Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ of Art Nouveau, a precursor of Cubism? A foretaste of the Blue Period, so soon to come?

      They valued him highly; and a group of his friends, Pallarès, Sabartés, and Casagemas among them, urged him to give a show of his drawings at the Quatre Gats, a show that would in a way be a challenge to the able, accomplished, established, and fashionable draughtsman Casas. Several men had shown there: Casas himself, Rusiñol, Utrillo, Nonell, Pichot, Canals, Mir, and Opisso. Picasso liked the idea, and in the winter of 1899/1900 he set to work on a series of portrait-drawings of the Quatre Gats habitués. Most of his friends appeared in this gallery. Among them Sabartés, slim in those days, but even then myopic, even at nineteen wearing that expression of weak meek obstinacy, skepticism, and deep unshakable self-satisfaction that is more apparent in some of the portraits of later years—a born and willing victim. Nonell, a strong round Mediterranean head, secretly amused, not unlike Picasso himself. (Indeed, almost alone among all those self-conscious people, affected, bearded, pipe-smoking for the most part, Picasso and Nonell had the look of real men, fully alive, who had wandered onto a stage full of minor actors playing dull, unimportant roles forever and ever, stilted creatures, devoured by their self-chosen parts.) Lluisa Vidal, one of the few women of the group, a former pupil of Eugène Carrière in Paris and a great admirer of his. Carlos Casagemas, who had an exhibition at the Quatre Gats just after his room-mate, Picasso: an anxious, haunted face, narrow, all jutting nose and receding chin: he was impotent, but it was not generally known at the time. Manuel Hugué, another fully human being, an admirable sculptor, extremely idle and utterly unreliable, much loved by the friends upon whom he lived, though forever penniless and somewhat given to stealing their possessions: the bastard son of a Spanish general, perhaps, and ordinarily called Manolo. Manuel Pallarès, who was less often to be seen with Picasso these days because of a long-drawn-out and difficult love-affair, but who remained a firm friend. Ramon Pichot, a painter, one of a large family all devoted to the arts, who lived in wild disorder in the splendid Calle Montcada—splendid not in the modern sense, with light and tree-lined space, but in that of the middle ages: a dark and malodorous lane, yet one lined with Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque palaces opening onto secret inward patios; one of them, restored, is now the Picasso Museum. (The Catalan version of Pichot is Pitxot, just as Carlos Casagemas comes out as Carles Casagemes: here I use the forms they used themselves in France.) Opisso, a talented draughtsman and the son of the Vanguardia’s art-critic: although in after days he told Cirici-Pellicer that “because of Picasso’s reserved character it was difficult to assert that they had ever really been friends.” In the same passage Cirici-Pellicer speaks of a somewhat later studio belonging to Soto where Picasso came to work and which he so filled with his own things and his own powerful personality that even Soto took to calling it “Picasso’s studio”; and he goes on to say, “This quite describes the overpowering, encroaching nature of the future creator of Cubism: those who knew him when he was young all agree that … one could only worship him or hate him. His worshipers have told us of his charm, his sound, quick, precise, clear-cut judgment, his immense gifts for improvisation and for perfect imitation [he could instantly produce a pastiche of any known artist, and this talent, indulged with unthinking freedom, brought the charge of plagiarism from the envious or the obtuse], his way of drawing a nude, starting with a toe and sweeping round with one sure, unfaltering line, and of his wonderful steadfast perseverance in his work…. On the other hand, his enemies have told us of his pig-headedness, his boundless self-confidence, his skill at seeing just where he could make a way for himself, and of his contempt for the work of those around him.”

      This is not wholly objective testimony: Cirici-Pellicer was out of sympathy with Picasso’s later work; Opisso knew no fame comparable to Picasso’s, but remained set in the late nineteenth century, when, he affirms, the work of the one could be mistaken for the work of the other: so much so that a collector once gave ten thousand pesetas for a charcoal drawing by Opisso, supposing it to be a Picasso. Yet it is worth recording because of the light it throws on the reactions of his friends to the eighteen-year-old Andalou, a small, commanding figure of no physical size at all but of a caliber hitherto unknown.

      The drawings and a few other works were ready in February, 1900. Neither Picasso nor his friends could afford frames, so they were hung with drawing-pins, more or less at haphazard. The general effect was indifferent, and from the commercial point of view amateurish: nothing like the smooth efficiency of the Saló Parés, where the citizens of Barcelona were accustomed to buying their pictures.

      Drawing has always been less generally valued than painting, and at that time, in spite of Casas’ success, it was held in particularly low esteem. A contemporary artist has given the scale of values that obtained in Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century: first the painter of religious subjects; he was a somebody, a señor. Second the portraitist: he was understood to possess a natural gift for catching a likeness and he was granted the respect due to a photographer. Third the landscape and genre painter, and he was little better than a halfwit. Last, and far below any classification by number, the draughtsman: he was scarcely an artist at all. And in this case the draughtsman was known to come from Andalucía, the home of idleness, levity, Gypsies, bullfighters, and wild extravagance, and to be absurdly young. He had no network of cousins, no local interest. Few people came, apart from the artist’s friends; and of those few none bought.

      In the end the unsold drawings passed to Pere Romeu; he gave some to their originals, and after his death his widow sold the rest, many to the Barcelona collector Graells.

      But these amounted to only a small part of Picasso’s work in 1899 and 1900. What can usefully be said of the countless drawings, the great number of paintings of these eighteen months? Only that they range from what academic realism ought to be to Modernismo and beyond, a range that includes a kind of proto-Fauvism and Expressionism, together with darts in many other directions, most of them enough to satisfy the most exigent, and some deliberate reminiscences of El Greco and Toulouse-Lautrec. Yet just as “influence” has little meaning as far as Picasso is concerned, so isms do not signify a great deal: they never really fit him and he never even fits his own, or rather those that theoreticians impose upon him; nor his “periods” either. Both isms and periods are mentioned in this book, since they do have a certain utility, but they are mentioned sparingly and with strong reserves: apart from such clearly-conceived theories as Divisionism most seem to be post hoc, approximate labels, fortuitous in origin and often misleading in application.

      On the other hand, a repeated theme, a steady preoccupation, is something else again; and at this time Picasso was particularly concerned with windows, as he had been earlier and as he was to be again. The first of the present series is quite straightforward, a drawing of the window over the way from his in the Calle d’Escudellers, a window with a young woman in it, sewing: she is labeled Mercedes. The next is the same window, but closed and blind: a painting this time—the gray house, the iron bars of the balcony, the yellow curtain behind the glass, all strangely important. Then comes a painting of his own window, the lower part veiled with a piece of translucent cloth: just that and nothing more. The cloth is suffused with amber light; the dark brown crossbars and frame stand out against the pale, featureless day beyond. The picture belongs entirely to the twentieth century; it is devoid of literature and it is profoundly satisfying: it is the truth, or a truth and a significant one, about that window and that light. Nothing could be farther from Art Nouveau.

      After that another window, closed but showing a suggestion of a landscape beyond, green and white: the room is dark, the inner window-sill is draped with something so deeply gray as to be nearly black; and here again there is that feeling of great unspecified significance.

      Still more windows appear, but not alone; they form part of sick-bed or death-bed scenes (his concession to the “decadence” of the time), and they are always closed. In later years Picasso’s windows grew broader; they were often wide open to a world full of sun and color and doves. But in these Barcelona days only one swings back to let the glow of the tawny, sunlit town into the vague gloom of the room: Lola Ruiz stands in front of it, wearing a ghostly white dress. There is something white on the floor beside her, possibly paper with which she is about to light her brother’s СКАЧАТЬ