Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ one of them was Dr. Raimundo Pérez Costales, an interesting man who had been minister of labor and of the fine arts under the short-lived and anarchical First Republic of Pi y Margall in 1873: according to Sabartés he was so much attached to Don José that when the Ruizes left La Coruña, Dr. Costales settled at Málaga in the hope that his friend would eventually return to his native town.

      However, in time José Ruiz did turn his mind to a thorough-going artistic education for his son. He taught Pablo the techniques of pen-and-ink, charcoal, pastel, and crayon; later he promoted him to painting in oil and watercolor, though at the same time he insisted upon a great deal of drawing, of exact and conscientious drawing. As a teacher Don José was a strict disciplinarian, obeying the law to the letter and requiring both obedience and hard work; it was a rigorously academic training, of course, for even if Don José’s tastes had not lain in that direction, the school was under the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, a deeply conservative body. Picasso accepted the discipline happily, and in the antique classes he made drawings of casts that astonish the beholder not only with their accomplishment but even more with their power of giving the faded models back their life, a life that had been there when the statues were first carved and that his pleasure in the act of drawing restored to their degraded plaster shadows. What for most people is a hopelessly arid exercise was a delight to Picasso, and his art-school studies glow with pleasure: controlled, disciplined, and almost anonymous, but certainly pleasure.

      Picasso told Brassaï, when he and the photographer were talking about children’s painting and infant phenomenons (they never last, said Picasso), that the precision of these academic drawings frightened him; and certainly there is something a little monstrous about their easy virtuosity when they are compared with the decorations that he was drawing at the same time in his school-books, a time when he was in fact no more than a little jug-eared boy of twelve or thirteen. Perhaps it was at this period that Picasso was first inhabited by his particular demon: not the more or less impersonal spirit that comes to children in their nonage, incapable of sin, but the fully adult creature that Sartre calls the vampire and that certainly, in the case of some writers, lives upon their blood. Except for Friar Bacon’s squat black dog, the demon has never, I believe, been isolated and identified, but it is a real presence, and those who have known this possession report the experience as both extraordinarily exalting—mind aglow, senses concentrated, hand flying, body, heat and cold forgotten—and as something with an element of dread.

      Outside the school his work was much more free: among the surviving oils there are some little tentative pictures dating from 1892 and 1893, then a more assured cottage, probably of late ‘93, technically far more competent and painted on a properly stretched canvas; and then suddenly, with no apparent transition, the extraordinarily accomplished head of a man that Cirlot, an authority on these early years, places in circa 1894, that is to say when Picasso was twelve or at the most thirteen. It is a small picture (thirteen and a half inches by eleven and a half), though it looks much larger; the head and shoulders of a man, bald-fronted, tanned, with a short grizzled beard: he is shown almost in profile, looking slightly upwards and to the right, and he does not have the least air of sitting for his portrait. The background of a very light gray sets off this ruddy brown head and browner neck, but it does not cover the fine-grained canvas entirely; and the whitish shirt below the neck is only suggested. Picasso certainly meant to leave the picture in this state, for in the little portrait of his uncle Baldomero Chiara, which is firmly dated July 3, 1894, the paint shades off into the virgin paper, and in that of Dr. Costales (a fine old gentleman with mutton-chop whiskers and a deep fur collar) which he painted in 1895, the top of the canvas is quite bare. The picture is full of light, full of life, and the finely proportioned head—finely proportioned to the limits of the canvas—is quite wonderfully striking. An eminently Spanish picture, with the best of Spanish naturalism, absolutely nothing childish about it at all: it has little or nothing of the nineteenth century, nothing in the least sentimental, and Velásquez would have admired it, whether he knew the painter’s age or not. Indeed, it has a certain kinship with the head of the elderly man in Velásquez’ “Los Borrachos” at the Prado, which the young Picasso had never seen.

      The next year, when Picasso was still thirteen, he painted many more pictures, several of which have come down to us. There is not much point in describing them in detail, but they show many different lines of approach, many different techniques, always more assured. Among them is his dog Klipper, one of the earliest in the long series of Picasso’s animals—cats, mice, apes, pigeons, an incontinent goat, turtle-doves, owls, and always dogs. Klipper is a brownish-yellow creature, a basic dog of medium size, more smooth than rough: an intelligent head with a large, knowing eye.

      The picture has all the marks of a good portrait; and it is painted without the least trace of sentimentality. Picasso’s relations with his animals were very close: he had an extraordinary gift for entering into direct contact with them: could handle a wild bird or walk up to a furious dog when most people would have provoked an ugly scene: and the tired old cliché about the power of the human eye finds its justification in Picasso. He had in fact a most luminous and striking eye, a singular, penetrating gaze, always the first thing that people noticed. But these relations were quite unlike those which are usual in Anglo-Saxon countries. A child brought up on the spectacle of slaughtered bulls does not have the same reactions as one brought up on flopsy bunnies or the products of Walt Disney’s muse: Picasso did not shift his animals to a semi-human plane—he met them on their own. He loved cats, not the sleek castrated fat domesticated creatures, not pussies, but the rangy feral cats of the southern gutter, who will fly in your face at the drop of a hat. His animals lived according to their own codes, more or less, with no undue notions of right or wrong, nor of cleanliness, imposed from above.

      Then there are more remarkable heads of poor, elderly men, masterly pieces of strong, sober Spanish realism, brown pictures. There is nothing of the picturesque peasant to be seen in these worn, stupid, hopeless people; even the torn shirt has no hint of the theatrical rags so common at the time. Yet only a very little earlier Picasso was drawing highly picturesque and rather feeble Moors and Moorish palaces: the development was extraordinarily rapid, and only months lie between the schoolboy doodling and the unbelievably accomplished throw-away pen and ink sketch of a Pantheon with a minute Velásquez, a pair of doves in flight, and some truly delightful putti, apparently bringing him a color-box.

      To all these pictures Picasso preferred his “Barefoot Girl” and his “Beggar,” both painted in 1895; and these he kept with him all his life.

      I will not describe “The Beggar,” which is a most able, confident study in the idiom of several others of that time, but the subtly different “Girl” must have a few lines. She sits on an uncomfortable straight-backed chair against a broken dark-green background, dressed in a long russet frock with a white cloth over her shoulders, her hands folded in her lap and one large chilblained foot dangling. She is a sad child, deep dismay struggling with sullenness in her face at repose: dismay not at her present situation, but at the world into which she has been pitched. She is of about the same age as the painter, and she sits there patiently; her immense, lustrous, asymmetric eyes gaze forward, a little down, at nothing. Here the technique is surer still, the brush-stroke firm and decisive on the dress, gentle and flowing on the face; and here there is much more personal involvement. Picasso did not spare her big hands, thick ankles, and coarse great feet; he was not in the least degree concerned with prettiness; but it is evident, not merely from her eyes and the pure oval of her face, that he was entirely with her.

      Both these canvases were rather large for Pablo at that time, about two foot six by one foot eight, and it is said that the model for the second and perhaps the canvas too were given him as a present for his good behavior during the Christmas holidays.

      Once Picasso had begun his true ascent, acquiring at the same time a mastery of his tools, Don José let him help with the details of the decorative pictures he still produced. He would, for example, cut off a dead pigeon’s pink legs and claws, pin them to a board, and tell Pablo to paint them in. In the course of a few months it became evident to both that even on the technical plane the СКАЧАТЬ