Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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      He illustrated books magnificently; he owned a considerable number, some of the greatest bibliographical interest; but he did not read a great many. This is not to say that he was not a keenly intelligent man, capable of profound understanding; yet his was an exceedingly quick and sometimes impatient mind, not very well suited for the slow accumulative absorption of prose. Verse was another matter: here the concentrated essence could be grasped almost as quickly as a picture or a carving; Picasso certainly read poetry and he certainly loved poets all his life—Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, to name but three. To be a poet was a passport to his kindness.

      On the other hand he was always surrounded by men who did read enormously, some of them brilliant writers themselves; and his keen, retentive intelligence gathered more from their distillation than years in a library would have given him. As far as Barcelona was concerned, Nietzsche was available to him through the medium of Joan Maragall, one of the best of the Catalan poets and a great translator from the German. Picasso liked and admired Maragall, as well he might, for not only did Maragall destroy rhetorical convention and “risk his life on every line,” but his Excelsior was a noble expression of faith in the future of art for those brave enough to launch far out into unknown seas. Then again Nietzsche’s aphoristic manner was perfectly suited to Picasso: when the philosopher died in the summer of 1900, at the term of his long madness, the papers were filled with appreciations of him; and Picasso undoubtedly read papers. 1900 was also the year that saw the first performance of Tristan and Siegfried in Barcelona (well before Madrid, of course), and although no music other than his native cante hondo or the Catalan sardana ever meant much to Picasso, he was necessarily affected by the admiration for things of the North so general in Barcelona at the time.

      The North was a capital place, seen from the shores of the Mediterranean: not only was it medieval—and the middle ages were golden to the Catalans—but it was modem too, with advanced ideas on sexual freedom. The area included Norway—Munch was already known in Barcelona, as well as Ibsen—and when the young Picasso was asked to illustrate a poem called El Clam de les Verges he produced a somewhat Expressionist young woman dreaming of a Man (his upper half floats in the middle distance of the night).

      The poem and its illustration appeared on August 12, 1900, in Joventut, Pèl i Ploma’s rival, whose artistic editor was Alexandre de Riquer, a member of the Cercle de Sant Lluc; and some of it reads:

      We are maidens, maidens

       By the force of hateful laws that keep us enslaved. Night and day we seek the wild delights that we dream of … If the mind is not virgin must the body be so? No, no, let us be free, let us take pleasure in love! Tear our white virginal robe: it is a shroud, A shroud, and a frail one, hiding a treasure within.

      Obviously the poem was written by a man, Joan Oliva Bridgman, but it does express a modest hope of what might be, and it is typical of the climate of the time. So is another, also written by Oliva and illustrated by Picasso: the excited verse, which begins “To be or not to be,” calls upon the reader to banish the dark smoke of base routine with the sacred light that pierces the shades of mystery—the reader is to be fully or not at all. There is no mention of the sea, favorable or otherwise, but Picasso, perhaps with Maragall in mind, drew a man guiding a boat through menacing waves towards the horizon.

      The North also embraced England, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and at one time Picasso had some faint notion of going there; this was less out of love for the Pre-Raphaelites than from an opinion he had formed of Englishwomen from an account of the intrepid Lady Hester Stanhope. Señora Romeu was said to be an Englishwoman, while Señora Maragall was certainly related to the British Dr. Noble who built a seamen’s hospital in Málaga, and perhaps he found they did not quite answer his expectations; at all events London very soon yielded to Paris.

      The North was the vague metaphysical goal; for most of the painters and literary men of the Quatre Gats Paris was the immediate and concrete aim. Quite apart from its being the center of artistic life and of everything that was new, it was accessible: all educated Catalans and a great many others spoke French, whereas few knew German and fewer still English—they were persuaded that Wilde was a poet. Many of the older men and some of the others had already been to Paris, bringing back a cloud of glory—Nonell had even exhibited in Parisian galleries. And it was Paris that provided the reviews, papers, and magazines that Picasso saw at the Quatre Gats.

      There were many others, such as Casas’ and Utrillo’s Pèl i Ploma, Alexandre de Riquer’s Joventut, Catalunya Artística, and the English Studio, but it was the French Assiette au Beurre, the Gil Blas illustré, the Figaro, and the famous Revue Blanche that introduced him to Théophile Steinlen, Jean Louis Forain, and above all to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

      These and the company of his many friends was his spiritual food. What he did for earthly nourishment it is difficult to say; and some of the self-portraits of these years show him looking wan and hungry. But he did sell a few drawings and pictures; Romeu commissioned advertisements and menu-cards; and Barcelona had many small shops up and down the Ramblas that specialized in tapabocas, little dishes to be eaten cheaply at any hour of the day or night: a shallow pipkin of sparrows stewed in their own juice was to be had for little more than a farthing, and although blackbirds or squids in their ink came dearer they were still very moderate, particularly as bread was thrown in; and bull’s flesh was cheap after corridas.

      At all events he ate well enough to go for long walks. Sabartés mentions their expeditions to Tibidabo, the mountain that stands some five or six miles behind Barcelona, giving a magnificent view of the whole spreading city, the harbor, the sea, and the remote sierras: a heartbreaking climb for which all but the most energetic of the penniless young take the funicular railway. And to do an immense amount of work: he had moved from the Calle d’Escudellers Blancs to a large, unfurnished, well-lit garret workshop on the top floor of number 17, Riera de Sant Joan, high in the old city, which he shared with his friend Carlos Casagemas, a strange-looking young man, well educated (he had been trained for the Spanish navy until the American war put an end to any hope of a career in it), the son of the United States consul-general in Barcelona. Since there was no furniture they painted it on the walls: tables, chairs, chests, a sofa, the necessary safe, together with servants, a maid and a boy, to look after it. And wherever the furniture left room there were pictures, pictures that overflowed on to the walls of the ladder-like staircase.

      No doubt many of them were outrageous; he always had a strong earthy sense of fun—to the end of his days shocking people amused him—and it was even stronger then. For example, on the ground floor of the house there was a grocery that sold fresh eggs from Villafranca, and he was attached to the daughter of the shop, so much so that he produced an advertisement for the eggs. The great men of the Quatre Gats, Rusiñol, Casas, Utrillo, and the rest, appeared, each holding an egg: the point of the advertisement was a comparison of their testicles with the eggs, from which it appeared that the fresh eggs of Villafranca were larger.

      But there were others too, and if only they had been preserved or even photographed we should have a fascinating account of his development at this crucial stage when an infinity of potentialities were opening in his mind and when he was making those deliberate elections that were to prove vital for him and for the art of the twentieth century. Yet although the camera was usual by then and although he was highly valued by those who knew him, nobody recorded them in any way. Would there have been a hint of the sharp angles and interlocking planes of Horta de Ebro, a СКАЧАТЬ