Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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These and the company of his many friends was his spiritual food. What he did for earthly nourishment it is difficult to say; and some of the self-portraits of these years show him looking wan and hungry. But he did sell a few drawings and pictures; Romeu commissioned advertisements and menu-cards; and Barcelona had many small shops up and down the Ramblas that specialized in tapabocas, little dishes to be eaten cheaply at any hour of the day or night: a shallow pipkin of sparrows stewed in their own juice was to be had for little more than a farthing, and although blackbirds or squids in their ink came dearer they were still very moderate, particularly as bread was thrown in; and bull’s flesh was cheap after corridas.
At all events he ate well enough to go for long walks. Sabartés mentions their expeditions to Tibidabo, the mountain that stands some five or six miles behind Barcelona, giving a magnificent view of the whole spreading city, the harbor, the sea, and the remote sierras: a heartbreaking climb for which all but the most energetic of the penniless young take the funicular railway. And to do an immense amount of work: he had moved from the Calle d’Escudellers Blancs to a large, unfurnished, well-lit garret workshop on the top floor of number 17, Riera de Sant Joan, high in the old city, which he shared with his friend Carlos Casagemas, a strange-looking young man, well educated (he had been trained for the Spanish navy until the American war put an end to any hope of a career in it), the son of the United States consul-general in Barcelona. Since there was no furniture they painted it on the walls: tables, chairs, chests, a sofa, the necessary safe, together with servants, a maid and a boy, to look after it. And wherever the furniture left room there were pictures, pictures that overflowed on to the walls of the ladder-like staircase.
No doubt many of them were outrageous; he always had a strong earthy sense of fun—to the end of his days shocking people amused him—and it was even stronger then. For example, on the ground floor of the house there was a grocery that sold fresh eggs from Villafranca, and he was attached to the daughter of the shop, so much so that he produced an advertisement for the eggs. The great men of the Quatre Gats, Rusiñol, Casas, Utrillo, and the rest, appeared, each holding an egg: the point of the advertisement was a comparison of their testicles with the eggs, from which it appeared that the fresh eggs of Villafranca were larger.
But there were others too, and if only they had been preserved or even photographed we should have a fascinating account of his development at this crucial stage when an infinity of potentialities were opening in his mind and when he was making those deliberate elections that were to prove vital for him and for the art of the twentieth century. Yet although the camera was usual by then and although he was highly valued by those who knew him, nobody recorded them in any way. Would there have been a hint of the sharp angles and interlocking planes of Horta de Ebro, a longing for the clean straight line after the curving lilies and languors of Art Nouveau, a precursor of Cubism? A foretaste of the Blue Period, so soon to come?
They valued him highly; and a group of his friends, Pallarès, Sabartés, and Casagemas among them, urged him to give a show of his drawings at the Quatre Gats, a show that would in a way be a challenge to the able, accomplished, established, and fashionable draughtsman Casas. Several men had shown there: Casas himself, Rusiñol, Utrillo, Nonell, Pichot, Canals, Mir, and Opisso. Picasso liked the idea, and in the winter of 1899/1900 he set to work on a series of portrait-drawings of the Quatre Gats habitués. Most of his friends appeared in this gallery. Among them Sabartés, slim in those days, but even then myopic, even at nineteen wearing that expression of weak meek obstinacy, skepticism, and deep unshakable self-satisfaction that is more apparent in some of the portraits of later years—a born and willing victim. Nonell, a strong round Mediterranean head, secretly amused, not unlike Picasso himself. (Indeed, almost alone among all those self-conscious people, affected, bearded, pipe-smoking for the most part, Picasso and Nonell had the look of real men, fully alive, who had wandered onto a stage full of minor actors playing dull, unimportant roles forever and ever, stilted creatures, devoured by their self-chosen parts.) Lluisa Vidal, one of the few women of the group, a former pupil of Eugène Carrière in Paris and a great admirer of his. Carlos Casagemas, who had an exhibition at the Quatre Gats just after his room-mate, Picasso: an anxious, haunted face, narrow, all jutting nose and receding chin: he was impotent, but it was not generally known at the time. Manuel Hugué, another fully human being, an admirable sculptor, extremely idle and utterly unreliable, much loved by the friends upon whom he lived, though forever penniless and somewhat given to stealing their possessions: the bastard son of a Spanish general, perhaps, and ordinarily called Manolo. Manuel Pallarès, who was less often to be seen with Picasso these days because of a long-drawn-out and difficult love-affair, but who remained a firm friend. Ramon Pichot, a painter, one of a large family all devoted to the arts, who lived in wild disorder in the splendid Calle Montcada—splendid not in the modern sense, with light and tree-lined space, but in that of the middle ages: a dark and malodorous lane, yet one lined with Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque palaces opening onto secret inward patios; one of them, restored, is now the Picasso Museum. (The Catalan version of Pichot is Pitxot, just as Carlos Casagemas comes out as Carles Casagemes: here I use the forms they used themselves in France.) Opisso, a talented draughtsman and the son of the Vanguardia’s art-critic: although in after days he told Cirici-Pellicer that “because of Picasso’s reserved character it was difficult to assert that they had ever really been friends.” In the same passage Cirici-Pellicer speaks of a somewhat later studio belonging to Soto where Picasso came to work and which he so filled with his own things and his own powerful personality that even Soto took to calling it “Picasso’s studio”; and he goes on to say, “This quite describes the overpowering, encroaching nature of the future creator of Cubism: those who knew him when he was young all agree that … one could only worship him or hate him. His worshipers have told us of his charm, his sound, quick, precise, clear-cut judgment, his immense gifts for improvisation and for perfect imitation [he could instantly produce a pastiche of any known artist, and this talent, indulged with unthinking freedom, brought the charge of plagiarism from the envious or the obtuse], his way of drawing a nude, starting with a toe and sweeping round with one sure, unfaltering line, and of his wonderful steadfast perseverance in his work…. On the other hand, his enemies have told us of his pig-headedness, his boundless self-confidence, his skill at seeing just where he could make a way for himself, and of his contempt for the work of those around him.”
This is not wholly objective testimony: Cirici-Pellicer was out of sympathy with Picasso’s later work; Opisso knew no fame comparable to Picasso’s, but remained set in the late nineteenth century, when, he affirms, the work of the one could be mistaken for the work of the other: so much so that a collector once gave ten thousand pesetas for a charcoal drawing by Opisso, supposing it to be a Picasso. Yet it is worth recording because of the light it throws on the reactions of his friends to the eighteen-year-old Andalou, a small, commanding figure of no physical size at all but of a caliber hitherto unknown.
The drawings and a few other works were ready in February, 1900. Neither Picasso nor his friends could afford frames, so they were hung with drawing-pins, more or less at haphazard. The general effect was indifferent, and from the commercial point of view amateurish: nothing like the smooth efficiency of the Saló Parés, where the citizens of Barcelona were accustomed to buying their pictures.
Drawing has always been less generally valued than painting, and at that time, in spite of Casas’ success, it was held in particularly low esteem. A contemporary artist has given the scale of values that obtained in Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century: first the painter of religious subjects; he was a somebody, a señor. Second the portraitist: he was understood to possess a natural gift for catching a likeness and he was granted the respect due to a photographer. Third the landscape and genre painter, and he was little better than a halfwit. Last, and far below any classification by number, the draughtsman: he was scarcely an artist at all. And in this case the draughtsman was known to come from Andalucía, the home of idleness, levity, Gypsies, bullfighters, and wild extravagance, and to be absurdly young. He had no network of cousins, no local interest. Few people came, apart from the artist’s friends; and of those few none bought.
In the end the unsold drawings passed to Pere Romeu; he gave some to their originals, and after his death his widow sold the rest, many to the Barcelona collector Graells.
But these amounted