Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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to do again: looking at this picture of the red Málaga earth sloping up to the light blue sky and partly covered with prickly-pear cactuses, some living, some dead (they grow wild there) one thinks of the Fauves and, more strongly by far, of van Gogh. The first did not yet exist; the second he cannot have heard of: yet there is the fierce color, and there is the powerful, living brushwork of the earth, a heavy dry impasto laid on as with a palette-knife, contrasting wonderfully with the thinly-painted sky. A second glance shows that the picture is entirely his own, entirely individual; a second thought makes it clear that these influences were utterly impossible; and one wonders how any professor can have had the confidence to teach this fourteen-year-old boy anything but the mere technique of his media.
The confidence was not lacking, however, and back in Barcelona that autumn the men at the Llotja continued to show him how to draw, while his father stretched him two big canvases for pictures that were designed to continue the modest success of the “First Communion” and lead on to sales, commissions, and a steady income. Don José went further than buying the raw materials and giving advice on their use; he even hired a studio for Pablo, in which the paint could be laid on. This first independent studio was in the Calle de la Plata, which runs down into the Calle de la Merced: the word studio, applied to those Picasso knew in Barcelona, does not mean a fine high airy place with a north light but simply a bare room, often very small and ill-lit, where he could work—where the mess would not matter; and here the word independent was strictly relative too, since the garret was only just round the corner from the family flat, within easy reach of parents.
One of these pictures, a bayonet charge (probably connected with the fighting in Cuba), has vanished: the other, which Don José planned and which he named “Science and Charity,” shows a medical man taking the pulse of a sick woman, while a nun, holding a fair-sized baby, stands on the far side of the bed, proffering a drink (soup, says Sabartés). The doctor was Don José; the nun’s habit was lent by a Sister of Charity from Málaga who now lived in Barcelona; and the genuine baby had been hired from a beggar-woman. Picasso made several drawings and studies in watercolor and oil for this picture; he worked hard on it, and the result pleased his family. “Science and Charity” was sent to the National Exhibition in Madrid, where it received a mención honorífica from the jury and a dart of facetious criticism from a journalist who thought the sick woman’s lead-blue hand looked like a glove (which it does), and to the Provincial Exhibition at Málaga, where not unnaturally it was given a medal, nominally made of gold. The kindest thing that can be said about the picture is that technically it is most accomplished, that there were a great many far worse in the same tradition, and that it gave and still gives pleasure to those who’ like craftsmanship, anecdote, and realistic description. In any case it was the last work of this kind that he ever painted. It was his farewell to the academic tradition in which he had been brought up and which his world accepted; but the fact that he painted no more Science and Charities does not mean that he was yet the full Picasso, the anarchist whose aim was to destroy the false and flabby world of illustration by violence and to bring another, infinitely more meaningful, into existence, a painting that should purge by pity and terror in its own language and according to its own logic rather than provide ornament, prettiness, or transposed literature. At this time his revolt was still latent: he was still in many ways a boy, and protest, aesthetic or social, was still no more than protest within the context of the world in which he lived. But it was also a time at which he covered sheets of paper with all possible variants of his signature, including the zz for ss which is sometimes to be seen in his early pictures; and although it is perhaps going too far to say that this “anxious search” shows a doubt of his own identity, it may well be the sign of an underlying uneasiness soon to rise to the surface.
The rest of his stay at the Llotja was taken up with school studies and with his own drawing: his sketch-books are filled with much the same scenes as before, some of them frankly picturesque, though now the touch is even more confident and the variety of approaches greater, ranging from the purely traditional to a number of experiments in which the geometrical simplification of the essential forms is already apparent. Yet although the beginning of several possible points of departure from tradition can be made out in the drawings and pictures, the evolution, the progression, is not that of an iconoclast but of an extraordinarily gifted student who does not doubt the nature of his world—of Pablo rather than of Picasso.
And it was still as Pablo, the wonderful boy, that he packed his canvases and drawings for the summer holiday of 1897. It was not nearly so happy as those of former years, and although he was seen to take a lively interest in his cousin Carmen, and although his talents were celebrated at a feast attended by local artists, who had the effrontery to baptize him painter in champagne, he did comparatively little work.
His uncle Salvador had grown even more prosperous; he had recently married the forty-year-old niece of the Marqués of Casa-Loring, a great social advancement; he had a fine house on the Alameda itself, and he was looked upon as the head of the Ruiz family, some members of which he either helped or supported entirely. As such he disapproved of Pablo’s way of signing his pictures Picasso, or P. R. Picasso, or at the best P. Ruiz Picasso. Don Salvador liked the pictures (he hung “Science and Charity” in a place of honor) but there were sides of his nephew’s character that he did not care for at all. It may be that in imposing his authority as the protector and in making Pablo aware that he was a poor relation he overplayed his part, and it is certain that although Don Salvador himself suggested that Pablo should be sent to Madrid, to the Royal Academy of San Fernando, where his friends Moreno Carbonero and Muñoz Degrain were now influential professors, he nevertheless calculated the sum necessary for his nephew’s support with all the sensible, contriving economy that the rich so often exercise on the poor’s behalf. The Málaga medal turned out to be made of brass, only very, very thinly plated with gold. The sum was to be advanced by the Doctor, by Don Baldomero Chiara, María Picasso’s brother-in-law, perhaps by some other relatives, and by Don José: it was to pay for his journey, his keep, his fees, and his materials.
“It must have been a small fortune,” said Sabartés.
“I’ll tell you what it was,” replied Picasso. “A mere vile pittance, that’s what it was. A few pesetas. Barely enough to keep from starving to death: no more than that.”
In the autumn of 1897 (the same year that an anarchist killed Canovas, the prime minister), the pittance carried him to Madrid, that expensive capital, where he found himself a room in the slummy Calle San Pedro Martir, in the heart of the town; and there he celebrated his sixteenth birthday. He had never been away from home before; he had never had to manage his own affairs or handle anything but pocket-money; and although the Ruizes had always been poor in the sense of having little or no superfluity, Pablo had no intimate, personal experience of true poverty; he had never lacked for food or warmth. This essential lesson was soon to come, but first he had to put his name down for the Academy—once called the Academia de Nobles Artes and familiar to Goya: much decayed since then, but still filled with his works—and to undergo the severe entrance examination.
He described himself on the form as a “pupil of Muñoz Degrain.” He may have thought this a politic stroke or he may have wished to set himself off from his father. He cannot have meant it as a statement of fact. But pupil of José Ruiz or of Muñoz Degrain, he passed the examination with stupefying ease, just as he had done at the Llotja; and the same amount of legend surrounds the feat.
Having been admitted with acclaim, he attended a few of the classes, found that they were as bad as the Llotja or worse, and then neglected the Academy entirely, except for its splendid collection of Goyas. There was no family routine to oblige him to go, and in any case he had all the wealth of the Prado just at hand, with time to absorb, copy, and enjoy El Greco, Velásquez, and Goya, who with van Gogh and Cézanne were the most important masters he ever knew.
A less obvious reason for his neglect was the presence of Muñoz Degrain and Moreno Carbonero at the Academy. They were both shockingly bad painters, and although Muñoz Degrain had some notion of light and although Carbonero was a good draughtsman, their canvases were the epitome of official art at its nadir. (There is some connection between size and worth in the official mind, and their pictures were often huge.) And they were not even competent: one vast Muñoz Degrain, preserved at Málaga, is