Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

off, has shot him with a blunderbuss; and the woman’s face has turned a startling green, as well it might, for her lover is weltering in his gore. It is so eminently, ludicrously, bad that at this distance of time one feels a glow of affection for the painter; but in 1897 this cannot have been the case with Picasso. As a small boy he had liked Muñoz Degrain: since then he had developed enormously, and although he had not yet made the decisive move to Modernismo, he was now surrounded by the greatest paintings that Spain had yet produced, and the contrast must have been painfully striking. At no period of his life was Picasso easily embarrassed, but meeting Muñoz Degrain just then must have been painful; and as for Moreno Carbonero, Picasso simply despised his teaching. He despised all Spanish teaching: “If I had a son who wanted to be a painter,” he wrote to a friend at this time, “I should not keep him in Spain for a moment, and do not imagine I should send him to Paris (where I should gladly be myself) but to Munik (I do not know if it is spelt like that), as it is a city where painting is studied seriously without regard to set theories of any kind, such as pointillisme and all the rest….”

      In Madrid he found a class-mate from his first year at the Llotja, Francisco Bernareggi, an Argentinian; and when Picasso was not walking about the streets of the city, drawing indefatigably, they went to the Prado together and copied the pictures they admired. It is significant of Picasso’s continuing respect for his father’s judgment that they both sent their copies back to Don José in Barcelona. Velasquez, Goya, and Titian he approved of, but when they sent him their versions of El Greco he wrote, “You are taking the wrong path.” Among Picasso’s was a late Velásquez portrait of Philip IV, from which it is clear that the student had either not yet acquired the master’s touch or that in his poverty he could not afford the master’s materials, particularly his famous brushes. There is also a version of one of Goya’s “Caprichos,” the bawd and the whore who were to reappear so often in much later years, and a careful, affectionate drawing from an early nineteenth-century print of José Delgado, otherwise Pepe Illo, the illustrious Andalusian bullfighter and the author of La Tauromaquia o Arte de Torear, which Picasso was to illustrate sixty years later. He had something of Picasso, and of the Gypsy, in his amused, knowing, proud old face—he was close on fifty (ancient for a torero) when a bull killed him at last, in 1801. Bulls: all these years, from early Málaga to Madrid, Picasso had loved to see them live and die. The drawings and paintings that he made have not always been mentioned in their place, often being more by way of personal memoranda, but they run through his life, a constant presence.

      The sketch-books are filled with his usual street-scenes, including some wonderfully drawn horses; and here again we see his preoccupation with his name. On one page Ruiz is written in careful capitals, each letter beneath the other: next to it P. Ruiz, ringed about with the kind of halo-line that he was using then, and not far off the initials P.R. several times repeated. And in some places we see the Picazzo that he had tried out before. This was at a time when his father had shown particular love and generosity.

      The most striking of the drawings and paintings, however, are those which show his first steps towards Modernismo and indeed towards a world far beyond it. Two landscapes of the Buen Retiro, painted in misty fin-de-siècle colors, clearly point in that direction; and in a drawing labeled “Rechs the Pre-Raphaelite,” with its symbolic oil-lamp, the connection is obvious. (The Pre-Raphaelite movement, though at its last tepid gasp, formed one of the heterogeneous ingredients of Modernismo.) And of course he was aware of the movement: in a letter written at this time he said, “I am going to make a drawing for you to take to the Barcelona Cómica to see if they will buy it…. Modernist it must be….” But there is also a group of gaunt chimneys rising above a wall that foreshadows an art from which anecdote and the picturesque are entirely banished, while unnamed forms, new or archaic, assume a vital significance; and an enigmatic window with an iron balcony, a subject to which he was to return again and again in later life.

      Another friend he met in Madrid was Hortensi Güell, a young Catalan writer and painter from Reus, whose portrait he drew later in Barcelona, a few months before Güell killed himself. This was the first of Picasso’s friends to commit suicide.

      Young people are surprisingly frail, in spite of their ebullient spirits and elasticity, and there are times when misfortune or unkindness will destroy them: Picasso was working hard in Madrid, but he was never to be seen at the Academy. News of this reached Málaga. Rich Don Salvador saw it as another proof of Pablo’s indiscipline, want of purpose, and defiance of established authority: he and the Málaga relations cut off their supplies. Don José, on the other hand, took Pablo’s side; he maintained his contribution and even increased it as much as he could; but his £100 a year did not allow him to do much, and the pittance dwindled to subsistence-level or below. One of Picasso’s many self-portraits, drawn considerably later, shows a thin adolescent, wan and pitifully young. Had he drawn it at the time, the face would have been more pinched by far. This cutting-off of his allowance came at a time when he was growing fast, and although he would probably never have reached his father’s six foot however much he had been fed, a reasonable diet at this point might have added those few inches that make all the difference between a small man and one of average size. As it was, he remained short; and it is a matter of common observation that in men of a determined character, combativeness is in inverse proportion to height. Perhaps it was just as well: if Picasso had been as tall as Braque, would he ever have painted the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” or “Guernica”? At all events (and this is another instance of the peculiar and unpredictable sweetness that made part of his extremely complex and often contradictory character) he bore no grudge for this or many other affronts: when Don Salvador lay dying in 1908, Picasso wrote to his cousins Concha and María most tenderly, with obviously sincere anxiety and pain. Though to be sure since 1897 Don Salvador had paid for his nephew’s exemption from military service.

      The days passed, and winter came on: it comes early in Madrid, a city of extremes, perched on a bare steppe two thousand feet up, with icy blasts from the Sierra de Guadarrama, and it can be most bitterly cold even for a native, let alone a Mediterranean sun-worshiper like Picasso. Furthermore, the air is so desperately unhealthy even in a dead calm that it will, as the local proverb says, “kill a man, although it will not blow out a candle.”

      Between bouts of painting, Picasso moved house several times, following his harassed landlords as they fled from the bailiffs, always keeping to the same kind of street—San Pedro Mártir, Jesús y María, Lavapiés— never far from the great rag-fair of the Rastro. It was in the last of his garrets that the Madrid air and the effects of privation caught up with him. He fell ill with a violent fever, his throat was excoriated, his flayed tongue assumed the appearance of a strawberry, he came out in vermilion spots all over, the spots rapidly coalesced, and he presented the classic aspect of a patient suffering from scarlet fever.

      The illness could be mortal then, but Picasso was tough. After some weeks of bed, losing his old skin and growing a new one, he was able to creep out for the verbena of San Antonio de la Florida, on June 12. These verbenas take place on the eve of the saint’s day, and although no doubt they were pious in their origin, for centuries they have been little more than fairs, with a great deal of singing, dancing, drinking, and fornication of a secular, if not pagan, character: Picasso was not going to miss a moment of it.

      Then he took the weary train to Barcelona, where home cooking, kindness, and his natural resilience restored his strength and spirits so quickly that a week or so later when Pallarès invited him to convalesce in the country air, at Horta, he accepted at once.

      Horta, where Pallarès was born and where his parents lived, was a village of some two or three thousand people; or perhaps one should say a very small town, since it possessed a mayor, a doctor, and a sereno, a watchman who called the hours and the weather throughout the night and who represented the law: he also buried the dead. It stands on a steep small hill in the middle of a plain surrounded by mountains, and it lies in the high limestone country known as the Terra Alta, on the far limits of Cataluñia, within sight of Aragón: it was then called plain Horta, or Horta de Ebro (though it is miles from the river), and now it is Horta de Sant Joan, a mayor of some sixty years ago having had a particular devotion to that saint.

      Even now it is at the back of beyond: in 1898 it was more so. They took the