Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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he really had to say he said in paint, sculpture, and line. He loathed art-criticism, analysis, and verbal aesthetics: his philosophy is to be seen on the wall, and rightly taken it is all of a piece.
But as far as Catalan is concerned he was certainly fluent and perfectly comprehensible, and this meant that on returning to Barcelona he could form an integral part of the group of writers, painters, and poets who met at Els Quatre Gats, a café or tavern or beer-hall or cabaret modeled on Rudolphe Salis’ Chat Noir and Aristide Briant’s Mirliton in Montmartre. They were a mixed body of men, differing widely in tastes and abilities, but they were united in their love for Modernismo and for their own language: an habitué speaking only Spanish would have been an intruder. And since some were anarchists, believing that the new world would dawn when the last king was strangled with the guts of the last priest, and most were Catalan separatists, there might have been some danger in admitting an outsider to their intimacy. (Not that this should be exaggerated: the real, the hard-line anarchists who tried to put Bakunin’s ideas into practice were almost exclusively working-men, whereas the conscientious bohemians of the Quatre Gats belonged to the middle class—their anarchism was theoretical, and their separatism did not go far beyond singing “Els Segadors,” the nationalist song.) Picasso was well introduced, however; not only did he speak the language, but he already knew several of their members; and within a few weeks of his return he was perfectly at home there.
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 syphilitics 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. Rusiñol 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 El Greco. Picasso did not need Rusiñol’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 Rusiñol’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 Rusiñol 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 Rusiñol’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 modem 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 Rusiñol, 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; Sebastià Junyent, who went mad; Josep 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