The Quatre Gats was founded in the summer of 1897 by a versatile character named Pere Romeu, who had taught gymnastics and run a puppet-show in Mexico; he had traveled a good deal, and at one time he worked at the Chat Noir. The name may have been chosen to avert ill-luck, since it means “nobody” or “almost nobody.”
“Were there many people in the procession?”
“Four cats, no more.”
Whether the charm was intended or not, it worked: the place was thronged with people, mostly of the kind to whom this announcement, printed in a kind of blackletter, was directed:
“To persons of good taste, to citizens on either side of the Ramblas, to those who require nourishment not only for their bodies but also for their minds.
“Pere Romeu informs them that from the twelfth day of the month of June, in the Calle Montesión, the second house on the left as one goes from the Plaza de Santa Ana, there will be opened an establishment designed to provide both enchantment for the eye and good things for the pleasure of the palate.
“This house is an eating-place for the epicure, a glowing hearth for those who long for the warmth of a home, a gallery for those who seek delights for the soul, a tavern for those who love the shade of the vine and the true essence of the grape, a Gothic beer-garden for lovers of the north, an Andalusian patio for those of the south; it is a house of healing for those who suffer from the sickness of our century, a refuge of friendship and harmony for those who shelter beneath its roof.
“They will not be sorry to have come, but on the other hand they will certainly regret having stayed away.”
The Calle Montesión was an out-of-the-way little street on the then unfashionable northern edge of the old town: the house was the work of the young architect Puig y Cadafalch, to some extent a follower of Gaudi and a whole-hearted, unselective lover of Modernismo. Els Quatre Gats had a great many beams, a great deal of ironwork wrought into bulbous, vegetable, art-nouveau shapes, a fully arched brick entrance, and a general Teutonic air of phony medievalism in keeping with the atmosphere in the Barcelona avant-garde of the time, which was much influenced by Wagner and by the north in general, including England, as well as by France. At the back it had a large room for shadow-plays (like the Chat Noir) and puppet-shows; and this room was also used for exhibitions.
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 syphiiitics 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. Rusińol 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 EI Greco. Picasso did not need Rusińol’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 Rusińol’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 Rusińol 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 Rusińol’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 modern 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 Rusińol, 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; Sebastia Junyent, who went mad; Josép 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.
At this time he was beginning to work out his own aesthetic, an aesthetic destined to destroy painting as it was then conceived and to thrust the boundaries of perception far beyond their known limits: one is tempted to say “to enlarge the idea of beauty” except for the fact that Picasso was primarily concerned with being rather than with what is ordinarily understood by that vague word beauty. “Beauty?” he said to Sarbatés, “. . . To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.”
It was an enormously ambitious project, and it was accompanied by self-doubt, periods of depression, and false starts: one does not shatter one’s own matrix, eat one’s own father, without some hesitation; yet in ten years from this time it was largely accomplished. Already the results of the process were evident in the prodigiously rapid development of his work in 1899 and 1900; but as a wholly conscious process it was only just beginning, and the milieu in which it began helps to explain at least some of the external forces acting upon it.
As I said earlier, Picasso has often been compared to Goethe, and certainly they had much in common, including the “virtue of lasting” and an extraordinary physical vitality; but whereas Goethe was an insider, solidly based in his social and national contexts, endowed with an elaborate education and with money, and supported on all sides by the culture of his time, Picasso was socially peripheral, his sense of national identity was at least troubled, his schooling had scarcely passed the elementary stage, and the culture of his time, such as it was, oppressed him on every hand. His eventual aim was to revolutionize a great part of this culture, and apart from his native genius all he had to help him in his intellectual formation for the task were his contacts in Barcelona and his early years in Paris: the Quatre Gats and Montparnasse were to be his Leipzig and Strassburg, his Greek, Latin, and philosophy.
As far as it was political at all, the general feeling at the Quatre Gats was of course left-wing. In this it was opposed to the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc, the respectable haven of the academic painters, good Catholics, patronized by Church, state, and big business. The two groups did resemble one another in being separatist and in the fact that at least some of the Sant Llucs were devoted to Modernismo—Gaudí himself was a member—but as far as religion was concerned they were poles apart. The Sant Llucs sympathized with the strong rise of right-wing Catholicism so evident in Spain during the long regency of the Habsburg Queen Christina: whereas at the Quatre Gats, although plenty of mysticism was to be found, it was mostly of the cloudy, imported kind, pantheistic, wooly, scarcely of the native growth at all; and since there was also a strong anarchist element, downright atheism was sometimes added to the left-wing anticlericalism—a striking contrast to a young man fresh from the age-old rural piety of Horta de Ebro.
The anarchism, in its more general implications, struck a responsive chord in him: Picasso was increasingly conscious of the misery caused by the system and its injustice—the evidence lay all about him in Barcelona—and his awareness was increased by Nonell. In 1896 Nonell, who was eight years older than Picasso and who had been drawn to Modernismo earlier, went to Caldas de Bohi, a village with hot springs right up in the mountains, under the Maladetta, and notorious for its goitrous idiots. He made a series of drawings of them which he exhibited in the hall of the Vanguardia and at the Quatre Gats. They are masterly, disturbing drawings, with a strong, fluid line enclosing the highly simplified figures. They may be said to belong to Art Noveau, but they injected a vital hardness into the milk-and-water lakes and fairies, chlorotic maidens stuff produced by Puvis de Chavannes, Maurice Denis, and so many others at the time, and they made a considerable sensation. Nonell’s was a direct expression of true, unsentimental sympathy: when Picasso produced his hospital patients in the article of death and his raddled whores it is tempting to say that he went one better, for here the savagery is not only far more intense, but it is unjudging, a flat statement—empathy rather than sympathy. Yet, “one better” implies competition or at least influence, and it is dangerous to speak of influence where Picasso is concerned. So much was already implicit in his early work and he had preconceived so many tendencies before their public birth elsewhere that an apparent influence is often no more than another man’s discovery of something that Picasso had already found out for himself—a discovery more fully developed, perhaps, by the kindred spirit (van Gogh comes to mind), but not radically new to Picasso. In this case the savagery, the guts, which both he and Nonell brought to Modernismo was perfectly evident in Picasso’s childish work; and in this case as in so many others “reinforcement” is nearer the mark than “influence.”
Anarchism too had formed part of his early outlook, and the talk at the Quatre Gats can have done little more than illustrate and encourage an existing hatred for authority and a determined rejection of rules imposed from without.
The most esteemed anarchist at the Quatre Gats was young Jaume Brossa: he had no great opinion of the artists he beheld there—”neurotic dilettanti, only concerned with being different from the philistines and the bourgeois”—but he did feel that there was promise for the art of the coming century, the anarchists’ secular millennium. “Man, carried away by a just and iconoclastic pride, the result of the psychological atmosphere created in his intelligence, will no longer tolerate the slightest barrier to his free-ranging mind; and this exaltation of the individual means that not a single myth, not a single idol, not a single entity, human or divine, will remain to stand in the way of the total liberation of individuality. Some people may say that these theories imply a general dissolution; but as well as a negative they possess a positive spirit, one that renews and builds up lost powers and forces,” he wrote. And referring once more to the
cult of the individual, of the Me, Brossa said, “it leads to a turning in upon oneself … and in its turn this withdrawal leads to the discovery of a compensation for disgust with life, that is to say the wonderful image of the world that lies deep in the camera obscura of the Me.” As Cirici-Pellicer observes, one could scarcely ask a fairer picture of Picasso’s progress. Destruction, repeated destruction, withdrawal from apparent reality, synthesis, new worlds, new powers, new visions: everything is here, including, it is to be hoped, compensation for some degree of disgust with life.
There was a great deal in the political anarchists’ creed that appealed to Picasso: Bakunin, for example, had said, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion,” and nothing could have harmonized better with his own views.