Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ 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-siècle 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 Madrid, 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.

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      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 Castillan 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.

      The Quatre Gats was founded in the summer of 1897 by a versatile character named Pere Romeu, who had taught gymnastics and run a puppet-show in Mexico; he had traveled a good deal, and at one time he worked at the Chat Noir. The name may have been chosen to avert ill-luck, since it means “nobody” or “almost nobody.”

      “Were there many people in the procession?”

      “Four cats, no more.”

      Whether the charm was intended or not, it worked: the place was thronged with people, mostly of the kind to whom this announcement, printed in a kind of blackletter, was directed:

      “To persons of good taste, to citizens on either side of the Ramblas, to those who require nourishment not only for their bodies but also for their minds.

      “Pere Romeu informs them that from the twelfth day of the month of June, in the Calle Montesión, the second house on the left as one goes from the Plaza de Santa Ana, there will be opened an establishment designed to provide both enchantment for the eye and good things for the pleasure of the palate.

      “This house is an eating-place for the epicure, a glowing hearth for those who long for the warmth of a home, a gallery for those who seek delights for the soul, a tavern for those who love the shade of the vine and the true essence of the grape, a Gothic beer-garden for lovers of the north, an Andalusian patio for those of the south; it is a house of healing for those who suffer from the sickness of our century, a refuge of friendship and harmony for those who shelter beneath its roof.

      “They will not be sorry to have come, but on the other hand they will certainly regret having stayed away.”

      The Calle Montesión was an out-of-the-way little street on the then unfashionable northern edge of the old town: the house was the work of the young architect Puig y Cadafalch, to some extent a follower of Gaudi and a whole-hearted, unselective lover of Modernismo. Els Quatre Gats had a great many beams, a great deal of ironwork wrought into bulbous, vegetable, art-nouveau shapes, a fully arched brick entrance, and a general Teutonic СКАЧАТЬ