It has been called a problem picture by those who are concerned with its literary content; and perhaps that is fair enough, in a way. At all events the preliminary studies are of unusual interest: they all show one or more pictures in the background, sometimes on an easel; most show the figure on the right, and in some cases it is not the severe woman with the child but an elderly man, who may in one instance be painting the pair on the left and in another holding out his hand for charity. In all the couple is to be seen, with little variation but the pointing hand; but whereas in the final version the man is the impotent Casagemas with his sex hidden by the slip, in the drawings he is Picasso himself, quite naked, unmistakably male. Yet neither in the studies nor the picture is the girl Germaine. Picasso could have painted her with perfect ease—a portrait without a model was nothing to him—particularly as she had already sat for him in 1902. He painted her again in 1905, and their curious relationship continued for at least another forty years, when he took Françoise Gilot to a little house in Montmartre where Germaine was living, a poor, sick, toothless old woman, confined to her bed. Picasso’s aim was to give her money, which was obviously his practice, and to exhibit her to Françoise Gilot as a memento mori. “When she was young she made a painter friend of mine suffer so much that he committed suicide,” he said.
“La Vie” was the result of a great deal of thought, perhaps too much for the spontaneity he so valued, for the figures are somewhat set, stiff, and over-organized; but to lay Casagemas’ ghost to his own satisfaction, by processes known only to himself, he would surely make sacrifices on the plastic side. However that may be (and it is mere hypothesis) the picture was ready in his head when the big canvas, almost certainly the one Don José had prepared, reached the studio; and Sabartés describes him setting about it at once, “roughing out a group as briskly as though he were attacking an ordinary picture.”
He also describes Picasso’s extreme nervous tension at this time, his need for inner silence, his mental exhaustion, his need for another air to breathe, a fresh atmosphere that Barcelona could not give him. Sabartés was his constant companion; and one day when they were with friends in a café the conversation grew boring, at least for Picasso in the darkness of his mood. While the others were in full flow, he glanced at Sabartés, said, “Are you coming?” and got up and walked off.
He scarcely spoke on the way back to the Calle del Comercio, nothing but, “What God-damned fools. Don’t you think them fools?” And Sabartés would have left him at the door if he had not pressed him to come in.
In the studio Picasso looked keenly at Sabartés, set a canvas on the easel, and said, “I’m going to do your portrait. All right?”
He needed a companion, a human presence, but a dumb one: he did not want to talk. Sabartés stood there, dutiful and mute, while Picasso worked in silent concentration. At last all that mattered was set down on the canvas, and putting away his brushes Picasso cried, “Well, why don’t you say something, brother? Have you lost your tongue? Anyone would think you were in a bad temper.”
He was happy again, voluble and gay. They went for a walk: the world was worth living in: people were no longer bores.
The next day he finished the portrait with a few strokes. It was a blue picture, certainly; but the sensual red of the lips, the brilliant gold of the tie-pin, were something new, the forerunners of a fresh approach.
*For the very curious essay itself, see the Appendix.
Chapter VI
WHAT sales, what subsidies, what savings carried Picasso to Paris in what proved to be his definitive removal is not recorded, although Sabartés (and Sabartés alone) does speak of an exhibition of his work at the Galérie Serrurier in February of 1904, with the catalog prefaced by Charles Morice. At all events he set off in May or June of that year, again in the company of Sebastiá Junyer-Vidal.
In Paris they found Paco Durio on the point of leaving his studio at 13, rue Ravignan for another place nearby where he could set up a kiln, since his sculpture was taking more and more the form of ceramics: and they took over from him at once. Junyer, who had renounced haberdashery, soon went off to paint in Majorca, leaving Picasso the sole tenant of the studio. Number 13 was a ramshackle building made mostly of wood, zinc, and dirty glass, with stove-pipes sticking up at haphazard; it stood on so steep a part of the Butte de Montmartre that while one spectator, standing where the rue Ravignan broadened into a muddy little square, would see it as a one-floored shack, another, looking up from its back-entrance in the rue Garaud, would gaze at an irregular mass, five stories of rickety studios towering up and holding together by some especial grace. A vast comfortless hutch with no lighting, the most primitive sanitation, and only one source of water for all the tenants; an oven in the summer, when the sun poured through the many skylights, and so cold in the winter, with its thin plank walls, that Picasso’s tea, left overnight, would be frozen in the morning. At one time it had been called the Maison du Trappeur, because of the log-cabins in which fur-trappers dwell; but Max Jacob’s poetic eye detected a likeness to one of those vessels moored in the Seine for laundresses to wash clothes in, and from that time onwards it was called the Bateau-Lavoir. Some laundresses did in fact live there, together with seamstresses, a large number of painters, sculptors, writers, itinerant greengrocers, and actors, all watched over from a distance by Madame Coudray, the good-natured concierge.
Picasso’s studio was at the end of a long passage on the ground floor, counting from the rue Ravignan: a lofty, fair-sized place with vast beams and a small alcove at the far end that could be curtained off. There were no curtains however; and apart from an iron stove in the middle there was no furniture either. But Picasso was in touch with his Spanish and Catalan friends, and among them he found the sculptor Gargallo, who was packing up to return to Barcelona. Gargallo sold Picasso all his furniture for eight francs, to be paid in cash: a small folding bed, a mattress, a chair, a little table, and a bowl. But Gargallo’s studio was in the rue Vercingetorix, right over on the other side of Paris, in Montparnasse: Picasso and Manolo hired a hand-cart, loaded it, and with the help of a hungry young Montparnasse Spaniard they wheeled it across the city, Manolo directing the operation rather than doing any actual work. At last they reached the studio, high on the Butte, and the young Spaniard collapsed. He may really have expected the five francs he had been promised; but when Picasso pointed out that if such a sum were paid it would be impossible for them all to eat, he submitted, agreeing that it should be pooled and converted into one great general meal.
Spaniards and Catalans formed the greater part of Picasso’s acquaintance at this time. As well as the nomads there was a considerable settled colony, including Pichot; Rocarol, with whom he shared the Conde de Asalto studio; the then well-known Zuloaga; Canals, who had first shown him the technique of etching and who was now encouraging him to make another and a far more ambitious attempt; Durio; and of course Manolo, who, being left the use of one of Durio’s studios while he was away, sold all the Gauguins on its walls to Vollard. He also stole Max Jacob’s only pair of trousers, Max being then in bed, and brought them back only because no dealer would make him an offer.
The friendship between Manolo and Picasso was of long standing and it lasted all their life. Picasso admired Manolo’s sculpture and Manolo admired Picasso’s painting, but there was far more to it than that: Manolo was some ten years older than Picasso, a love-child who had been early turned out on the streets of Barcelona to pick up what living he could; he kept alive in the face of literally cut-throat competition, and in the course of this education he grew very sharp indeed, not to say piratical. Harsher words, such as bandit, thief, and pickpocket have been used; and the face that Picasso often drew is that of a lean and wary character, though curiously distinguished. But above all he was an outsider, a complete outsider, tough, self-reliant, and capable, and it was this that bound them together: piracy was a quality latent in Picasso too, and he esteemed the quality in his friend. What is more,
Manolo was extremely witty and gay; even his victims—that is to say almost his entire acquaintance—bore him no iil-will; and Picasso had more fun with him as a companion than ever he had had with the melancholy Sabartés, who had now gone off to the New World in search of a fortune. It was a true companionship: each respected the other (and, by the way, neither of them drank; they both retained their lucidity at all times). Maurice Raynal knew both intimately, and when he was telling Brassaï about Manolo he said, “I was very, very fond of that man, and Picasso was devoted to him … Manolo was the elder by ten years and for him the young Ruiz was always ‘Little Pablo.’ And Picasso took more notice of him than of anyone else… he was perhaps the only person from whom Picasso would take criticism, teasing, contradiction”
A fellow-tenant in the Bateau-Lavoir, a big, sleepy, beautiful young Frenchwoman named Fernande Olivier or Belle vallee, the detached wife of an insane sculptor, used to watch Picasso laughing with Manolo, talking all day long with his Spanish friends under the trees of the little square. Sometimes he also showed the local children how to draw chickens, hares, and what the cautious André Level terms “ruminants” in the dust. She wondered when he found time to work, and presently she found that it was in the quiet of the night, lit by an oil-lamp or sometimes by a candle.
At this point Picasso was twenty-two and Fernande about the same (some say older, some say younger): and although she did notice his small feet and hands she did not see anything particularly attractive about him at first—rien de trés séduisant. She was not alone in this: a friend of Gertrude Stein’s described him as a “good-looking bootblack.” Nor could she place him socially; his days of purple and fine linen were over (there was no Soler in Paris and in any case Picasso’s dandyism had only been for the fun, a kind of dressing-up) and now he usually wore a boilersuit or the French workingman’s blue cotton jacket, with the red Catalan sash, the faixa, under it. But like everybody else Fernande was struck by his extraordinary eyes—huge, dark, and piercing, generally kind, always compelling; and by the immense vitality that flowed from him. She did not think him particularly young at the time; but she does observe that he stayed the same fairly mature twenty-two for all the twelve years they lived together. For that matter, photographs taken when he was well past fifty still show an absurdly boyish face, with the same black forelock drooping over his forehead; and even in 1952, when I first met him and when by the calendar he was over seventy, there was nothing at all of the old man about him: he was trim, compact, well made, his round head burned brown in the sun—age was irrelevant.
All the people in the Bateau-Lavoir knew one another without formal introduction, because they met daily at the tap by the front door, carrying jugs, but some little time passed before Picasso and Fernande became more intimate. It was on a hot, oppressive, overcast day that she hurried into the house to escape the thunder-rain; Picasso was there, holding a kitten in his arms; he blocked her passage—they both laughed—he offered her the little cat and invited her to come and see his work: indeed, his etching.
Fernande had been used to studios since at least the age of seventeen, for not only had she married her sculptor, but she also had a thin, acid, shrill-voiced sister who was mistress to Othon Friesz; nevertheless this one astonished her, not only by its poverty in furniture (apart from Gargallo’s sticks the only object was a little sad black trunk, used as a seat), not only by its exceptional squalor, accentuated by squashed tubes of paint all over the floor, jars of turpentine, and a pail of filth, but by the crowd of canvases that filled it. They were all blue. She had never seen anything like it. He was obviously working on several at once—some were unfinished—and although she thought them morbid she liked them, particularly one of a cripple leaning on a crutch and carrying a great long basket of flowers on his back: “tender, strange.… infinitely sad … a painful crying out to the pity of mankind.” And then there was the etching, an emaciated couple sitting at a paper-covered table with a two-liter bottle of wine on it, an empty glass, an empty plate, and a hunk of bread: the starving man wears a bowler hat and a kind of ragged vest that does not cover his poor stringy neck; his head is turned from the woman (he is probably blind), but his arm is round her shoulders and his other hand presses her arm; the pair have reached their uttermost limit, but their elongated, bony hands form a marvelous intricate pattern holding their wretchedness together. This was, of course, the etching that became so famous in later years under the title of “Le Repas frugal,” and Picasso made it on an old zinc plate (copper was too expensive) given him by Canals: his only tool was a common pin.
Picasso had not yet been long in Paris, but he had already done a great deal of work: and of course he had acquired an animal, as well as the vague cats that walked in and out. It was only a mouse; but it was a white mouse, and unusually tame. Its home was in the table drawer, safe from the cats. He was also beginning to acquire French or at least French-speaking friends: for the moment Max Jacob was away, visiting his family in Quimper, but others soon appeared—Apollinaire, Salmon, Reverdy, Raynal, the Steins, to name but a few. And sooner or later all these friends, as well as his merchants and mistresses, wrote books about him; indeed almost everybody who ever met Picasso seems to have taken to print, and as early as 1966 Gaya Nu ño’s massive bibliography numbered one thousand five hundred and seventy items (though to be sure some of them are critical works) and today the total is even greater. With this mass of documentation the biographer’s task should be straightforward, if laborious; and so it would be, if only the principal witnesses, the prime sources, the people who were actually there, had the least notion of accuracy. They have not: Fernande Olivier, for example, places her meeting with Picasso in a year when he was in Barcelona, and she has the long-dead Casagemas walking about the Place Ravignan; André Salmon repeats Fernande’s error and long, long before they ever met he adds Matisse to those who frequented Picasso’s studio; while Gertrude Stein makes so many wild statements that it is impossible to rely upon her. The chronology of Picasso’s movements is difficult to establish; so is that of his early work. Later, when his foresight overcame his modesty and he realized that posterity would wish to follow his development—or rather the temporal sequence of his works, since he denied any evolution—he dated everything, even to the month and the day; but for the early periods there is no certainty. Even Picasso’s astonishing memory could not encompass eighty years of ceaseless activity: he could not recall, for instance, just when he had made some of his undated sculptures.
It was some time before Fernande moved in with Picasso. The exact date is of course uncertain, but it must have been after his meeting with Apollinaire, since it was the poet’s active mind that hit upon a way of cleaning the studio floor. Fernande had said she would pay Picasso a visit that evening, and as he gazed about it occurred to him that the place was not as inviting as he could wish; yet he could not tell what to do: even if he had possessed a broom, sweeping would not deal with the half-dried mounds of paint on the floor, the trodden, embedded tubes, and it would disturb the layers of dust, causing it to settle on the wet, unfinished canvases that stood in all parts of the room. Apollinaire had the answer: they would wash it with paraffin, that powerful solvent. This they did: the paraffin soaked into the wooden floor, spreading the dirt more evenly and turning the studio into the most dangerous fire-hazard in Montmartre (no company would ever insure it and in fact it burned down entirely a few years ago) as well as the smelliest. The smell was strongest when they had finished and when the greatest possible area of floor was exhaling its mortal fumes: clearly there was nothing to be done but to sprinkle the whole place with a large quantity of eau de Cologne.
In spite of the lingering stench Fernande did move in, threading her way through the precariously-balanced canvases and bringing with her curtains for the alcove in which they sometimes slept and where she took refuge from morning callers, an alcove which Picasso turned into a shrine to love, partly burlesque and partly serious: a hanging portr
ait, a white blouse, two blue vases with artificial flowers, a variety of symbols. Fundamentally serious, probably; for at about the time of Fernande’s appearance the Blue Period and its deep unhappiness came to an end, giving way to the Rose: Picasso may have seen Fernande as little more than a splendid pink body—this obliquity of vision, this unfortunate inheritance, hampered all his relations with women—but at least it was a body that changed his view of the world and the whole current of his plastic approach to it.
Fernande was a curious being, not easily to be classed nor yet described. Picasso’s pictures show a large, placid woman, with a beautiful complexion and great almond eyes, sleepily sensual: natural and at ease with no clothes on. She might have suited Renoir or Matisse far better than Picasso. She was remarkably idle, and she seems to have had nothing maternal about her at all; she would lie in bed watching Picasso do whatever housework was done, and although she records the efforts made by other women to help their artists (some shelled peas in the market, and the seamstress wives of Reverdy the poet and Agero the sculptor, who lived in the Bateau-Lavoir, worked late into the night to provide for them), she herself did nothing in Picasso’s hardest times apart from charming a merchant into delivering coal on credit. Her people had been manufacturers of artificial flowers in a small way of business; it is said that she was trained as a schoolmistress; and foreigners at least thought her French so pure that at a later time she gave them lessons.