Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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properly stretched canvas; and then suddenly, with no apparent transition, the extraordinarily accomplished head of a man that Cirlot, an authority on these early years, places in circa 1894, that is to say when Picasso was twelve or at the most thirteen. It is a small picture (thirteen and a half inches by eleven and a half), though it looks much larger; the head and shoulders of a man, bald-fronted, tanned, with a short grizzled beard: he is shown almost in profile, looking slightly upwards and to the right, and he does not have the least air of sitting for his portrait. The background of a very light gray sets off this ruddy brown head and browner neck, but it does not cover the fine-grained canvas entirely; and the whitish shirt below the neck is only suggested. Picasso certainly meant to leave the picture in this state, for in the little portrait of his uncle Baldomero Chiara, which is firmly dated July 3, 1894, the paint shades off into the virgin paper, and in that of Dr. Costales (a fine old gentleman with mutton-chop whiskers and a deep fur collar) which he painted in 1895, the top of the canvas is quite bare. The picture is full of light, full of life, and the finely proportioned head—finely proportioned to the limits of the canvas—is quite wonderfully striking. An eminently Spanish picture, with the best of Spanish naturalism, absolutely nothing childish about it at all: it has little or nothing of the nineteenth century, nothing in the least sentimental, and Velásquez would have admired it, whether he knew the painter’s age or not. Indeed, it has a certain kinship with the head of the elderly man in Velásquez’ “Los Borrachos” at the Prado, which the young Picasso had never seen.
The next year, when Picasso was still thirteen, he painted many more pictures, several of which have come down to us. There is not much point in describing them in detail, but they show many different lines of approach, many different techniques, always more assured. Among them is his dog Klipper, one of the earliest in the long series of Picasso’s animals—cats, mice, apes, pigeons, an incontinent goat, turtle-doves, owls, and always dogs. Klipper is a brownish-yellow creature, a basic dog of medium size, more smooth than rough: an intelligent head with a large, knowing eye.
The picture has all the marks of a good portrait; and it is painted without the least trace of sentimentality. Picasso’s relations with his animals were very close: he had an extraordinary gift for entering into direct contact with them: could handle a wild bird or walk up to a furious dog when most people would have provoked an ugly scene: and the tired old cliché about the power of the human eye finds its justification in Picasso. He had in fact a most luminous and striking eye, a singular, penetrating gaze, always the first thing that people noticed. But these relations were quite unlike those which are usual in Anglo-Saxon countries. A child brought up on the spectacle of slaughtered bulls does not have the same reactions as one brought up on flopsy bunnies or the products of Walt Disney’s muse: Picasso did not shift his animals to a semi-human plane—he met them on their own. He loved cats, not the sleek castrated fat domesticated creatures, not pussies, but the rangy feral cats of the southern gutter, who will fly in your face at the drop of a hat. His animals lived according to their own codes, more or less, with no undue notions of right or wrong, nor of cleanliness, imposed from above.
Then there are more remarkable heads of poor, elderly men, masterly pieces of strong, sober Spanish realism, brown pictures. There is nothing of the picturesque peasant to be seen in these worn, stupid, hopeless people; even the torn shirt has no hint of the theatrical rags so common at the time. Yet only a very little earlier Picasso was drawing highly picturesque and rather feeble Moors and Moorish palaces: the development was extraordinarily rapid, and only months lie between the schoolboy doodling and the unbelievably accomplished throw-away pen and ink sketch of a Pantheon with a minute Velásquez, a pair of doves in flight, and some truly delightful putti, apparently bringing him a color-box.
To all these pictures Picasso preferred his “Barefoot Girl” and his “Beggar,” both painted in 1895; and these he kept with him all his life.
I will not describe “The Beggar,” which is a most able, confident study in the idiom of several others of that time, but the subtly different “Girl” must have a few lines. She sits on an uncomfortable straight-backed chair against a broken dark-green background, dressed in a long russet frock with a white cloth over her shoulders, her hands folded in her lap and one large chilblained foot dangling. She is a sad child, deep dismay struggling with sullenness in her face at repose: dismay not at her present situation, but at the world into which she has been pitched. She is of about the same age as the painter, and she sits there patiently; her immense, lustrous, asymmetric eyes gaze forward, a little down, at nothing. Here the technique is surer still, the brush-stroke firm and decisive on the dress, gentle and flowing on the face; and here there is much more personal involvement. Picasso did not spare her big hands, thick ankles, and coarse great feet; he was not in the least degree concerned with prettiness; but it is evident, not merely from her eyes and the pure oval of her face, that he was entirely with her.
Both these canvases were rather large for Pablo at that time, about two foot six by one foot eight, and it is said that the model for the second and perhaps the canvas too were given him as a present for his good behavior during the Christmas holidays.
Once Picasso had begun his true ascent, acquiring at the same time a mastery of his tools, Don José let him help with the details of the decorative pictures he still produced. He would, for example, cut off a dead pigeon’s pink legs and claws, pin them to a board, and tell Pablo to paint them in. In the course of a few months it became evident to both that even on the technical plane the boy’s painting was far beyond the man’s. José Ruiz could no more have painted that beggar’s head or the barefoot girl than he could have confronted a bull in the arena. He acknowledged it; solemnly handed over his brushes to his son, and never painted again.
It was perhaps an unfortunate impulse. The truth must in time have become even more obvious, but this gesture crystallized the situation and by so doing altered it, making it far more extreme. The young are often cruel; and there are circumstances in which they can be devoid of pity, especially towards those whose role it is to be strong and who are weak. Even now a father who abdicates, who declines the absurd role of the omniscient, omnipotent, infallible monarch of the glen, is liable to arouse a confused but strong resentment; and the status, thankfully laid aside, can never be convincingly resumed when at a later date it may become necessary: at that time, and in that place, such an action was more exceptional by far.
One of Picasso’s outstanding characteristics as a man was his kindness, and this was evident in his face, in his habitual expression; but he was no more all of a piece throughout than any other—indeed he had more contradictions in him than most—and he could be very hard. There are also discreet, muffled, imprecise rumors of marital discord at this period: José Ruiz, aging fast, cannot have been a very lively companion. It is not surprising that Pablo’s affection should have shifted almost entirely to his mother in such an event; nor that the Picasso, which had been absent from the signatures of most of these early paintings, should now reappear. The bold P. Ruiz is replaced by P. Ruiz Picasso after 1895, and with few exceptions the Ruiz vanishes altogether after about 1901. And most of his portraits of Don José are not signed at all, whereas those of his mother are.
Yet this does not mean any decided, lasting, definitive, and evident animosity between José and Pablo Ruiz: the portraits alone prove that, and there is a great deal of evidence for an enduring, though tempered, affection on both sides. Then again at this point the family was struck by a cruel blow that certainly brought its members together. Concepción, Pablo’s youngest sister, fell ill with diphtheria, and in spite of Dr. Costales’ devoted care she died: at that time the disease could kill in three or four days, and in Spain it did kill about half of those it attacked. Don José felt the loss most bitterly: she was the only one of his children who resembled him in the least, a fair-haired child, tall for her age, and slim.
But in any case the La Coruña days, with their dreary, oppressive atmosphere, the shut-in life so conducive of secret domestic war, were in their turn coming to an end. A former assistant of Don José’s, Ramón Navarro García, who taught figure-drawing at the famous art-school of the Llotja at Barcelona, wished to return to his native Galicia. When he proposed the exchange there could be no hesitation on José Ruiz’s part. Not only would they get away from the sad house, so very much sadder now, but Barcelona meant the Mediterranean once more, an escape