Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian
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of the size—and its solitary delight, apart from the port and the bull-ring, was a Roman tower on the howling eminence at the end of the peninsula, an erection called the Torre de Hercules by the inhabitants and the caramel tower by Don José. With its later additions it soared up four hundred feet, still serving as a lighthouse; and when the great Atlantic rollers drove in to break with a measured thunder at the foot of the cliff and sent their spray up to the tower it had a splendor of its own.
The port was busy enough, but even when it was visible it was not to be compared with Málaga. The exports were hogs, horse-beans and roots (mostly for Cuba, then still a Spanish possession), and the imports mainly coal, arriving in dirty tramp-steamers from England and South Wales. The bull-ring was closed when they arrived, but even when it opened it was a disappointment. There is little comprehension of the corrida outside Andalucía, little grasp of those fine points that distinguish it from mere bull-baiting (or at the worst a vile butchery) and so raise it to the level of a savage, dangerous, poetic sacrifice. When the bullfighters are aware that the congregation does not know what the mystery is about, they will only perform, not officiate; and after a while, the season having come round at last, Don José was so disgusted that he gave up attending.
Picasso drew the tower, as he drew everything else in La Coruña. The early drawings are still childish, or rather boyish, many of them being illustrations to jokes about the weather; others, particularly those in the margins and blank pages of his schoolbooks, show the kind of battle that most schoolboys draw—Romans, savages, people with spears, swordsmen slashing away at one another. There are also some capital bulls. The school-books which Picasso preserved are in the museum at Barcelona: they resemble almost all school-books in being dog-eared, battered, and tedious, but they are of a considerably higher standard than might have been expected. One, which has selections from the classics and which Picasso adorned with a pen-and-ink Moor’s head and some pigeons far livelier than his father’s, has quite advanced Latin verse and passages from Cicero. How much Pablo made of it is another matter, but at least he had got into the school and he did well enough not to be sent away; furthermore at this time he wrote, or was compelled to write, a far more elegant, legible hand than he had ever used before or was ever to use again. The school in question was the Instituto da. Guarda, and Picasso was admitted to the primer curso, the first year of the secondary cycle: the next year, in 1892, he also matriculated at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, where his father was teaching, while at the same time he carried on with his studies at the Instituto.
At no time of his life was Picasso a willing writer of letters. In La Coruña he invented a way of communicating with his relatives in Málaga that called for little effort in the literary way: this was a small news-sheet “published every Sunday,” called sometimes Asul y Blanco and sometimes La Coruña, in which he drew local people, dogs, pigeons (one of his small advertisements reads “Pedigree pigeons purchased: apply second floor, 14 Calle Payo Gómez”), the “caramel tower” on a tray, and wrote short dispatches such as “The wind has started, and it will go on blowing until there is no La Coruña left,” or “The rain has begun already. It will not stop before summer,” or “At the time of going to press this publication had received no telegrams of any kind.” Then there were more jokes, some illustrated and most of this general nature: During an arithmetic examination: Master, “If you are given five melons and you eat four, what have you left?” Pupil, “One.” Master, “Are you sure that is all?” Pupil, “And a belly-ache.” Most of the people are struggling with the wind or the rain or both (La Coruña’s main industry seems to have been the manufacture and repair of umbrellas); and to show Málaga the extreme wild remoteness of these parts there is a drawing of the Galician bagpipes.
These too are still entirely boyish productions, with little hint of what was so soon to appear; and it is worth pointing out that the spelling entonses, for example, or asul, rather than the orthodox entonces and azul, shows that Picasso had retained his Andalusian way of speaking (the Castilian pronounces z and soft c as th, whereas the southerner makes no attempt at any such thing—nor do many South Americans, Andalusian in origin). These mistakes, together with others that have nothing to do with phonetics, also show that Picasso remained impervious to printed shape: which is strange, when one considers his astonishingly accurate recall of other forms, even then. And what is more curious still is his mirror-version of the final question-mark: this might have been influenced by the Spanish convention of starting a question with another question-mark, upside-down, but later he sometimes inverted the esses of his signature, and when he took to etching and engraving he could not or would not grasp that the printing of the plate necessarily reversed the legend. It is as though there were some confusion in the mental process that separates right from left.
These childish things were soon to be left behind, however, and although the facetious illustrative sketch reappeared at intervals, the young Picasso suddenly moved on to an extraordinary degree of maturity, to serious and as it were total painting. He might perhaps have done so a little earlier if his father had set about his education as a painter more seriously; but the separation from his friends, his native climate, his whole way of life, coming on top of his other reasons for unhappiness, quite crushed Don José’s spirit: he hardly ever went out, but stood at the window, watching the rain. When he did leave the house, it was to go to the art-school, just over the way, or to Mass: the then unchanging Mass was one of the few remaining links with his former life—that and the pigeons, which he still kept, and which he still painted from time to time, although with little enthusiasm, and that little diminishing fast. This is the Don José that his son painted, a man so deeply sad that it is painful to look at some of the portraits. Yet at this time he was still capable of making friends—his final withdrawal came later—and one of them was Dr. Raimundo Pérez Costales, an interesting man who had been minister of labor and of the fine arts under the short-lived and anarchical First Republic of Pi y Margall in 1873: according to Sabartés he was so much attached to Don José that when the Ruizes left La Coruña, Dr. Costales settled at Málaga in the hope that his friend would eventually return to his native town.
However, in time José Ruiz did turn his mind to a thorough-going artistic education for his son. He taught Pablo the techniques of pen-and-ink, charcoal, pastel, and crayon; later he promoted him to painting in oil and watercolor, though at the same time he insisted upon a great deal of drawing, of exact and conscientious drawing. As a teacher Don José was a strict disciplinarian, obeying the law to the letter and requiring both obedience and hard work; it was a rigorously academic training, of course, for even if Don José’s tastes had not lain in that direction, the school was under the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, a deeply conservative body. Picasso accepted the discipline happily, and in the antique classes he made drawings of casts that astonish the beholder not only with their accomplishment but even more with their power of giving the faded models back their life, a life that had been there when the statues were first carved and that his pleasure in the act of drawing restored to their degraded plaster shadows. What for most people is a hopelessly arid exercise was a delight to Picasso, and his art-school studies glow with pleasure: controlled, disciplined, and almost anonymous, but certainly pleasure.
Picasso told Brassaï, when he and the photographer were talking about children’s painting and infant phenomenons (they never last, said Picasso), that the precision of these academic drawings frightened him; and certainly there is something a little monstrous about their easy virtuosity when they are compared with the decorations that he was drawing at the same time in his school-books, a time when he was in fact no more than a little jug-eared boy of twelve or thirteen. Perhaps it was at this period that Picasso was first inhabited by his particular demon: not the more or less impersonal spirit that comes to children in their nonage, incapable of sin, but the fully adult creature that Sartre calls the vampire and that certainly, in the case of some writers, lives upon their blood. Except for Friar Bacon’s squat black dog, the demon has never, I believe, been isolated and identified, but it is a real presence, and those who have known this possession report the experience as both extraordinarily exalting—mind aglow, senses concentrated, hand flying, body, heat and cold forgotten—and as something with an element of dread.
Outside the school his work was much more free: among the surviving oils there are some little tentative pictures dating from 1892 and 1893, then a more assured