Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ painting as it was then conceived and to thrust the boundaries of perception far beyond their known limits: one is tempted to say “to enlarge the idea of beauty” except for the fact that Picasso was primarily concerned with being rather than with what is ordinarily understood by that vague word beauty. “Beauty?” he said to Sarbatés, “… To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.”

      It was an enormously ambitious project, and it was accompanied by self-doubt, periods of depression, and false starts: one does not shatter one’s own matrix, eat one’s own father, without some hesitation; yet in ten years from this time it was largely accomplished. Already the results of the process were evident in the prodigiously rapid development of his work in 1899 and 1900; but as a wholly conscious process it was only just beginning, and the milieu in which it began helps to explain at least some of the external forces acting upon it.

      As I said earlier, Picasso has often been compared to Goethe, and certainly they had much in common, including the “virtue of lasting” and an extraordinary physical vitality; but whereas Goethe was an insider, solidly based in his social and national contexts, endowed with an elaborate education and with money, and supported on all sides by the culture of his time, Picasso was socially peripheral, his sense of national identity was at least troubled, his schooling had scarcely passed the elementary stage, and the culture of his time, such as it was, oppressed him on every hand. His eventual aim was to revolutionize a great part of this culture, and apart from his native genius all he had to help him in his intellectual formation for the task were his contacts in Barcelona and his early years in Paris: the Quatre Gats and Montparnasse were to be his Leipzig and Strassburg, his Greek, Latin, and philosophy.

      As far as it was political at all, the general feeling at the Quatre Gats was of course left-wing. In this it was opposed to the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, the respectable haven of the academic painters, good Catholics, patronized by Church, state, and big business. The two groups did resemble one another in being separatist and in the fact that at least some of the Sant Llucs were devoted to Modernismo—Gaudi himself was a member—but as far as religion was concerned they were poles apart. The Sant Llucs sympathized with the strong rise of right-wing Catholicism so evident in Spain during the long regency of the Habsburg Queen Christina: whereas at the Quatre Gats, although plenty of mysticism was to be found, it was mostly of the cloudy, imported kind, pantheistic, wooly, scarcely of the native growth at all; and since there was also a strong anarchist element, downright atheism was sometimes added to the left-wing anticlericalism—a striking contrast to a young man fresh from the age-old rural piety of Horta de Ebro.

      The anarchism, in its more general implications, struck a responsive chord in him: Picasso was increasingly conscious of the misery caused by the system and its injustice—the evidence lay all about him in Barcelona—and his awareness was increased by Nonell. In 1896 Nonell, who was eight years older than Picasso and who had been drawn to Modernismo earlier, went to Caldas de Bohí, a village with hot springs right up in the mountains, under the Maladetta, and notorious for its goitrous idiots. He made a series of drawings of them which he exhibited in the hall of the Vanguardia and at the Quatre Gats. They are masterly, disturbing drawings, with a strong, fluid line enclosing the highly simplified figures. They may be said to belong to Art Noveau, but they injected a vital hardness into the milk-and-water lakes and fairies, chlorotic maidens stuff produced by Puvis de Chavannes, Maurice Denis, and so many others at the time, and they made a considerable sensation. Nonell’s was a direct expression of true, unsentimental sympathy: when Picasso produced his hospital patients in the article of death and his raddled whores it is tempting to say that he went one better, for here the savagery is not only far more intense, but it is unjudging, a flat statement—empathy rather than sympathy. Yet, “one better” implies competition or at least influence, and it is dangerous to speak of influence where Picasso is concerned. So much was already implicit in his early work and he had preconceived so many tendencies before their public birth elsewhere that an apparent influence is often no more than another man’s discovery of something that Picasso had already found out for himself—a discovery more fully developed, perhaps, by the kindred spirit (van Gogh comes to mind), but not radically new to Picasso. In this case the savagery, the guts, which both he and Nonell brought to Modernismo was perfectly evident in Picasso’s childish work; and in this case as in so many others “reinforcement” is nearer the mark than “influence.”

      Anarchism too had formed part of his early outlook, and the talk at the Quatre Gats can have done little more than illustrate and encourage an existing hatred for authority and a determined rejection of rules imposed from without.

      The most esteemed anarchist at the Quatre Gats was young Jaume Brossa: he had no great opinion of the artists he beheld there—”neurotic dilettanti, only concerned with being different from the philistines and the bourgeois”—but he did feel that there was promise for the art of the coming century, the anarchists’ secular millennium. “Man, carried away by a just and iconoclastic pride, the result of the psychological atmosphere created in his intelligence, will no longer tolerate the slightest barrier to his free-ranging mind; and this exaltation of the individual means that not a single myth, not a single idol, not a single entity, human or divine, will remain to stand in the way of the total liberation of individuality. Some people may say that these theories imply a general dissolution; but as well as a negative they possess a positive spirit, one that renews and builds up lost powers and forces,” he wrote. And referring once more to the cult of the individual, of the Me, Brossa said, “it leads to a turning in upon oneself … and in its turn this withdrawal leads to the discovery of a compensation for disgust with life, that is to say the wonderful image of the world that lies deep in the camera obscura of the Me.” As Cirici-Pellicer observes, one could scarcely ask a fairer picture of Picasso’s progress. Destruction, repeated destruction, withdrawal from apparent reality, synthesis, new worlds, new powers, new visions: everything is here, including, it is to be hoped, compensation for some degree of disgust with life.

      There was a great deal in the political anarchists’ creed that appealed to Picasso: Bakunin, for example, had said, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion,” and nothing could have harmonized better with his own views.

      But although Brossa had clear notions of their ideology, he did not succeed in passing them on to Picasso, who was never a political animal. Nor did he succeed in passing on the anti-Semitism that infects some of Nietzsche’s followers, for Picasso, although given to superstition, was far, far too strong a personality for that kind of self-inflating myth.

      What Picasso did draw in was a generalized anarchism and a deep sympathy for Catalan independence: the people around him preached contempt for bourgeois art, which some of them produced, and hatred for intellectual snobbery, which most of them practiced, but the very young and ingenuous Picasso either did not notice their inconsistencies or did not find them shocking: whether he needed the encouragement of the Quatre Gats or not, he remained the very type of anti-bourgeois, anti-snob all the rest of his days.

      The disastrous war with America, the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, had plunged Madrid into gloom, introspection, and pessimism: it had no such effect on Barcelona, where, in spite of labor troubles, agitation, bombs, and repression the mood was sanguine, forward-looking, interested in the outer world. At the Quatre Gats Picasso swam in an atmosphere of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Wagner—an Associación Wagneriana met there regularly from 1900—Schopenhauer, the Symbolists, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, all new and exciting names in Catalonia; and although he was no great reader he came by at least a second-hand notion of their ideas.

      He was no great reader. In their love for him some of his friends have maintained that he was: they admit that they never saw him with a book in his hands, but they assert that he read in bed, by night, and they mention books that he owned—Verlaine, for example, at a time when Picasso could neither read, write, nor speak French. Yet Picasso was one of the hardest-working painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, etchers that ever lived: “Where do I get this power of creating and forming? СКАЧАТЬ