Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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for entry to the higher schools of life, antique and painting two examinations were required, both of them of an adult standard, the minimum age being twenty.
These examinations he had to undergo, for although Don José’s colleagues might be persuaded to accept that a short boy of thirteen was “apparently about twenty years of age” if in fact he really could draw as well as a mature art-student, they did not choose to make public fools of themselves by admitting a beginner, and they set him the tests in all their rigor. At this level they had nothing to do with ordinary school subjects, which perhaps was just as well: his first task was to draw a school model draped in a sheet; the second was a standing nude.
A certain amount of legend has gathered about these examinations, and while some writers say that although a month was allowed, Picasso did the work in a single day; others prefer one hour instead of the permitted twenty-four.
In fact the two surviving drawings are dated September 25 and 30, 1895, but even so there is no doubt that he produced them in a surprisingly short time. They ignored the art-school convention that would have turned the first model into a toga’d Roman and the second into a reasonably noble figure: Picasso drew exactly what he saw, a school model draped in a sheet and a stocky, ill-proportioned little man, very naked in the hard north light. But he did so with such extraordinary academic ability that there could be no question of the result; he was at once put down on the list of those admitted to the higher school for the academic year 1895–96. There were a hundred and twenty-eight of them, in alphabetical order, and he was the hundred-and-eighth, his second surname being spelled Picano.
Most of the other names were typically Catalan—Puigvert, Bosch, Batlle, Campmany, Creus—and none achieved any wide notoriety. But number eighty-six was Manuel Pallarès Grau, who happened to be Picasso’s neighbor in his first anatomy class. Pallarès was a powerful rustic youth of rising twenty, an art-student of some standing, and of course he was much bigger than Pablo; but in spite of these differences they made friends at once. Indeed, the whole school accepted him, his personality and his obviously outstanding gifts doing away with the chasm between thirteen and twenty, a time when each year counts for ten. Here again it was taken for granted that Picasso was an extraordinary being, to whom common laws did not apply. Neither extreme youth nor extreme age ever mattered to Picasso where human relationships were concerned; all his life he met people he liked on the direct plane of immediate contact, unobscured by the accidental differences of birth, age, or nationality; and he and Pallarès, his earliest and certainly his most valuable friend in Barcelona, remained deeply attached as long as they lived.
These first two years in Barcelona were comparatively quiet, industrious, and dutiful. It seems absurd to speak of any exceptional industry and sense of duty in a man who never stopped working all his life, whose output has been estimated at over fifteen thousand paintings to say nothing of his sculpture, engravings, and countless drawings, and whose sense of what was due to his art led him again and again to throw away success, critical and financial, when he was poor and needed both; but his later morality was his own alone, and here the words are used as they are understood by bourgeois families who want their son to “get on.” He lived at home, of course, and he attended the school regularly: he had put himself down for several courses, including History of Art and Aesthetics, and although in time he took to cutting these lectures, he was assiduous in all classes where there was a model. What is more, he perpetually walked about Barcelona with Pallarès, drawing with scarcely a pause, filling albums and sketch-books with street-scenes, horses, cats, dogs, whores, bawds, anarchist meetings, scores and scores of hands, paired and single, beggars, soldiers leaving for the unpopular Cuban campaign, soon to end in war with the United States. And he was busy at home, drawing and painting his family—a pastel of his mother, at least three portraits of his father, many drawings and paintings of the patient Lola—and preparing a big canvas for the spring exhibition of Fine Arts and Artistic Industries. It is a strictly academic picture, somewhat in the manner of the respected Mas y Fontdevila, and certainly painted under Don José’s supervision: it shows Lola in the white dress and veil of a girl at her first communion, kneeling before an altar with her father standing beside her. There is more Industry in it than one usually associates with Picasso, but within its limits it is an accomplished piece of work, and when it was shown (with the wild price-tag of 1500 pesetas—fifty pounds at the then rate of exchange) it met with a certain amount of mild praise.
This was also the time when Picasso produced a sudden little output of religious pictures, including the charming “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” that he kept with him all his life: they amount to a dozen or more, and it is as though the fourteen-year-old Pablo were making a determined effort to be a “good boy.” At about this period, however, he also rid himself of his virginity: he and Pallarès went to all manner of places, and Picasso’s drawings show an early, exact knowledge of the female form, although the models at the school were all men. Picasso himself, when asked when he had first made love to a girl, held his hand a little more than a yard from the ground. One of these bawdy-houses was nearby, in the Calle d’Avinyó (Avinyó is the Catalan for Avignon, and to be consistent I should also put the Catalan carrer rather than calle; but calle is what the pilgrim will find written up on the wall), the very street to which the Llotja has recently been removed.
With so much work to do—and the list should include the great number of careful studies from the school’s collection of plaster casts, one a prophetic charcoal drawing of a man carrying a lamb—and with such a close companionship with Pallarès, Picasso had not much leisure for the other students. He did make friends among them, particularly with Josep Cardona Furró, a sculptor, and with Joan Cardona Lladós, a draughtsman; but upon the whole they seem to have been rather a dull lot, and there is no record of the animated discussions of the new worlds of painting and philosophy that were to come a little later, when Picasso frequented the Quatre Gats, with its much maturer, far more aware and living company.
Yet even if these students knew little or nothing of Impressionism and still less of the Neo-Impressionists and Symbolists, they must all have been conscious of the Art Nouveau that was sweeping southwards from France, Germany, England, and the north in general, and that in its Spanish form took on the name of Modernismo. Santiago Rusiñol, one of the most advanced of the earlier generation of painters and a poet (and one of the first men to buy Picassos), had organized several well-publicized Fiestas Modernistas at the nearby Sitges; and during the celebrations of 1895 two of his recently-acquired paintings by the then neglected El Greco were carried in procession. The sillier, more mawkish manifestations of later Art Nouveau make any association with El Greco seem strange, but the connection was more evident in 1895; and whether Picasso was at Sitges or not (most probably he was not) El Greco certainly had great influence on him when in time he reached Madrid.
Before seeing the Prado again, however, he was to spend another year at the Llotja and two summer holidays in Málaga. The first holiday, in 1896, was a period of the most surprising activity. Of the many drawings, pictures, and portraits that he produced in those months, two stand out as being quite exceptional; and neither shows the least trace of Barcelona. Although Picasso respected the professor of painting at the Llotja, Antonio Caba, the director of the school (an awful figure) and an able portraitist, in later life he said he did not like the pictures he painted when he was a boy in Barcelona: he preferred those of La Coruña. Now, back in his native town, he seems to have returned to that earlier state of spirit, with a greater power of expression and more to express.
The portrait of his aunt Josefa (a difficult old lady, pious and contradictory, his father’s eldest surviving sister) has been called by Juan-Eduardo Cirlot “without doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.” Other authorities might not go so far, but the statement is not downright ludicrous: as it hangs there amidst the juvenilia the picture is immensely striking. Against a dark background the little old woman’s strong-featured yellowish face with its big, lustrous eyes, as dark as her nephew’s, peers out under a black cap, completely dominating the room: the brushwork is bold and assured; the picture is eminently successful. Yet Picasso never painted like this again: he never again used the same Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro nor the same Expressionist approach.
In its way the second picture is more surprising still. In the first place, it is a landscape, a rare thing in Picasso’s