Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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and he did at least possess the few pesetas that would launch Arte Joven and keep it going until advertisements and increasing circulation should set it on its independent feet.
Soler already knew Madrid and many of its inhabitants, including several of the “generation of ‘98,” then very much the avant-garde in Spanish letters, such as Pio Baroja and his brother the painter, Martinez Ruiz, who wrote under the name of Azorín, and Bargula, and when the first issue of Arte Joven came out, dated March 31, 1901, and priced at fifteen centimos, it contained not only Baroja’s Orgía macabra but three noble sonnets by Miguel de Unamuno, no less. There was also a letter from Barcelona by Ramon Reventós and some translations from the Catalan. And just as Casas, the art-editor of Pèl i Ploma, filled the review with his own work, so Picasso did almost all the illustration of Arte Joven; and among his drawings, pastels, and decorations there blazed and sparkled the indispensable Belt, the only paying advertisement in the paper.
The other numbers had pieces in favor of Nietzsche by Pompeu Gener and in favor of anarchy and of killing the law by Azorín: but Arte Joven’s anarchism was of the armchair kind, and neither Azorín nor the editors were in much danger from his article, since all it recommended was abstention from voting in the elections. They also contained advertisements for the Quatre Gats, for the Belt of course, and for a book to be written by Soler and illustrated by Picasso. It was to be called Madrid, Notas de Arte, a pictorial and poetic discovery of the city on the lines of Verhaeren’s L’Espagne noire, the Spanish translation of which had woodcuts by Dario de Regoyos, the friend of Gauguin. The advertisement shows the two authors side by side and it is the only example among the many self-portraits in which Picasso makes himself appear serious and respectable, intelligent, earnest, and sensitive: like Soler he is wearing a fine black silk stock, his hair is carefully arranged, and he has done away with the disastrous little bristly beard that made him look so like one of the four cats in an advertisement he did for Romeu. Several of his drawings for the book appeared in Arte Joven, together with portraits of his friends both in Madrid and Barcelona, bar and café interiors, women, ranging from a flowered Pre-Raphaelite yearning head (perhaps his very last bow in that direction) to a truly sinister stout middle-aged whore in a dark doorway numbered 69, and a good many “social” scenes of bourgeois and the like, remarkable for their direct cruelty.
But the book never came out, and after five issues Arte Joven appeared no more. Picasso had been living hard in Madrid. First he had stayed in a boarding-house, where they regaled him with fried eggs; but fried eggs, his figure for high luxury, were beyond his means and the regular hours irked him; presently he moved to a place of his own, and since he meant to stay in Madrid indefinitely he took a lease for a year. This lease he preserved, together with innumerable other papers long since out of date; it survived removal after removal, part of a steadily growing mass of mingled junk and precious drawings, all stuffed into worn cardboard boxes; and some forty years later Sabartés chanced upon it in one of the slums piled upon a piece of furniture in the dining-room of Picasso’s house in Paris. The agreement, dated February 4, 1901, covered one room on the top floor of 28 Calle Zurbano.
“Handsome street,” said Sabartés. “Fashionable district.”
“Yes,” said Picasso. “But I lived in a garret. No fire; no lighting. I was never so cold in my life.”
All he could afford was a camp-bed with a straw mattress, a deal table, and one chair; and at night he worked by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle. He had lived hard before and he was to live hard again, working furiously all the time, and it never worried him unduly—it certainly never checked his flow. He put up with lack of water, drainage, and light as an ordinary part of a painter’s life; as far as food was concerned he was naturally abstemious, and although he smoked continually he drank little wine and his apéritif was mineral water. But even his Spartan frame had its limits; the cold numbed his generous Mediterranean spirit; and here in Madrid there was the paper to look after too. He and Soler had to try to find subscribers and to sell advertising space; they did not know how to do it and they failed. It was not for want of effort: Picasso went to great lengths, even writing to one of his Málaga uncles, presumably not Salvador but the husband of an aunt, asking him to take the paper. “What are you thinking of?” replied the uncle. “And what kind of a man do you think I am? This is not what we had hoped for from you. Such notions! Such friends! If you go on this way…”
He also had to satisfy Manyac, who expected regular deliveries according to their contract, but who expected in vain: at no period of his life did time mean much to Picasso, still less punctuality; and writing a letter, finding an envelope, a postage stamp, were only a little less of a torment than doing up a packet and sending it away—the hand that could model the most satisfying statue of a goat known to man could only with the greatest reluctance be brought to make a parcel. And even then the resulting bundle, with its inadequate paper and odd bits of string, could scarcely confront the post.
Then again Modernismo was only now reaching Madrid, that un-European town. Picasso had already had years of it in Barcelona and a most concentrated dose in Paris, where a great deal of the enormous exhibition sagged and drooped in Modern’ style. His own work had for some time been reaching far beyond this stage, and the prospect of living through it again, of promoting it in Arte Joven, cannot have been agreeable. Besides, although Art Nouveau was to live on for many years, growing steadily more debased, industrialized, and commonplace as the first genuine excitement died away, it had already given what little it had to offer. Yeats, looking back at the year 1900, said, “Everybody got down off his stilts … nobody drank absinthe in his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church.” Picasso was perfectly in tune with the Zeitgeist; he was already ahead of it in many ways and he was soon to be recognized as one of its chief formers: yet here he was in 1901, surrounded by amiable people who were just getting ready to mount on their stilts for the first time. If Barcelona had seemed provincial after Paris, Madrid, apart from the Prado, was a desert.
It has also been suggested that he fell out with Soler and there is nothing improbable in the suggestion: two men in an unsuccessful partnership are not likely to agree, and Picasso was at all times highly susceptible to any hint of an affront or an assumption of superiority. Furthermore Soler was tall, well dressed, and comparatively moneyed: Picasso was short, shabby, and poor. As a young man he was sensitive about clothes in a spasmodic way—something of a dandy when he could afford it—and here was another source of discontent. But far, far more important than these was the fact that the death of Casagemas was working in his mind.
Although he knew many interesting people in Madrid—he was popular among the literary men, who looked at him with some wonder as “the little Andalou who spoke with a Catalan accent”—although he had sold some pictures, and although the cruel Madrid winter was turning to a hope of that blazing sun in which he thrived, in May he abandoned his garret, his table, and chair and his dying Arte Joven and returned to Barcelona.
He brought with him a large number of pastels, a medium he was using a great deal at the time, though with a ferocity contrasting strangely with the gentle word, together with other works that may have included the “Dwarf Dancing-Girl.” Phoebe Pool quotes “an old friend” who remembered Picasso coming into the Quatre Gats on his return from Madrid, showing a copy of part of “Las Meninas” that he had just made at the Prado and then next to it his own “Dancing-Girl.” “Velásquez did this,” he said, “Picasso did that.” On the other hand the Picasso Museum dates the canvas “Autumn 1901,” and certainly it looks as though Picasso’s van Gogh tendency had been reinforced by his later and deeper study of the Dutchman’s work: in any case it is a violent, savage picture, brilliant in its conception, coloring, and execution. The vulgar, strident, indefinably malformed girl amounts to the same basic statement that Velásquez made with his dwarf attendant, but in a completely different idiom; and although at first glance one recoils from the cruelty, presently one sees that the apparent harshness overlies a deep fellow-feeling, a wholly unsentimental sympathy. Just as Toulouse-Lautrec points no accusing finger at his grotesque poxed alcoholics, reserving his real venom for the bourgeois whoremasters on the spree, so Picasso’s real kindness is apparent in his treatment of other outsiders; it is strikingly obvious too