Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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is the impotent Casagemas with his sex hidden by the slip, in the drawings he is Picasso himself, quite naked, unmistakably male. Yet neither in the studies nor the picture is the girl Germaine. Picasso could have painted her with perfect ease—a portrait without a model was nothing to him—particularly as she had already sat for him in 1902. He painted her again in 1905, and their curious relationship continued for at least another forty years, when he took Françoise Gilot to a little house in Montmartre where Germaine was living, a poor, sick, toothless old woman, confined to her bed. Picasso’s aim was to give her money, which was obviously his practice, and to exhibit her to Françoise Gilot as a memento mori. “When she was young she made a painter friend of mine suffer so much that he committed suicide,” he said.
“La Vie” was the result of a great deal of thought, perhaps too much for the spontaneity he so valued, for the figures are somewhat set, stiff, and over-organized; but to lay Casagemas’ ghost to his own satisfaction, by processes known only to himself, he would surely make sacrifices on the plastic side. However that may be (and it is mere hypothesis) the picture was ready in his head when the big canvas, almost certainly the one Don José had prepared, reached the studio; and Sabartés describes him setting about it at once, “roughing out a group as briskly as though he were attacking an ordinary picture.”
He also describes Picasso’s extreme nervous tension at this time, his need for inner silence, his mental exhaustion, his need for another air to breathe, a fresh atmosphere that Barcelona could not give him. Sabartés was his constant companion; and one day when they were with friends in a café the conversation grew boring, at least for Picasso in the darkness of his mood. While the others were in full flow, he glanced at Sabartés, said, “Are you coming?” and got up and walked off.
He scarcely spoke on the way back to the Calle del Comercio, nothing but, “What God-damned fools. Don’t you think them fools?” And Sabartés would have left him at the door if he had not pressed him to come in.
In the studio Picasso looked keenly at Sabartés, set a canvas on the easel, and said, “I’m going to do your portrait. All right?”
He needed a companion, a human presence, but a dumb one: he did not want to talk. Sabartés stood there, dutiful and mute, while Picasso worked in silent concentration. At last all that mattered was set down on the canvas, and putting away his brushes Picasso cried, “Well, why don’t you say something, brother? Have you lost your tongue? Anyone would think you were in a bad temper.”
He was happy again, voluble and gay. They went for a walk: the world was worth living in: people were no longer bores.
The next day he finished the portrait with a few strokes. It was a blue picture, certainly; but the sensual red of the lips, the brilliant gold of the tie-pin, were something new, the forerunners of a fresh approach.
*For the very curious essay itself, see the Appendix.
WHAT sales, what subsidies, what savings carried Picasso to Paris in what proved to be his definitive removal is not recorded, although Sabartés (and Sabartés alone) does speak of an exhibition of his work at the Galérie Serrurier in February of 1904, with the catalog prefaced by Charles Morice. At all events he set off in May or June of that year, again in the company of Sebastià Junyer-Vidal.
In Paris they found Paco Durio on the point of leaving his studio at 13, rue Ravignan for another place nearby where he could set up a kiln, since his sculpture was taking more and more the form of ceramics: and they took over from him at once. Junyer, who had renounced haberdashery, soon went off to paint in Majorca, leaving Picasso the sole tenant of the studio. Number 13 was a ramshackle building made mostly of wood, zinc, and dirty glass, with stove-pipes sticking up at haphazard; it stood on so steep a part of the Butte de Montmartre that while one spectator, standing where the rue Ravignan broadened into a muddy little square, would see it as a one-floored shack, another, looking up from its back-entrance in the rue Garaud, would gaze at an irregular mass, five stories of rickety studios towering up and holding together by some especial grace. A vast comfortless hutch with no lighting, the most primitive sanitation, and only one source of water for all the tenants; an oven in the summer, when the sun poured through the many skylights, and so cold in the winter, with its thin plank walls, that Picasso’s tea, left overnight, would be frozen in the morning. At one time it had been called the Maison du Trappeur, because of the log-cabins in which fur-trappers dwell; but Max Jacob’s poetic eye detected a likeness to one of those vessels moored in the Seine for laundresses to wash clothes in, and from that time onwards it was called the Bateau-Lavoir. Some laundresses did in fact live there, together with seamstresses, a large number of painters, sculptors, writers, itinerant greengrocers, and actors, all watched over from a distance by Madame Coudray, the good-natured concierge.
Picasso’s studio was at the end of a long passage on the ground floor, counting from the rue Ravignan: a lofty, fair-sized place with vast beams and a small alcove at the far end that could be curtained off. There were no curtains however; and apart from an iron stove in the middle there was no furniture either. But Picasso was in touch with his Spanish and Catalan friends, and among them he found the sculptor Gargallo, who was packing up to return to Barcelona. Gargallo sold Picasso all his furniture for eight francs, to be paid in cash: a small folding bed, a mattress, a chair, a little table, and a bowl. But Gargallo’s studio was in the rue Vercingetorix, right over on the other side of Paris, in Montparnasse: Picasso and Manolo hired a hand-cart, loaded it, and with the help of a hungry young Montparnasse Spaniard they wheeled it across the city, Manolo directing the operation rather than doing any actual work. At last they reached the studio, high on the Butte, and the young Spaniard collapsed. He may really have expected the five francs he had been promised; but when Picasso pointed out that if such a sum were paid it would be impossible for them all to eat, he submitted, agreeing that it should be pooled and converted into one great general meal.
Spaniards and Catalans formed the greater part of Picasso’s acquaintance at this time. As well as the nomads there was a considerable settled colony, including Pichot; Rocarol, with whom he shared the Conde de Asalto studio; the then well-known Zuloaga; Canals, who had first shown him the technique of etching and who was now encouraging him to make another and a far more ambitious attempt; Durio; and of course Manolo, who, being left the use of one of Durio’s studios while he was away, sold all the Gauguins on its walls to Vollard. He also stole Max Jacob’s only pair of trousers, Max being then in bed, and brought them back only because no dealer would make him an offer.
The friendship between Manolo and Picasso was of long standing and it lasted all their life. Picasso admired Manolo’s sculpture and Manolo admired Picasso’s painting, but there was far more to it than that: Manolo was some ten years older than Picasso, a love-child who had been early turned out on the streets of Barcelona to pick up what living he could; he kept alive in the face of literally cut-throat competition, and in the course of this education he grew very sharp indeed, not to say piratical. Harsher words, such as bandit, thief, and pickpocket have been used; and the face that Picasso often drew is that of a lean and wary character, though curiously distinguished. But above all he was an outsider, a complete outsider, tough, self-reliant, and capable, and it was this that bound them together: piracy was a quality latent in Picasso too, and he esteemed the quality in his friend. What is more, Manolo was extremely witty and gay; even his victims—that is to say almost his entire acquaintance—bore him no ill-will; and Picasso had more fun with him as a companion than ever he had had with the melancholy Sabartés, who had now gone off to the New World in search of a fortune. It was a true companionship: each respected the other (and, by the way, neither of them drank; they both retained their lucidity at all times). Maurice Raynal knew both intimately, and when he was telling Brassaï about Manolo he said, “I was very, very fond of that man, and Picasso was devoted to him … Manolo was the elder by ten years and for him the young Ruiz was always ‘Little Pablo.’ And Picasso took more notice of him than of anyone else … he was perhaps the only person from whom Picasso would take criticism, teasing, contradiction.”
A fellow-tenant in the