Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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      The ingredients that went to make up Modernismo ranged from Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and beaten copper on the one hand to Bakunin, Nietzsche and El Greco on the other, with Hiroshige, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kate Greenaway and a morass of cheap sentimentality in between. Naturally there were a great many contradictions in the Quatre Gats, a fair amount of silliness, and some of its customers were hangers-on of the arts who dressed up as decadents or anarchists and gave it to be understood that they were consumptives or syphilitics or both; but the senior members of the group were men of talent.

      The most important of these were Santiago Rusiñol, Ramón Casas and Miguel Utrillo. Rusiñol was a painter and poet twenty years older than Picasso: he was one of the leading figures in the movement, and it was he who organized the Fiestas Modernistas at Sitges, where he built the neo-Gothic Cau Ferrat and saw to the erection of a monument to El Greco. During these fiestas he uttered fluent, cloudy, mystical, enthusiastic orations, in one of which he exhorted his hearers “to translate the eternal verities into wild paradox; to draw life from the abnormal, the extraordinary, the outrageous; to tell the horror of the reasoning mind as it gazes upon the chasm, the earthquake-crash of disaster, and the creeping dread of the imminent; to descry the unknown, to foretell fate,” and thus to practice an art “at the same time resplendent and nebulous, sophisticated and barbaric, medieval and modernist.” He did not tell them how to do it however, and the only book of his the writer has seen is innocuous, sentimental, and pretty. Yet he was a fairly good painter, infinitely beyond Muñoz Degrain or Carbonero, and he did write articles in the Vanguardia, the great Barcelona daily and probably the best paper in the country, supporting the Impressionists and the Symbolists when they were virtually unknown in Spain, and he did love El Greco. Picasso did not need Rusiñol’s example to do the same—writing from Madrid in 1897 he had spoken of “El Greco’s magnificent heads”—but it may have strengthened his admiration: at all events in that same year of 1899 he painted an “El Greco figure,” a dark and impressive, rather diabolical, long, bearded face with something of the Cretan’s own technique. And the fact that there was something eminently sound in Rusiñol’s ideas may have helped the rest of the oration down: Picasso did not hear it—he was in La Coruña at the time—but Rusiñol was a great one for speeches (J. M. de Sucre says that he gave Picasso a copy of these “Oraciones” illustrated by Miguel Utrillo and Suzanne Valadon) and like most orators he was given to repeating himself—in any case his views were shared by the rest of the group, and with variations they were to be heard daily at the Quatre Gats. Not the slightest relation of direct cause and effect is here suggested, but the absurd thing is that in the course of his life Picasso did in fact fulfill something closely resembling Rusiñol’s excited program; although to be sure he was never nebulous or medieval and there is something to be said for the view that he was never modem either, but outside time: a painter modern for us only by the accident of contemporaneity.

      Casas and Utrillo were also painters and writers, and between them they ran Pèl i Ploma, the Catalan literary and artistic review. Both were successful men, and both, like Rusiñol, had lived and studied in Paris, where Miguel Utrillo acted as the Vanguardia’s correspondent and where he met Suzanne Valadon, to whose son Maurice he gave his name. Utrillo was also one of the earliest and most percipient authorities on El Greco.

      Generally speaking the other men Picasso met there were younger: far and away the most important was Nonell, whose painting he admired and even more his drawing; then there were Casagemas, Junyer, and Andreu, with whom he went to Paris; Manolo Hugué the sculptor, whom he helped until the end of his days; Sebastià Junyent, who went mad; Josep Xiro, who did the same; Joachim Mir (he and Picasso exchanged portraits); Brossa the anarchist; Zuloaga, who turned Fascist in Franco’s time and denounced his former friend; Eugenio d’Ors, who wrote the well-known Pablo Picasso and other studies; Sabartés, who looked after his affairs for the last thirty-odd years of his life; the brothers Reventós and many, many others.

      One of the reasons why he had time for making all these friends in spite of working as hard as usual—and the number of pictures and drawings from these years is very great—is that shortly after his return from Horta in February, 1899, he and his father disagreed.

      Being a father is generally acknowledged to be an ungrateful trade; being a son is another—Zeus and Saturn found it an impossible relationship. Don José was then rising sixty, an age at which nine months count for very little; Pablo was seventeen, when less than that makes the difference between a boy and a man. He had just come back from a long period of total independence, with no one to speak to him in parental terms; and it would have been strange if they had not disagreed.

      He left home and spent several weeks in a bawdy-house. He cannot possibly have been a guest who paid in cash, but he returned the girls’ kindness by decorating the walls of the room in which they sheltered him. The location of the murals (covered over long since, no doubt) and the exact sequence of events has eluded the researches of even Josep Palau, yet it is probable that it was after the brothel had fulfilled its didactic purpose that he moved in with his friend Santiago Cardona, the brother of the sculptor he had known at the Llotja. Picasso had a small room where he worked and slept, and its window gave on to the Calle d’Escudellers Blancs, a narrow, densely-populated street leading from the Ramblas towards the cathedral: it was here that he was painting in April, 1899. The other rooms were devoted to the making of corsets, and at intervals of painting and drawing Picasso loved to operate the machine that made the holes for the necessary tapes; since the workmen liked him, as workmen always did, he could indulge himself as much as ever he chose.

      The break with his family was neither violent nor lasting, however; there are kindly drawings of his father from this period, and his sister often came to see him. And it was here, too, in this little room, that later in the same year Sabartés first met Picasso, brought by a fellow sculpture-student, Mateo de Soto. “Science and Charity” was leaning up against a wall, together with “Aragonese Customs,” and Picasso, among piles of drawings and sketchbooks, was busy at another painting for which Soto was the model. His piercing black gaze put his diffident visitor out of countenance; the pictures and the drawings quite overcame him; and when they said good-bye Sabartés bent in a kind of respectful bow. This was the beginning of what may be called a friendship, according to one’s definition of the word, and of what must be called a domination that lasted, with one long interruption when Sabartés was in America, until his death in 1968.

      

      For Dr. Johnson every conversation was a contest for superiority: this was also true of Picasso, and there were few relationships in which he did not quickly establish himself as the dominant partner. Later in his life, when he could bring world-wide notoriety and great wealth into play, victory was fatally easy; but even at this stage, when he was eighteen, penniless and unknown, he was accepted as a leading figure at the Quatre Gats, even by those who can have had little notion of his talent and even by those who disliked him.

      It was not that he talked much at the Quatre Gats; in fact he was often silent, moody, withdrawn, absorbed or apparently bored, as well he might have been with some of the morphine creeps who frequented the place—he was always easily bored, and more easily as the years went by. But when he did speak he spoke well, often wittily, and always with the unconscious authority of a man who could already draw and paint better than any of the artists there except perhaps Isidro Nonell.

      A man: in some ways certainly a man. Much of his painting had been fully mature these four or five years past. But he was not yet formed: he had read little, he had had virtually no formal education, and in the nature of things he had very little experience of adult life; what is more, the child Pablo still lived on in him then, as it was to live on for the rest of his life, with comic hats, false noses (and child-fresh painting) at the age of ninety.

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