Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

the field of criticism, analysis, or interpretation.

      There are several reasons for this, and the first is that Braque was surely right in saying that the only important thing in art is that which cannot be explained. Then, while detailed analysis and technical description certainly have their value, they would be out of place in a book that is intended for the intelligent but unspecialized reader. And as for interpretation, that source of so many books about Picasso, it seems to me of value only when the author is a man as interesting as his subject. In the course of my reading I have necessarily waded through thick clouds of interpretative Teutonic metaphysics and a great deal of homespun psychology; but few of the writers came anywhere near this standard and little of what they wrote shed much light on Picasso. What I have done, therefore, when I come to an important picture, is to describe it as accurately as I can, without obtruding any attempt at explanation on the reader, still less telling him what he ought to think. Then I say something about its impact on me; and when, as it sometimes happens, this differs from the generally accepted view, I give that view as well: it is only for the very early or the very late work, where there is as yet no consensus, that I offer my own opinion and little more.

      Since this is not a book for specialists I have not encumbered it with notes and references, nor with a bibliography. Indeed, the formal bibliography, referring the reader to books long out of print and to articles published in obscure journals fifty years ago, seems a show of erudition of little use to the general reader when it is genuine and ridiculous when it is false: many that I have seen give what they call the first newspaper criticism, an article by Rodríguez Codolá entitled Exposición Ruiz Picasso and published in La Vanguardia of Barcelona in 1897. But as Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño has shown in his Bibliografia crítica y antológica the article does not exist: nor did the exhibition.

      Apart from the many learned and sometimes illuminating monographs on various aspects of his art, there are of course valuable works among the great number that have been written about Picasso; and no one interested in him can fail to find instruction in Barr or delight in Sabartés, Brassaï, Penrose, Fernande Olivier, Geneviêve Laporte, and some others. Yet it seems to me more useful to speak of them in some detail in the course of the book rather than giving a bald list of all the authors I have read.

      But although I give no bibliography, it would be the basest ingratitude if I were not to acknowledge the great kindness and help I have received from Monsieur and Madame Pierre de Saint-Prix, and from many of the friends I have had the honor of sharing with Picasso. Most are mentioned in the text, but there are others whom I must beg to accept my thanks in this place, particularly Madame Marguerite Matisse-Duthuit, the Comte and Comtesse de Lazerme, Señor Maurizio Torra-Balari, and Monsieur Jean Hugo. And I should like to express my gratitude to Señorita María Teresa Ocaña of the Museo Picasso in Barcelona, to the kind people at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Barnes Foundation at Merton, Pennsylvania, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Louvre, the Bibliothèque nationale, and the Musée national d’Art moderne, who have been so very helpful and cooperative.

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      PICASSO was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, the first, the only son of Doña María Picasso y Lopez and her husband, Don José Ruiz y Blasco, a painter, a teacher in the city’s art school, and the curator of the local museum. The statement is true: it is to be found in all the reference-books. But perhaps it does not convey a great deal of information except to those Spaniards who can as easily visualize the Málaga of Alphonso XII’s time as English-speaking readers can the St. Louis of President Arthur’s or the Southampton of Queen Victoria’s—to those who know the economic, cultural, and social position of a middle-class family in that town and the pattern of life in nineteenth-century Andalucía as a whole. For even the strongest individual is indelibly marked by the culture in which he is brought up; even the loneliest man is not an island; and even Picasso carried his cradle with him to the grave. “A man belongs to his own country forever,” he said.

      Picasso’s Málaga, then, was an ancient city in the far south of Spain, an essentially Mediterranean city, and after Barcelona the country’s most important seaport on that coast: it had been a great port for centuries before Barcelona was heard of, having a natural harbor as opposed to Barcelona’s open beach; but long before Picasso’s time the silting up of this harbor and the activity of the Catalans in building moles had reversed the position, and whereas in 1881 ships had to lie off Málaga and discharge their cargoes into lighters, in Barcelona they could tie up in their hundreds alongside the busy quays. Yet Málaga still had a great deal of shipping; its great bay provided shelter, and the smaller vessels could still use the harbor at the bottom of that bay, where the white town lies along the shore with the hills of Axarquía rising behind it, while the Gibralfaro rears up five hundred feet and more in the city itself, with a huge Moorish castle standing upon its top.

      Compared with the booming town of the present day, the Málaga of 1881 belonged to a different world, a world innocent of concrete and in many ways much nearer to the middle ages than to the twentieth century: tourism has changed it almost beyond recognition. When Picasso was born Málaga still relied upon its ancient industries, shipping, cotton-spinning, sugar-refining, the working of iron, and the production of wine, almonds and raisins, and other fruit: the fertile, irrigated, subtropical plain to the west of the town supplied the cotton and the sugar-cane (the Arabs brought them to Spain) as well as oranges, lemons, custard-apples, and bananas, while the slopes behind produced almonds, the grapes for the heavy, potent wine and for the raisins; and iron-ore came from the mountains. The city of that time had only about 120,000 inhabitants as opposed to the present 375,000 (a number enormously increased by holiday-makers from all over Europe in the summer), and they lived in a much smaller space: there was little development north of the hills or beyond the river, and what is now land on the seaward side was then part of the shallow harbor. This made for a crowded, somewhat squalid city, particularly as there was little notion of drains and the water-supply was inadequate; a real city, however, with its twenty-seven churches and chapels, its four important monasteries (the survivors of a great many more before the massive suppressions, expropriations, and expulsions of 1835), its bullring for ten thousand, its still-unfinished cathedral on the site of a former mosque, its splendid market in what was once the Moorish arsenal, its garrison, its brothels, its theaters, its immensely ancient tradition, and its strong sense of corporate being. Then, as now, it had the finest climate in Europe, with only forty clouded days in the year; but in 1881 traveling in Spain was an uncommon adventure and virtually no tourists came to enjoy the astonishing light, the brilliant air, and the tepid sea. Only a few wealthy invalids, consumptives for the most part, took lodgings at the Caleta or the Limonar, far from the medieval filth and smells of the inner town. They hardly made the least impression upon Málaga itself, which, apart from a scattering of foreign merchants, was left to the Malagueños.

      Their town had been an important Phoenician stronghold until the Punic wars; then a Roman municipium; then a Visigothic city, the seat of a bishop; and then, for seven hundred and seventy-seven years, a great Arab town, one in which large numbers of Jews and Christians lived under Moslem rule. The Moslems were delighted with their conquest: they allotted it to the Khund al Jordan, the tribes from the east of the sacred river, who looked upon it as an earthly paradise. Many Arabic travelers spoke of its splendor, Ibn Batuta going so far as to compare it with an opened bottle of musk. Málaga was a Moslem city far longer than it has subsequently been Christian, and the Arabs left their mark: even now one is continually aware of their presence, not only because of the remains of the Alcazaba, a fortified Moorish palace high over the port, and of the still higher Gibralfaro, from which the mountains in Africa can be distinguished on the clear horizon, but also because of the faces in the streets and markets and above all because of the flamenco that is to be heard, sometimes from an open window, sometimes from a solitary peasant following an ass so loaded with sugar-cane that only its hoofs show twinkling below.

      The Spaniards who reconquered Andalucía came from many different regions, each with its own way of speaking; and partly because of this and partly because of the large numbers of Arabic-speaking people, Christian, Jew, and Moslem, they evolved a fresh dialect of their own, a Spanish in which the s is often lost and the h often sounded,