Picasso: A Biography

  Another who found his way to Picasso’s door and knocked on it in the morning, obliging him to rise before twelve o’clock (not that he would do so unless the good concierge called out that this was a “serious visitor,” meaning a merchant or a solvent amateur) was Olivier Saincére, a councilor of state, no less; and another, who kept more reasonable hours, was Paul Poiret, the eminent dressmaker.

  These gentlemen brought money with them, and it was at about this time that Fernande scandalized the whole of Montmartre and even parts of Montparnasse by displaying a bottle of scent that had cost eighty francs: for now Picasso might have several hundred-franc notes at one given time. They came at irregular, unpredictable intervals, but they came, and he loved them: he could not bear, or he did not choose, to leave them at home, and he bought himself a wallet, which he fastened into his breast-pocket with a large safety-pin. One day he fancied that the pin was not quite as he had left it, and he stared round with a most suspicious and foreboding air. Fernande reports the fact; finds it amusing; and does not appear to feel that it throws an unusual light upon their relationship—a shaky relationship, by the way, for Gertrude Stein was accustomed to their partings; and if Toklas were a reliable witness (which she is not) one of the most dramatic of these came as soon as Picasso had enough money—by his code a man had to provide for a woman on leaving her.

  Picasso liked to have money, there is no doubt about that, and he liked to keep it; but what sets him apart from most men in this respect is the fact that getting it did not fill him with elation. He found the whole business exhausting, particularly if it was accompanied by bargaining; but much more than that, he hated parting with his pictures. This was one of the very few things that stopped him working: the deep depression would not lift for days. He loved his pictures, and he loved painting them—could not conceive painting without love. Once, when he was very poor, Vollard passed on an order for a replica of “L’Enfant au pigeon”— ”Picasso looked at me in surprise. ‘But I should have no pleasure in copying my own work, and how do you suppose I could paint without enjoyment?’”

  Gertrude Stein thought Vollard an amusing, unbusinesslike character; Femande Olivier thought him deeply cunning, though agreeable: but a picture-dealer, if he is to survive, must possess flair and an acute sense of the shifting market; though he was far from infallible, Vollard had both, and a high degree of enterprise as well. He knew Shchukine, he knew the Steins; and although his interest in Picasso had hitherto been great enough for him to keep some Picassos in his mysterious cellars, to be shown only to the initiated, and to buy his small sculptures and have them cast in bronze, it now suddenly increased. He came to the Bateau-Lavoir and bought almost everything in the studio. His purchase included some thirty canvases; and he paid two thousand francs for the lot.

  The sum of £2.64 may not seem a great deal for a big Picasso oil, but the total was a larger sum of money than Picasso had ever seen in his life. At Fernande’s minimum rate of housekeeping the two thousand francs would have lasted three years, and even with what would have been prodigality for the abstemious Picasso it was a good twelve months’ living. He decided that they should take a holiday; and the desolation of his empty studio may have helped his decision. He tore himself away from the sittings with Gertrude Stein, leaving her portrait unfinished (at the last session he painted out her face, in spite of all protests); he tore himself away from the Louvre, where a fascinating exhibition of ancient Iberian sculpture, unearthed in his native province, was being shown; and they took the train for Barcelona.

  Fernande’s presence neither surprised nor displeased the Ruizes; they liked her, regretted her irregular situation, and wondered that she did not marry Pablo: she did not mention the mad sculptor, still her legal spouse. She delighted his friends, Pallarès, the Sotos, and many others, some of whom she already knew from their Paris days; there is a surviving photograph of her, wearing a splendid hat, sitting in the Guayaba with Picasso and Ramon Reventós, and she and Picasso went to see his former haunts, including the studio in the Riera de Sant Joan, where his painted furniture still adorned the walls.

  But this was only a pause in their voyage. A few days later they set off for Gósol, a remote mountain village at the far end of the province of Lérida, high in the Pyrenees and so close to the Andorran border that smuggling was an established way of life.

  Why they chose it cannot be told with any certainty, but a connection between Picasso’s friend the sculptor Casanovas and Gósol is the likeliest answer: their route is equally uncertain, for even recent maps show no road, only faint wandering tracks. However, their most probable way was to take the train to Ripoll, a diligence to Berga, and a wagon to Sant Llorens de Morunys: from that point onwards there was nothing for it but feet or a powerful mule. The track, a little wider now than it was in 1906 but still abominable, climbs over a series of improbable sierras by passes well over five thousand feet, through limestone mountains shattered and upheaved by ancient convulsions; sometimes the peaks are bare, with sheer ocher-colored precipices, and sometimes they are covered with pine-forest, where the trace of prodigious winds can be seen, the trunks lying like a heap of spillikins; but nowhere does there seem the least room for men. Eventually the path rises over one last barren pass, and there in the valley below lies Tuixent, a close-packed village on its own little hill, like Horta but in a far more savage landscape, far higher too and far more severe—gray stone houses, gray roofs, slightly relieved by the blue of shutters and embrasures. Now that Picasso has given one eyes to see it, the village is purely Cubist, and late Cubist at that, with intersecting or superimposed planes, shifting in sober color; and it seems to have no depth in the ordinary sense, for all perspective is confounded. Another day’s ride, rising and falling through still more and still more spectacular mountains, with sheltered streams a great way down lined with tall poplar trees, would have brought them to the next inhabited place, Josa, a village the twin of Tuixent, though with an even finer Romanesque church crowning its hill: then climbing right out of the Josa valley through a deep forest and over still another watershed they would have reached the upper rim of a great smoothly-rounded cirque gouged out by some glacier long ago, and far below they would have beheld Gósol at last, a village somewhat like the other two, but richer, lying in a patchwork of bright green fields and sprawling wider from its hill—a hill topped by ancient ruined fortifications and an ancient ruined church. North of the village and hemming in the valley, the great bar of the Sierra del Cadi, rising eight thousand feet and more and shutting it off from Andorra: beyond, to the south and the east, a chaos of gray, green, and ocher mountains, with this small complex pattern of rectilinear walls and roofs providing order in the chaos.

  Gósol is not a hundred miles from Barcelona in a straight line, but it was another world. Unlike Tuixent and Josa, which could only live by sheep and goats, some hardy cattle, and wood-cutting, Gósol was agricultural as well, and its life was very like that of Hofta, a better watered, alpine Horta. Like Horta too it was well within the boundaries of the Catalan language and culture, so that Picasso felt perfectly at home—more at home than ever he was in Paris, says Fernande. They settled at the only inn, the Can Tempanada, a small house giving on to the vaguely triangular square, the heart of the village, where cattle drink at the perpetually flowing fountain and fill the air with their sweet breath: the house is still there, although it is no longer an inn, and in recent years a plaque has been set up on its outer wall, celebrating with some emphasis the stay of the Spanish painter Picasso.

  Horta had left the deepest impression on him, and this was essentially the same unchanging, timeless life, with the additional pleasure of smuggling and the possibility of bears, boars, wild cats, the Pyrenean chamois, and even lynxes, as well as wolves. He understood the people, their work and play, their relationship to the land, and the rhythm of their days. His health, which had been much tried by the last years in Paris, was restored by the clean sharp air, the exercise, and the
simple, copious food. What Fernande made of her mule, her journey, her surroundings, her diet, and her neighbors, and what they made of her cannot be deduced from her memoirs; she does not seem to have been quite sure where she was and she certainly could not communicate with anyone but Picasso; but so long as she could lie long abed she was content, and in her somnolent way she was quite pleased to see the improvement in her lover. His difficult manner disappeared; he made friends with the villagers, particularly with one ancient savage mountaineer, a smuggler by trade; and above all he worked. At intervals of roaming about the Sierra del Cadi and the lower valley with its astonishing geology of blood-red soil and green shattered rock with bands of native vermilion and coal, he turned out a great number of pictures and drawings; and these show some important new and apparently divergent approaches to the problems that concerned him so deeply. The order in which he produced them cannot now be followed with any certainty: years later Picasso himself put a wrong date on one of the most important, and even the devoted cataloguer Zervos assigns fourteen of them to 1905, when Picasso was in Paris. However, the following account, which is based on Barr, cannot be far out. When Picasso began working at Gósol he appears to have carried on with his classical manner, painting still, gently molded forms and using pink as he had once used blue, so that some of the canvases are monochromatic. There was a fairly straightforward portrait of Fernande, herself a statuesque figure by nature; but a better example is a classical nude with both hands over her head (a pose that preoccupied him in the following years), arranging her hair in a glass held by another woman, this one clothed: both have Fernande’s almond eyes and sleepy grace. Then came a certain hardening, the pink growing less rosy, the figures assuming a still more sculptural form and their faces an impassive, mask-like quality, as though the severe, archaic Iberians in the Louvre were showing through: the “Porteuse de pain,” a big oil of a woman in a white kerchief carrying two huge flat rye loaves on a little white cushion on her head, shows this change, which became very much more marked when Picasso returned to Paris.

  This steady progression is suddenly broken by a large and particularly important painting to which Picasso, no doubt badgered by some merchant or critic, gave the unmeaning title “Composition”: it may have been actually painted when Picasso was back in Paris, but the conception and the preliminary drawings almost certainly belong to Gósol, as the bullocks do without a doubt—to Gósol and to the perfect, mild-eyed cattle of antiquity. Two barefoot peasants, carrying flowers, run beside a couple of bullocks: the man is immensely tall, his minute lemon-shaped head towers up, his forearms are enormous, he carries a great basket of flowers on his shoulders and their varied colors fill the top of the picture; the slim girl, half his size, has a simple bunch of them, held at her waist. They all run very close together, bullocks and people intermingled, and the canvas is alive with movement. In the flowers, the tall man, and the small girl there is a strong resemblance to the El Greco “Saint Joséph and the Child Jesus” at Toledo both in the arrangement and the physical distortion of the figures, a likeness still more apparent in a preliminary sketch before the bullocks were added; while the unification of the whole, both by means of this distortion (which Picasso had never carried so far before) and by the use of color in angular planes, looks back to El Greco and Cézanne and forward to Cubism.

  Why the wild rushing delight? Why the bullocks? Far be it from me to offer an explanation (“In general those who try to explain pictures are entirely wrong,” said Picasso to Juan Larrea) but I will mention a circumstance that may have some bearing on their presence: in mountain country the cattle usually stay out on the high pastures for the summer, and when the right season comes they are brought down, often with rejoicing and sometimes with wreaths of flowers about their horns.

  These summer months of 1906 were an idyllic holiday; they produced a great deal of work; they restored Picasso’s health and his immensely valuable contact with unchanging rural life, strengthened his body, mind, and spirit in isolation from all extraneous intellectual contacts; and they might have produced even more—they might have been prolonged far into the autumn—if a child at the inn had not fallen sick with what some describe as typhoid fever, others as typhus, the plague itself. Picasso was always terrified of illness, the precursor of death, the utter negation of all he stood for, and he insisted on instant flight, on leaving at once for France.

  Fernande gives no details of how they crossed the entire range of the Pyrenees, but she does remember that they traveled from five in the morning until five at night before they reached a village from which they could take a diligence. This agrees with Josép Palau’s statement that they rode from Gósol to Bellver on mules, there took a diligence to Puigcerda and another to Axles-Thermes in France, where the train carried them to Paris. (He also says that they first reached Gósol by taking the train as far as Guardiola, covering the last twenty miles by mule; but in 1906 it seems that the Guardiola line was open only for minerals, mostly coal.)

  Back in Paris Picasso could refurnish his studio with the pictures brought from Gósol: almost the only canvas left from former times was the unfinished portrait of Gertrude Stein, with its face now a mere blur. Before ever he saw her again he painted it in from memory. The features that had so pleased her friends were replaced by a mask, immobile and intent, with severe, uneven, asymmetric eyes, the whole quite removed from the earlier hands and the careful drapery, thus acquiring a strange haunting value, another reality—surrealist before the letter. The friends were shocked; the sitter was delighted, as well she might have been, for it is a noble picture, a Gertrude Stein without self-consciousness, affectation, or complacency—and as for likeness, she came to resemble her portrait in time, as Picasso foretold.

  This was followed by another, a portrait of the artist himself, holding his symbolic palette; and here the mask-like quality is even more accentuated. Then came two nudes, massive, stocky, sculptural women, coppery pink, archaic, ugly by conventional standards, devoid of sentiment. Only their color connects them, and that but tenuously, with the Rose Period: the whole feeling, the present climate of Picasso’s mind, was entirely different.

  His solitary meditations and countless other circumstances, including “primitive” art, were producing a radical change. He was perfectly open about the continuing influence of the Catalan Romanesque sculpture and frescoes he had known in his youth, just as considerably later he acknowledged the importance of Iberian art to his painting at this period, when he had not only been studying it at the Louvre but also possessed two small figures of the same epoch, acquired from Apollinaire’s friend Gery Piéret. But the influence of African carvings is another matter. Negro art was in the air, common property, much as Japanese prints had been for an earlier generation; nevertheless there was then and there has been ever since a great deal of talk about who first discovered it, as though African sculpture were all the same, and as though all these different aspects of reality or rather all these different approximations to truth from the angle of another culture were a trick that could be used to produce “modern” art, a gadget that could be invented, patented, and applied to the solution of contemporary problems. Claims to priority, foolish or disingenuous, accusations of plagiarism, flew about; and some of them so irritated Picasso that he uttered some equally foolish rejoinders, such as “Negro art? Never heard of it.” And it may be that in time his continuing irritation led him to magnify the importance of the Iberians, as a counterweight to the Negroes: at all events, even the erudition of Alfred Barr CJI find no reference to the Iberians in any book on Picasso nor in his own recorded conversations before 1939. Yet this “African controversy” did not arise until after 1907, and on the evidence it seems safe to say that in late 1906 and early 1907 Picasso was aware of African, Oceanic, and other “primitive” carvings, but not yet acutely aware of them.

  He was also aware of the Fauves. There was much more talk of them in Paris than there had been before he went to Spain: they we
re by far the most exciting group since the Neo-Impressionists. He did not join their ranks, of course—he never joined anybody’s ranks—but as soon as he called at the rue de Fleurus he saw the great “Joie de Vivre” that Matisse had exhibited at the Indépendants during his absence and that Leo Stein had purchased; and not only this picture but also his increasing acquaintance with Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, and a little later Braque convinced him that although their answer was not his answer, they were men of such stature that a counterblast was in order, to restore the balance.

  Then again Cézanne died in October of 1906, and the subsequent exhibitions brought him even more closely to Picasso’s mind: he had always admired Cézanne, and the more he saw of his work the more he realized that Cézanne had been obsessed by the same problems that he was trying to answer himself. Whether he read the words “Deal with nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, and put them all into perspective.… For us men nature exists more in depth than on the surface” when they were first published or not, he very soon heard them from Jacob or Apollinaire or Raynal or Salmon, and they brought an instant response, the agreement of a like-thinking mind. Furthermore he saw the version of Cézanne’s “Trois baigneuses” that Matisse possessed: and here again that unfortunate word “influence,” so freely bandied about, suggests itself. Sometimes it is used to mean the mere copying of a mannerism, direct theft, and sometimes it hovers ambiguously over a wide area; but there is a strong case for the assertion that no man can be influenced—influenced to the degree of producing a valid work of art and not a mere pastiche—by anything that is not at least latent in his mind.