Picasso: A Biography

  He also had to satisfy Manyac, who expected regular deliveries according to their contract, but who expected in vain: at no period of his life did time mean much to Picasso, still less puctuality; and writing a letter, finding an envelope, a postage stamp, were only a little less of a torment than doing up a packet and sending it away—the hand that could model the most satisfying statue of a goat known to man could only with the greatest reluctance be brought to make a parcel. And even then the resulting bundle, with its inadequate paper and odd bits of string, could scarcely confront the post.

  Then again Modernismo was only now reaching Madrid, that un-European town. Picasso had already had years of it in Barcelona and a most concentrated dose in Paris, where a great deal of the enormous exhibition sagged and drooped in Modern’ style. His own work had for some time been reaching far beyond this stage, and the prospect of living through it again, of promoting it in Arte Joven, cannot have been agreeable. Besides, although Art Nouveau was to live on for many years, growing steadily more debased, industrialized, and commonplace as the first genuine excitement died away, it had already given what little it had to offer. Yeats, looking back at the year 1900, said, “Everybody got down off his stilts … nobody drank absinthe in his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church.” Picasso was perfectly in tune with the Zeitgeist; he was already ahead of it in many ways and he was soon to be recognized as one of its chief formers: yet here he was in 1901, surrounded by amiable people who were just getting ready to mount on their stilts for the first time. If Barcelona had seemed provincial after Paris, Madrid, apart from the Prado, was a desert.

  It has also been suggested that he fell out with Soler and there is nothing improbable in the suggestion: two men in an unsuccessful partnership are not likely to agree, and Picasso was at all times highly susceptible to any hint of an affront or an assumption of superiority. Furthermore Soler was tall, well dressed, and comparatively moneyed: Picasso was short, shabby, and poor. As a young man he was sensitive about clothes in a spasmodic way—something of a dandy when he could afford it—and here was another source of discontent. But far, far more important than these was the fact that the death of Casagemas was working in his mind.

  Although he knew many interesting people in Madrid—he was popular among the literary men, who looked at him with some wonder as “the little Andalou who spoke with a Catalan accent”—although he had sold some pictures, and although the cruel Madrid winter was turning to a hope of that blazing sun in which he thrived, in May he abandoned his garret, his table, and chair and his dying Arte Joven and returned to Barcelona.

  He brought with him a large number of pastels, a medium he was using a great deal at the time, though with a ferocity contrasting strangely with the gentle word, together with other works that may have included the “Dwarf Dancing-Girl.” Phoebe Pool quotes “an old friend” who remembered Picasso coming into the Quatre Gats on his return from Madrid, showing a copy of part of “Las Meninas” that he had just made at the Prado and then next to it his own “Dancing-Girl.” “Velásquez did this,” he said, “Picasso did that.” On the other hand the Picasso Museum dates the canvas “Autumn 1901,” and certainly it looks as though Picasso’s van Gogh tendency had been reinforced by his later and deeper study of the Dutchman’s work: in any case it is a violent, savage picture, brilliant in its conception, coloring, and execution. The vulgar, strident, indefinably malformed girl amounts to the same basic statement that Velásquez made with his dwarf attendant, but in a completely different idiom; and although at first glance one recoils from the cruelty, presently one sees that the apparent harshness overlies a deep fellow-feeling, a wholly unsentimental sympathy. Just as Toulouse-Lautrec points no accusing finger at his grotesque poxed alcoholics, reserving his real venom for the bourgeois whoremasters on the spree, so Picasso’s real kindness is apparent in his treatment of other outsiders; it is strikingly obvious too in his marvelous animal drawings. “In the end there is only love,” he said to Tériade; and at another time he said that you could paint nothing you did not love—women should not paint pipes, for example—and perhaps in this context love would be a better word than kindness.

  But, as the critics pointed out, neither love nor kindness was evident in the pastels he showed at the Saló Parés. This exhibition, the first real, full-blown exhibition of Picasso’s career, was a gesture of reparation on the part of the senior members of the Quatre Gats; they had not done a great deal to help him gain a footing in Barcelona and Pèl i Ploma had published little of his work. Now his friends welcomed him back, and although this was only a flying visit, a stage on the journey to carry his promised, overdue pictures to Paris rather than send them, and to collect more, the review sponsored this show in the only worthwhile gallery the town possessed; it did so in style, and although since Ramon Casas also exhibited it was not a one-man show, the fact of sharing with so well-known a man was in itself a compliment.

  Pèl i Ploma also published an appreciation of the artist, with his portrait drawn by Casas in Paris, with Montmartre, the Sacré Coeur, and the Moulin de la Galette in the background. The appreciation was written by Utrillo, a man whose opinion carried weight. After some disobliging remarks about the painters of Málaga, among whom Picasso would have accomplished nothing, and about official art in Barcelona, and after speaking of Picasso’s recent history, he went on, “Picasso’s is an exceedingly youthful art; it is the product of an observing eye that does not forgive the weaknesses of the people of our time, and it is one that reveals the beauty even of the hideous, a beauty recorded with the restraint and measure of one who draws because he sees, not merely because he can hit off a face from memory. The pastels shown here … are only one aspect of the talent of Picasso, an artist whose work will arouse a great deal of controversy but also the esteem of many who reject ready-made forms and who seek out art in all its manifestations … Pèl i Ploma bows low to the established artists of merit; it also does whatever it can to help the first flight of those who may become the great men of tomorrow.” Then, having recalled that in Paris Picasso was called “the little Goya” because of his looks, Utrillo went on, “We hope that this physical resemblance will not be belied; and our heart tells us we shall prove right.”

  This was a kind reception for a nineteen-year-old foreigner in a clannish city where patronage was both scarce and jealously guarded, but Picasso was almost certainly not there to enjoy it. He rarely attended the opening of any of his shows: an understandable reaction, since an exhibiting painter has not only to expose his nakedness on the wall—a nakedness that is no longer under his control, that can no longer be altered, any more than a book that has passed its final proof—but he also has to stand there in his best suit with a dubious drink in his hand, while strangers ask him “what that is meant to represent” and while his friends, uneasily aware that they ought to buy something, conceal their determination not to do so by labored praise. And on this occasion he was short of time as well; as Sabartés observes, he darted through Barcelona like a meteor.

  At all events, while the show was still on, and it lasted from June 1 to June 14, 1901, Picasso was in Paris. He had made the journey with Jaume Andreu, a Quatre Gats acquaintance: not a particularly interesting man, it seems, but Picasso needed company, and he rarely made any considerable journey alone.

  Manyac was living in Montmartre on the top floor of 130 ter boulevard de Clichy, in the small flat Manuel Pallarès had occupied earlier in the year: he welcomed Picasso and the pictures he brought, invited him to stay and told him that he had already arranged an exhibition, not with Berthe Weill but at the larger, more important gallery run by Ambroise Vollard in the rue Laffitte.

  Vollard was a remarkable figure among the Paris art-dealers: dingy, bearded, dusty, apparently bemused. He was one of the few who knew what painting, rather than the sale of pictures, was all about; and although he was not indifferent to profit he loved the living art of his time far more
. Indeed he was so much ahead of the taste of his time that the commercial success of his gallery touches upon the miraculous, particularly as there was little of the salesman in his nature. Gertrude Stein had to struggle to buy a picture from him; and her description of his gallery is particularly convincing. “It was an incredible place. It did not look like a picture gallery. Inside there were a couple of canvases turned to the wall, in one corner was a small pile of big and little canvases thrown pell mell on top of one another, in the centre of the room stood a huge dark man glooming. This was Vollard cheerful. When he was really cheerless he put his huge frame against the glass door that led to the street, his arms above his head, his hands on each upper corner of the portal and gloomed darkly into the street. Nobody thought then of trying to come in.”

  He came from Réunion, far away in the Indian Ocean; he still had a strong Creole accent and the murk of Paris weighed upon his spirits; he was only thirty-three at this time, yet he looked middle-aged. Perhaps a nostalgia for the tropics was a factor in his love for painters with the sun in their belly, above all Cézanne. Since his great purchase he had not sold many of the pictures—with a few exceptions even the educated public remained indifferent or even hostile—but at least this did mean that there were plenty of Cézannes to be seen in the gallery when the young Picasso was introduced to its owner.

  The show, which opened on June 24, 1901, was another shared exhibition, the second man in this case being the Basque Iturrino, a man in his thirties, much esteemed by Vollard; but there were seventy-five Picassos on the wall—bull-fights, nudes, flower-pieces, night-life and café scenes—as opposed to thirty-six Iturrinos, and the critics took more notice of the younger man. For although the Galérie Vollard may not have been as smooth as Durand-Ruel farther along the street or the fashionable Bernheim-Jeune, an exhibition there was taken seriously by the Paris press, and the critics appeared in numbers. Gustave Coquiot, one of the most influential, was enthusiastic about Picasso; so was the perspicacious Félicien Fagus, who wrote in the Revue Blanche itself. Although he indulged in the art-critic’s favorite game of influences, detecting no less than nine—Delacroix, Manet, Monet, van Gogh, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Forain, and Rops—and although he said that Picasso’s enthusiasm had not left him time to work out a personal style of his own, the general tone of the review was strongly favorable: “prodigious skill—youthful, impetuous spontaneity. Picasso is a painter, wholly and beautifully a painter, and his exaltation of his subjects is enough to prove it. Like all absolute painters he worships color for its own sake, and each subject has its own. He is in love with every theme, and for him everything is a theme—the flowers hurling themselves out of the vase towards the light, the flight of the vase itself and even of the table beneath it, and the dancing light-filled air all around them.… The danger for Picasso lies in this very impetuosity, which may well carry him away, leading him to an easy virtuosity, an easier success.”

  There is no doubt about the critics’ reception of the exhibition; but although some writers confidently state that all the pictures were sold, while others maintain that the show did fairly well, Vollard himself says that it was not a success. What the merchant considered a success is less plain, yet whether pictures were sold or not, it cannot have made much immediate material difference to Picasso, since most of the money, if not all of it, would have been divided between Manyac and Vollard.

  What this exhibition certainly did bring him, apart from praise, was the friendship of Max Jacob, an exceptionally percipient, witty, poverty-stricken critic, poet, and writer who was deeply impressed by Picasso’s work and who sought his acquaintance.

  Picasso was living with Manyac in the boulevard de Clichy; he had the second, the larger room at the back; and he still moved about in his Spanish and Catalan world: Pichot, now firmly attached to Germaine; Paco Durio the sculptor, Gauguin’s friend; Fontbona; and many others, including the resourceful Manolo—it is said that on being called up for his military service in Spain he found himself in a cavalry regiment on frontier duty, and that he at once rode his horse into France, sold it, pawned his uniform and weapons, and took the earliest train to Paris, disguised as a monk.

  Max Jacob was then twenty-five, but he looked much more; he was an extremely gifted man, well-read, short, bald, charming, sharp-tongued, salacious, fantastic, painfully sensitive and vulnerable, terrified of women, and hopelessly impractical: the son of a Jewish tailor in Quimper. He left an appreciative note at the gallery and Manyac asked him to call on Picasso at the boulevard de Clichy. “He was surrounded by a swarm of poor Spanish painters, who sat on the floor eating and talking. He painted two or three pictures a day, wore a top hat just as I did and spent his evenings behind the scenes in the music-halls of those days, drawing portraits of the stars.” They shook hands, smiled repeatedly, and then, being unable to communicate, shook hands again. Jacob examined the canvases—Picasso had already painted scores since his arrival—and more Spanish friends appeared. Presently formality died away; someone cooked a dish of beans and they sat about in the dust, eating them. Dinner being over, they all of them, except for Picasso, who had no gift in that direction, uttered sounds intended to represent an orchestra playing Beethoven. The next day Picasso and his friends returned the call, flooding into Jacob’s little room on the Quai aux Fleurs: after a long, long time some of the Spaniards went away; Manyac, the interpreter, fell asleep; and Picasso and Jacob, left to themselves, gazed at the Daumiers, the Gavarnis, and the Dürer woodcut on the walls. In some way Picasso conveyed his wish to hear Jacob’s poetry, and he listened to it for what was left of the night. At dawn they separated, and Jacob gave Picasso the Daumiers, the Gavarnis, and the Dürer.

  They saw a great deal of one another after that, although Picasso was working at his usual steam-engine pace: sometimes they used Oller’s pass to go to places such as the Moulin Rouge where Picasso not only enjoyed himself but also stored up material for one side of his painting. Yet this second Paris was not all success or the promise of success, not all this new friendship and wandering about the brilliant town by night. Among other things, Picasso’s relationship with Manyac was turning sour. Few men can successfully mix business and friendship: and perhaps one has to be a creative artist to live in close proximity with another, if indeed it is possible at all, creative artists being so very often, and perhaps necessarily, the most selfish and exigent of men. Picasso’s was a naturally dominant personality; his life was irregular even for a Spaniard; his habits squalid; the flat exceedingly small. Envahissant has often been used in connection with him, a word for which the English “encroaching” or “overwhelming” are inadequate approximations. For some years he used to summer with friends of the present writer in a town where many Spaniards lived, most of them Republican refugees: he would walk about in the afternoon, often meeting with old acquaintances or making fresh ones, and his hostess never knew whether there would be five for dinner or twenty-five, nor whether they would sit down at eight o’clock or eleven. However, she and her husband had a very great affection for Picasso, a deep respect for his painting, and they were perfectly happy to suit their ways to his. Manyac was made of less noble stuff, and presently he began to resent this influx of friends, the virtual annexation of his home.

  But the merchant was of little importance compared with the shade of Casagemas. Picasso was living within a few paces of the café where his friend had killed himself (he painted its interior); the studio that Nonell had lent them was only just round the corner; Pichot and Germaine were always in view; and Picasso could scarcely go to a single place in the Paris he knew that was not haunted by the poor tortured suicide.

  In the late, dead season of the year Sabartés arrived in Paris, solely with the idea of following Picasso. Many things astonished him—the lightless sun like an orange through the fog, the sight of Picasso waiting for him at the station although it was only ten in the morning, an unheard-of hour for him to get out of bed. But he was still more
astonished when Picasso took him back to the boulevard de Clichy and showed him his recent painting.

  It had changed entirely. There were, to be sure, pictures in what might be called his Toulouse-Lautrec manner, which had begun during his earlier visit—pictures such as the sumptuous ram-you-damn-you harlot in her high collar of jewels or the delightfully perverse “Jeune Femme” with auburn hair and a vast complicated hat—but others at first glance seemed to have no connection with the Picassos that Sabartés had known in Barcelona. There were several Maternities, grave, somber studies of the ancient theme, one at least of the most poignant beauty; there were the fierce, brilliantly-colored pictures that resulted from the fusion of Picasso’s own vision, or rather one of his visions, with that of van Gogh, whom Picasso specifically named to Roland Penrose as the strongest influence on him in 1901, and it is most probable that the “Dwarf Dancing-Girl” was among them; portraits, such as those of Coquiot, as variegated as playing-cards; there were Harlequins already, those sad, lonely figures in the outsider’s uniform that were to haunt his work, his private mythology, for so many, many years; there were paintings of Casagemas alive and dead, of mourners at an open coffin, and among the studies a limp, drooping nude that he afterwards used to place around one of his rare drawings of Christ crucified; there was an ambitious great picture sometimes called the “Evocation” and sometimes the “Burial of Casagemas”; there was Casagemas himself, seen close to, in his coffin with a huge radiant “van Gogh” candle burning beside him; and then, as from another world entirely, an impressionistic boulevard de Clichy; a girl standing in a hip-bath in his room (it has a Toulouse-Lautrec poster on the wall, probably stolen from a hoarding while the paste was still wet) sponging herself in a flood of light; and a most satisfying still-life, as deeply satisfying as a Cézanne: but above all, Picasso’s universe had been invaded by the color blue.