Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Quatre Gats went to Paris that year, partly to see the exhibition; several were already more or less settled there; and Picasso, Pallarès, and Casagemas made plans to go too. These plans were complicated not only by the general lack of money but by the possibility that Pallarès might obtain a commission to decorate a chapel at Horta; but as the year wore on they grew more substantial.

      By the autumn of 1900 Picasso had become reconciled with his family, and in October it was with his father’s reluctant consent and his mother’s active support that he set off for Paris with Casagemas. Pallarès had in fact received his commission and he could not be with them at the Estación de Francia, but he was to join them in a week or two.

      “And the money for all this, where did it come from?” asked Sabartés.

      “Pallarès, Casagemas and I were going to share. My father paid for the ticket. He and my mother came to the station with me. When they went home, all they had left was the loose change in his pocket. They had to wait until the end of the month before they could get straight. My mother told me long after.”

      By dawn Picasso had crossed the Pyrenees at last. They were well behind him and the train was tearing northwards through France at an exhilarating pace unknown to Spain, belching smoke. A thousand kilometers from the frontier it drew into Paris: they crept from their third-class carriage, deeply covered with smuts, loaded with easels, color-boxes, portfolios, baggage. For a moment it was still Spain, with Catalan and Spanish all around them, tourists for the exhibition, immigrant workers with shapeless bundles; then as the stream flowed off the platform into the open it was Paris. A Paris as dirty as Barcelona or even dirtier but infinitely more full of color: brilliant posters everywhere—Chéret, Bonnard, Steinlen, Forain, Toulouse-Lautrec; sandwichmen; women dressed in bright colors rather than the black of Spain; startling umbrellas. Everywhere the enormous roar of the iron tires of horse-buses, drays, carts, and wagons on the crowded stone-paved streets, littered deep with dung, speckled with the bills handed out by the sandwichmen and thrown away; and mingling with the accustomed omnipresent reek of horse-piss and dung, the new sharp smell of petrol fumes. (Picasso always had a very strong sense of smell.) A bewildering great city, vaster by far than Barcelona or Madrid, and immensely active—no leisurely Spanish pacing here: the French language all round them, a babel of signs, street-cries, directions, people talking, policemen, carters, cab-drivers bawling in their native tongue; and Picasso, the eternal outsider, did not possess a word of it.

      But he did at least know one thing: artists in Paris lived in Montparnasse. Rooms and even regular studios were to be had cheaply in Montparnasse. Junyent was already living there, and they went to see him at once. Although this might only be a short stay, hotels were out of the question, and they must find a room, preferably with some furniture in it.

      They had hit upon a place in the rue Campagne-Première, just off the boulevard Montparnasse, and Picasso was on the point of taking it when he ran into Nonell, who was on the wing for Barcelona, portfolio packed and ready to depart. He at once offered them his studio in the rue Gabrielle, far over on the other side of Paris, on the hill of Montmartre, close to the Sacré Coeur.

      There was no refusing so handsome an offer, and when Pallarès arrived in a few days’ time, too soon for them to have had his letter so that they could meet him at the station, he found them comfortably installed, quite at home, with two young women, Germaine and Odette.

      It was clear that Picasso was quite pleased with Odette, in his cheerful way, although he could not communicate verbally with her at all: it was equally clear that Casagemas was very, very much more affected by Germaine. Presently Ramon Pichot came to see them and a third girl was produced, Germaine’s sister Antoinette. (Pallarès was already deeply in love in Spain; and he was some ten years older than the rest.) How five of these shifting relationships developed is far from clear, but the sixth, Casagemas’ longing for Germaine, grew steadily more obvious.

      Picasso was much attached to Casagemas; they were intimate friends, and he knew about his impotence—in fact, he had introduced Casagemas to Rosita, one of his favorite Calle d’Avinyó girls, in an effort to help him. Exactly what he did to deal with this present situation has not been recorded except in his subsequent pictures, which are open to various interpretations. What is certain is that later he felt the outcome as deeply as it was possible for him to feel anything.

      A hypothesis, based on his pictures and a few other circumstances, is this: he tried to detach Germaine from Casagemas—no very difficult task, perhaps, once the poor man’s condition had become evident—and then possibly to transfer her to Pichot, whom in fact she eventually married. If he thought that by taking the girl away from Casagemas he would cure his friend’s unhappy passion, he was wrong: he may have succeeded with Germaine, but Casagemas still went about with her, and his desperate love grew day by day.

      In any case these days were filled to overflowing for Picasso, and he had little time to look after his friend. There was such a very great deal to be seen: the enormous wealth of the Louvre; the vast, spreading Exposition Universelle itself, which included exhibitions of art in the new-built Grand and Petit Palais and, in the Champ-de-Mars, a retrospective of French painting over the last century—acres of official pictures, but also David, Delacroix, Ingres, Daumier, Courbet, Corot, the Impressionists.

      All this was exciting for the foreign artist, but less so for the native. The Paris of 1900 had grown used to Impressionism and although Monet, Sisley, and some others were still painting purely Impressionist pictures, the first impetus had long since died away. The group’s last exhibition had taken place fourteen years before amidst a violent quarrel about who was Impressionist and who was not, and their successors had never had quite the same impact. Neo-Impressionism produced some wonderful pictures, but Seurat had died in 1891, and apart from Signac and perhaps Cross there were few painters whose divisionist or pointillist technique looked anything more than the application of another man’s rules. There was much talk of Synthétisme, and the Nabis, with Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Vallotton, Vuillard, and Bonnard were carrying on with modern painting in their quiet, domestic way, sometimes galvanized by their connection with Gauguin; but the strong current had been broken, and although there was still a feeling of newness and discovery in the air, the younger artists had no clear rallying-point. The writers of the time, always ready with theory, tried with some success to persuade them that they were or should be Symbolists in the literary sense. They lived in an odd mixture of fin-de-siècle aestheticism and the slowly-crystalizing new outlook, between Mallarmé and Jarry as it were much of the confused, eclectic Art Nouveau with which they were surrounded looked backwards, and so did the Rose-Croix of Joseph Péladan and his followers; yet many of the young men had seen something of van Gogh, Gauguin, and even Cézanne.

      The Parisians of 1900 were not starved for painting. Every year the huge official Salon des Artistes français showed room after room of unbelievably debased academic pictures—slick portraits, illustrations of trifling, often sentimental anecdote, picturesque nooks, and very, very curious nudes—while the dissident Société nationale des Beaux-Arts did much the same, though in their Salon might be seen the now semiofficial watered Impressionism. Yet neither of these Salons was always and entirely devoid of worth: the young Matisse was happy to show at the Nationale, and the Beaux-Arts professor who taught him and for whom he retained a respectful affection all his life, the amiable Gustave Moreau, regularly sent his pictures to the Artistes français, where Rouault also exhibited. But it was at the third Salon, that of the Indépendants, that the new painting was really to be seen. The Société des Indépendants was founded by Seurat, Signac, Redon, and their friends in 1884, and at their second exhibition they hung four pictures by Henri Rousseau, commonly known as the Douanier, while in the years before 1900 they also showed Bonnard, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, the then virtually unknown and quite unsalable van Gogh, and many other splendid painters.

      This was the atmosphere in which Picasso was to live, but for the moment it was not the pictures shown in any of the Salons nor yet the crowded Exposition that gave him his СКАЧАТЬ