted, made much of. Their native air, their native speech and food, revived the returning exiles, and Pablo, still the only boy the Ruiz brothers had between them, was particularly caressed. He was always in his element at a party—conviviality was meat and drink to the abstemious Picasso all his life—and this may well have been the happiest holiday that he spent in Málaga. He was so taken up with having fun that his work, even his sketching, shows a falling-off in quantity. However, he did paint a picture of the kitchen, and he did make a very delicate pencil drawing of their old servant Carmen, with her sleeves rolled up as once she had rolled them up to lead him to school by force; and perhaps influenced by the familiar atmosphere recovered, he signed it P. Ruiz, as he had done in former days.

      His relations were proud of him. Painting was now no longer the desperate career that it had been when Don José made his choice, and they may even have distinguished between the canvases he brought back from La Coruña and his father’s work. In any case, despite the shaky condition of the peseta, twenty years of peace had led the richer sort to buy paintings more frequently, and Muñoz Degrain, Moreno Carbonero, and other men they knew were doing well in Madrid, so well that the State bought their pictures for the Museum of Modern Art in the capital itself. Pablo’s manifest destiny was accepted without question: Dr. Salvador, who had grown more prosperous still, hired an aged seafaring man as model and gave his nephew a duro a day to paint him, five pesetas, a sum at least twice as much as a laborer could earn.

      

      Towards the end of the summer they took to the sea once more, coasting along northwards past Almería, Cartagena, Alicante, and Valencia; and the September sea was so kind that during the voyage Picasso could paint, not hurried sketches of the shore, but oil upon canvas, and that of a considerable size. After three days of sailing, Barcelona came in sight, an immensely busy port with the vast city spreading wide on either hand, the sinister Montjuich to the left, Tibidabo rising behind, and mountains beyond: to the right, factory chimneys, gasworks, palm-trees, industrial suburbs.

      As soon as he set foot on the quay, Picasso found that once again he was surrounded by a different language. All around him the people spoke Catalan, as incomprehensible as Gallego or even more so; and many of them were dressed in the fashion of their country—a red bonnet like a Phrygian cap, curiously plaited rope-soled cloth shoes, a broad red sash, a little waistcoat.

      And as the Ruizes walked along to the lodging that a friend had found for them in the Calle Cristina, not far from their landing-place, this impression of being abroad grew stronger. For the Barcelona of 1895 was a wholly European city, something they had never known before; a huge, busy, and intensely Catalan city, with half a million people in it, all talking their own language and all living according to customs and values that were foreign not only to Málaga but to Madrid and the whole of the rest of the Peninsula. The thirteen-year-old Pablo could not have felt more a stranger if he had landed in Marseilles or Genoa: once again he was entirely uprooted.

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