Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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intelligence, will no longer tolerate the slightest barrier to his free-ranging mind; and this exaltation of the individual means that not a single myth, not a single idol, not a single entity, human or divine, will remain to stand in the way of the total liberation of individuality. Some people may say that these theories imply a general dissolution; but as well as a negative they possess a positive spirit, one that renews and builds up lost powers and forces,” he wrote. And referring once more to the cult of the individual, of the Me, Brossa said, “it leads to a turning in upon oneself … and in its turn this withdrawal leads to the discovery of a compensation for disgust with life, that is to say the wonderful image of the world that lies deep in the camera obscura of the Me.” As Cirici-Pellicer observes, one could scarcely ask a fairer picture of Picasso’s progress. Destruction, repeated destruction, withdrawal from apparent reality, synthesis, new worlds, new powers, new visions: everything is here, including, it is to be hoped, compensation for some degree of disgust with life.
There was a great deal in the political anarchists’ creed that appealed to Picasso: Bakunin, for example, had said, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion,” and nothing could have harmonized better with his own views.
But although Brossa had clear notions of their ideology, he did not succeed in passing them on to Picasso, who was never a political animal. Nor did he succeed in passing on the anti-Semitism that infects some of Nietzsche’s followers, for Picasso, although given to superstition, was far, far too strong a personality for that kind of self-inflating myth.
What Picasso did draw in was a generalized anarchism and a deep sympathy for Catalan independence: the people around him preached contempt for bourgeois art, which some of them produced, and hatred for intellectual snobbery, which most of them practiced, but the very young and ingenuous Picasso either did not notice their inconsistencies or did not find them shocking: whether he needed the encouragement of the Quatre Gats or not, he remained the very type of anti-bourgeois, anti-snob all the rest of his days.
The disastrous war with America, the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, had plunged Madrid into gloom, introspection, and pessimism: it had no such effect on Barcelona, where, in spite of labor troubles, agitation, bombs, and repression the mood was sanguine, forward-looking, interested in the outer world. At the Quatre Gats Picasso swam in an atmosphere of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Wagner—an Associación Wagneriana met there regularly from 1900—Schopenhauer, the Symbolists, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, all new and exciting names in Catalonia; and although he was no great reader he came by at least a second-hand notion of their ideas.
He was no great reader. In their love for him some of his friends have maintained that he was: they admit that they never saw him with a book in his hands, but they assert that he read in bed, by night, and they mention books that he owned—Verlaine, for example, at a time when Picasso could neither read, write, nor speak French. Yet Picasso was one of the hardest-working painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, etchers that ever lived: “Where do I get this power of creating and forming? I don’t know. I have only one thought: work. I paint just as I breathe. When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired. It’s still often three in the morning before I switch off my light,” he said to Beyeler. He was also extremely convivial—loved a late gathering of friends; his days were full and sometimes his nights as well, since he loved working by artificial light. And as it made him uneasy to spend his idle nights alone he nearly always had a companion: not one of these companions has ever spoken of his reading in bed.
He illustrated books magnificently; he owned a considerable number, some of the greatest bibliographical interest; but he did not read a great many. This is not to say that he was not a keenly intelligent man, capable of profound understanding; yet his was an exceedingly quick and sometimes impatient mind, not very well suited for the slow accumulative absorption of prose. Verse was another matter: here the concentrated essence could be grasped almost as quickly as a picture or a carving; Picasso certainly read poetry and he certainly loved poets all his life—Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, to name but three. To be a poet was a passport to his kindness.
On the other hand he was always surrounded by men who did read enormously, some of them brilliant writers themselves; and his keen, retentive intelligence gathered more from their distillation than years in a library would have given him. As far as Barcelona was concerned, Nietzsche was available to him through the medium of Joan Maragall, one of the best of the Catalan poets and a great translator from the German. Picasso liked and admired Maragall, as well he might, for not only did Maragall destroy rhetorical convention and “risk his life on every line,” but his Excelsior was a noble expression of faith in the future of art for those brave enough to launch far out into unknown seas. Then again Nietzsche’s aphoristic manner was perfectly suited to Picasso: when the philosopher died in the summer of 1900, at the term of his long madness, the papers were filled with appreciations of him; and Picasso undoubtedly read papers. 1900 was also the year that saw the first performance of Tristan and Siegfried in Barcelona (well before Madrid, of course), and although no music other than his native cante hondo or the Catalan sardana ever meant much to Picasso, he was necessarily affected by the admiration for things of the North so general in Barcelona at the time.
The North was a capital place, seen from the shores of the Mediterranean: not only was it medieval—and the middle ages were golden to the Catalans—but it was modem too, with advanced ideas on sexual freedom. The area included Norway—Munch was already known in Barcelona, as well as Ibsen—and when the young Picasso was asked to illustrate a poem called El Clam de les Verges he produced a somewhat Expressionist young woman dreaming of a Man (his upper half floats in the middle distance of the night).
The poem and its illustration appeared on August 12, 1900, in Joventut, Pèl i Ploma’s rival, whose artistic editor was Alexandre de Riquer, a member of the Cercle de Sant Lluc; and some of it reads:
We are maidens, maidens
By the force of hateful laws that keep us enslaved. Night and day we seek the wild delights that we dream of … If the mind is not virgin must the body be so? No, no, let us be free, let us take pleasure in love! Tear our white virginal robe: it is a shroud, A shroud, and a frail one, hiding a treasure within.
Obviously the poem was written by a man, Joan Oliva Bridgman, but it does express a modest hope of what might be, and it is typical of the climate of the time. So is another, also written by Oliva and illustrated by Picasso: the excited verse, which begins “To be or not to be,” calls upon the reader to banish the dark smoke of base routine with the sacred light that pierces the shades of mystery—the reader is to be fully or not at all. There is no mention of the sea, favorable or otherwise, but Picasso, perhaps with Maragall in mind, drew a man guiding a boat through menacing waves towards the horizon.
The North also embraced England, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and at one time Picasso had some faint notion of going there; this was less out of love for the Pre-Raphaelites than from an opinion he had formed of Englishwomen from an account of the intrepid Lady Hester Stanhope. Señora Romeu was said to be an Englishwoman, while Señora Maragall was certainly related to the British Dr. Noble who built a seamen’s hospital in Málaga, and perhaps he found they did not quite answer his expectations; at all events London very soon yielded to Paris.
The North was the vague metaphysical goal; for most of the painters and literary men of the Quatre Gats Paris was the immediate and concrete aim. Quite apart from its being the center of artistic life and of everything that was new, it was accessible: all educated Catalans and a great many others spoke French, whereas few knew German and fewer still English—they were persuaded that Wilde was a poet. Many of the older men and some of the others had already been to Paris, bringing back a cloud of glory—Nonell had even exhibited in Parisian galleries. And it was Paris that provided the reviews, papers, and magazines that Picasso saw at the Quatre Gats.
There were many others, such as Casas’ and Utrillo’s Pèl i Ploma, Alexandre de Riquer’s Joventut, Catalunya Artística, and the English Studio, but it was the French Assiette au Beurre, the Gil Blas illustré, the Figaro, and the famous Revue Blanche that introduced him to Théophile Steinlen,