Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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taking up more and more of the restricted space, the pictures accumulating along the walls—but at all events Picasso did not wear it for his ordinary evening’s entertainment: a top-hat would have been somewhat out of place at the Zut.
This was a deeply squalid little establishment in what was then the Place Ravignan, itself a deeply squalid unpaved unlit stretch of mud high up in Montmartre, not far from the boulevard de Clichy and just round the comer from Picasso’s first studio, the one Nonell had lent him; it was surrounded by mud walls and a few low houses, and by night it was haunted by the local apaches, who were said to scalp their victims. The Zut was run by a guitar-playing character called Frédé, who served little but beer, and that only when his credit with the brewers was good: the main room had a floor of beaten earth, some tables and benches, and it was usually filled with a mixed band of painters, sculptors, models, vague young women, and of course the neighborhood toughs. Picasso, Manolo (very much at home in this atmosphere), Pichot, Durio, and other Spaniards went there so regularly that Frédé gave them a small, filthy room to themselves. At this stage they were still shy of going into the main room, where all the people knew one another and where everybody spoke French, and this little den was better than the outer bar, the entrance, with its three barrels and nothing else: at any rate they had fun there, and although they were sometimes interrupted by differences of opinion next door (harsh words and the thumping of benches and tables always, knives and pistols on occasion), they grew so fond of the place that they decided to decorate it, and perhaps even to get rid of some of the vermin. Frédé whitewashed the walls and cleaned the lamp; Sabartés and Soto hung paper garlands, helped by a girl they picked up on the way (she also swept the floor), and Pichot and Picasso painted pictures. Picasso had brought all he needed—a little blue—and while Pichot did an Eiffel Tower and an airship in one comer, he dipped his brush and, says Sabartés, “with the tip he drew a group of nudes, all in one continuous line of blue. Then, in a space that he had left, a hermit.” Someone cried out “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” and he stopped at once: but there was still the rest of the wall to cover. He turned back to his work, never lifting his brush except to take more blue. “He did not seem to hear us talking, nor even to realize that we were there…. Next to the group of nudes there appeared a half-length portrait of me, larger than life, in an oratorical pose, holding a paper in my hand.”
Portraits: Picasso loved them, and he was immensely gifted for this strangely discredited form of art; many of his friends, merchants, critics, women, and children were his models, but until he saw old age gazing back at him from the looking-glass one day his most usual subject was himself. There was no vanity, no complaisance, in this, but a profound, objective, and probably always unsatisfied curiosity; yet whereas all his portraits of, for example, Sabartés are instantly recognizable as the same man, even under the utmost distortion, the Picassos still continued to vary so widely, particularly in the drawings, that sometimes experts differ as to their identity—they wonder whether it is Picasso at all.
He drew and painted a hundred different aspects of himself; but at least for this period there is one aspect, perhaps the most important of all, that is not represented. We have no self-portrait of the man whose iron determination to express himself as he thought fit could not be broken by any force whatsoever, certainly not by poverty, discouragement, success, or persuasion: none that shows his incorruptible strength of purpose.
Picasso was fond of money: he was eager to get it when he was young and all his life he preferred keeping it to spending it—above all he hated being parted from it against his will. His parsimony could reach a point where an enemy might call it sordid avarice, a trait connected with his dread of death, perhaps. For example, when Sabartés was his secretary, in Françoise Gilot’s time, Picasso was a very wealthy man with several homes; yet according to her he kept his old friend on the equivalent of thirty pounds or $150 a month, barely enough for him and his wife to live, with strict economy, in a minute flat in a dreary part of Paris. Or there is the wholly reliable testimony of Brassaï, who, though very poor in 1943, could not induce Picasso to pay for proofs of the photographs he was taking for a book on Picasso’s sculpture. And there are many other instances, early and late, which show that money was of great importance to Picasso: but when it was a question of changing his style for material gain, or even of keeping to a manner he had thought valid and satisfying only a few months earlier, there was nothing to be done—the money counted no more for him than it would have counted for Saint Francis. Again and again he threw away the prospect of fortune with unfeigned indifference.
If he had made a portrait of this quality, and if Manyac had understood it, the merchant would not have tried to stem the flood of blue. As it was, he wasted his breath and embittered their relationship to such a degree that at length Picasso, who had spent all his money, went to the extreme length of writing to Don José for the fare home.
Days went by: the money did not come. Picasso suspected Manyac, who knew what was afoot, and early one morning, when he and Sabartés had spent the night in Durio’s studio, the three friends crept up the stairs of the house in the boulevard de Clichy, hoping to get there before the postman. They were too late, but the letter was there, pushed under the door; and Manyac was there too, lying face down on his bed, fully dressed, and moaning, “The letter, the letter…”
That was the end of Picasso’s second Paris. The next time Sabartés saw him, in the spring of 1902, he was living at home and working in a studio belonging to Angel de Soto and the painter Rocarol. It was just off the Ramblas, in the Calle Conde de Asalto; and just across the way stood the remarkable house or palace that Gaudí had built for his patron Güell in 1885, a mass of labored stone, wrought iron, and bronze. Gaudí was one of the earliest exponents of what might be called the Catalan Gothic revival and by far the most gifted, by far the most interesting: yet even his highest flights left Picasso unmoved. Gaudí belonged to an earlier generation (he was some thirty years older than Picasso); he was a member of the Cercle de Sant Lluc, a practicing Catholic, and, in spite of his increasingly adventurous, highly individual architecture that went far beyond Modernismo towards a kind of surrealism, he was very much a part of the Establishment. As far as Picasso was concerned, Gaudí was old hat.
The studio was on the top floor (Picasso spent most of his young life up a great many stairs), and it was flooded with the light of the Mediterranean sun. The change from winter in Paris could hardly have been more pronounced, but his painting was still blue, indeed bluer than ever.
He stayed in Barcelona until the autumn, and he worked hard all the time, falling into a steady routine of getting up late, working all day, going to the Quatre Gats or some café on the Ramblas, and talking until the morning hours; then, when even the hardiest had gone home, he would walk about in the coolness of the night.
During these months his painting, for the most part, followed the line that was already evident in Paris and that was to develop even more strongly when he returned there: blue, of course, and with an increasing concentration upon the single figure. Ambitious compositions such as the “Burial of Casagemas” were no longer to be seen; the backgrounds lost their richness both in brushstroke and incident, while the simplification of his figures, often enclosed by a heavy outline in the Gauguin manner, grew more pronounced, detail giving way to unified masses; and the heavy impasto was replaced by a lightly-brushed, even surface. And increasingly, not only at this time but throughout the Blue Period, his subjects could be understood as social protest—beggars, very poor women with children, blind men, lunatics, outcasts. This has led to a charge of sentimentality. Yet there is a world of difference between true feeling and sentimentality, and it may be that those who bring this charge are using the smear-word as a form of defense, a denial of the facts. When Picasso spoke of the horror of extreme poverty, alienation, hunger, and loneliness he knew what he was talking about; then again he was living in close touch with the people in a city where working conditions were so intolerable that riots broke out in the very month of his return, and they were followed by a general strike in February. The authorities sent the notorious General Weyler to deal with the situation in Barcelona, and he did so with such an extreme brutality of repression that the government fell. However, it recovered a week later and carried on, leaving the working-class exactly where it had been before, apart from the disappearance of many of its members, some of whom “vanished,” while others were shut up in Montjuich, that cruel fortress.
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