Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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and with bloody risings from time to time, until the end of the Habsburg line in Spain.
In the bitter wars that followed—Marlborough’s wars—the Catalans supported the Austrian pretender: his successful rival, the French Bourbon who ruled Spain as Philip V, took Barcelona by storm and turned upon the Catalans with great severity. He suppressed Catalan as the official language, imposing Castilian in its place, abolished their ancient privileges, the Cortes and the fueros, closed the university of Barcelona, and built a citadel and a much-hated ring of walls to enclose and overawe the city.
The policy of repression and assimilation continued with even greater force; local laws and customs were done away with; the language was discouraged. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this policy had some success; it certainly came close to destroying Catalan literature, although it was unable to kill the language itself—a language closely related to the Provencal in which many of the earlier poets wrote; a harsher language to the unaccustomed ear, but one capable of the utmost subtlety in the hands of such writers as Ramon Llull (Caxton published him in translation) or Ausiàs March; and, with its comparative absence of vowel endings, perhaps the most masculine of Romance dialects.
But there was always a resistance, both political and cultural; and with the coming of romanticism the Catalan poets began their Renaixença, a movement designed not only to revive the country’s literary culture but to express the nation’s wish for at least some measure of independence. The Renaixença was strongly supported, often by people with little concern with poetry or the arts: in 1841 the university was restored, and some years later the hated walls went down but still the Catalan was not master in his own house.
The Barcelona that Picasso explored in 1895 presented some analogies with Joyce’s Dublin: there was the same nationalist revival, the same passionate resentment of a foreign government, the same memory of a glorious past now overshadowed, the same tradition of deep opposition to central authority, the same conviction of a higher culture oppressed by a lower; and historically there had been the same readiness to call in foreign aid to get rid of the oppressors. But the religious element was lacking; and whereas Joyce’s Dublin was desperately poor, Barcelona had been growing steadily richer ever since the restoration of the monarchy in 1874. The port was now handling eight thousand ships a year; the manufactures had increased enormously; the city had spread far beyond its ancient limits; and Barcelona’s taxes, though grudgingly paid, provided a great part of the government’s income.
Yet these were the days of unrestrained capitalism, and Barcelona also possessed a huge urban proletariat. Picasso had been acquainted with squalor ever since he was born, but the misery of a great industrial city was something far beyond his experience; so was the reaction to this misery. For whereas the victims of the chronic agricultural depression in Spain suffered in silence, or at least without rioting, the intolerable conditions in Barcelona led to strong left-wing movements, to frequent strikes, and to anarchism. Anarchism was preached all over Europe and America at that time, but nowhere did it take such a hold as in Barcelona; and there it added a still more eruptive element to the general anti-government atmosphere. An anarchist had set off a bomb in the crowded Liceo theater shortly before Picasso’s arrival, on the grounds that “there could be no innocent bourgeois”; and the Ruizes had hardly settled down before another bomb was lobbed right into the great Corpus Christi procession. The Establishment called the bombs “infernal machines”: it had no sympathy whatsoever for those who thought that the existing order had to be destroyed to bring a decent society into being, and very little for those who proposed a less radical reform. But Picasso never belonged to the Establishment at any time, and protest, both moderate and extremely violent, appeared early in his work.
It did not appear at first, however. As a boy he was no part of the community: although he had no difficulty in making himself understood, the city being bilingual, he had only to open his mouth to make it clear that he was a stranger and a stranger of no great consequence, for an Andalou was instantly labeled idle, Gypsyish, mercurial, and above all not serious, a very grave charge in hard-headed Catalonia. And since he had no gift for languages this was his status throughout his early adolescence. It was as an outsider that he discovered Barcelona, and perhaps for that very reason he saw the squalor and injustice more clearly than the natives.
Little of this was visible in the new districts outside the walls, with their broad streets crossing at right-angles, but the heart of Barcelona lay in the old town, and that was where the Ruizes lived. The flat in the Calle Cristina soon proved too dark and inconvenient and after a short stay in the nearby Calle Llauder they removed to number three in the Calle de la Merced, a tall, five-storied house with a battered coat of arms over its gloomy entrance, facing equally tall houses on the other side of a street some four yards wide: a dank street into which the sun could hardly penetrate except at midday and the kind of house that Don José would naturally have chosen. It was only a hundred yards or so from the art-school and he stayed there for the rest of his life.
Immediately northwards stood the still older Barrio Gótico, with its medieval houses and palaces by the cathedral, which itself was no distance at all from the Ramblas, the main artery of the old city, a broad, tree-filled avenue running right down to the port, with a fine shaded promenade in the middle, always crowded with people and enlivened by a flower-market, a bird-market, cafés—a continual flow of life. And on the far side of the Ramblas lay the densely-populated Barrio Chino, a rabbit-warren of deep, winding lanes, full of whores and sailors: picturesque slums, with their dark wine-shops lined with enormous barrels, seamen’s bars full of music, purple characters walking about, and the Mediterranean sun blazing down on the innumerable lines of colored washing hanging from the high façades, but slums nevertheless.
It was a dirty city, upon the whole, with the middle ages lingering on in many parts of it, and the streets packed with horses, mules, and asses, carrying paniers or pulling carts, drays, wagons, carriages, omnibuses, cabs; a city smelling not only of horse and humanity but of the port, the fish-markets, hot olive oil, and the countless factory-chimneys.
But it was an immensely living one, with nothing of that air of decrepitude and death so familiar in the rest of Spain, and it was inhabited by a race with the reputation of working extremely hard, of worshiping money and success, an unpolished, hard-headed nation. The removal of the court had long since changed the nature of Cervantes’ “seat of courtesy,” and Picasso’s Barcelona was emphatically a commercial city, one that according to Jean Cassou “had never heard of good taste”: which, when one considers the castrating effect of good taste, was just as well for Picasso. Yet the prevailing materialism was tempered by a strong sense of religion, by a natural gaiety, and (whatever Cassou may say) by a certain feeling for the arts.
It was Catalan businessmen who had launched Gaudí some twenty years before Picasso’s arrival; it was they who supported the thriving opera-house, the concerts, and the many choirs that sang Catalan songs both for pleasure and as a means of nationalist assertion. Their sensitivity to painting was less than it had been in the fifteenth century, when the municipality commissioned masterpieces from Huguet and Dalmáu; and one gallery alone, the Saló Parés (together with temporary exhibitions in the hall of the Vanguardia newspaper), was all that Barcelona could support in the way of living artists. Yet even at this time, when in every country but France painting was at its lowest, most dreary ebb, they did patronize their favorite Fortuny, they did possess an artistic club, dedicated to St. Luke, and it was their sons and even daughters who filled the busy art-school.
This school was in the Exchange, a fine late-eighteenth-century building that incorporated the great Catalan-Gothic hall of its fourteenth-century counterpart built during the reign of Peter the Ceremonious. It was down by the harbor, its function being to accommodate merchants, ship-owners, and marine insurers in their dealings, and the Catalans called it the Llotja, just as they called Peter En Pere. The official, Castilian, name was La Lonja, while En Pere came out as Pedro; and this dual system, which is to be found at every turn, makes it difficult for a writer to be consistent. The Catalans themselves often waver; Jaume Sabartés, a Barcelonan born and bred, signed his invaluable books on Picasso with the Castilian Jaime, and many a Catalan Joan uses the more familiar Spanish Juan outside his own country.
This was the school that José Ruiz wished his son to attend.