Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

can usefully be said of the countless drawings, the great number of paintings of these eighteen months? Only that they range from what academic realism ought to be to Modernismo and beyond, a range that includes a kind of proto-Fauvism and Expressionism, together with darts in many other directions, most of them enough to satisfy the most exigent, and some deliberate reminiscences of El Greco and Toulouse-Lautrec. Yet just as “influence” has little meaning as far as Picasso is concerned, so isms do not signify a great deal: they never really fit him and he never even fits his own, or rather those that theoreticians impose upon him; nor his “periods” either. Both isms and periods are mentioned in this book, since they do have a certain utility, but they are mentioned sparingly and with strong reserves: apart from such clearly-conceived theories as Divisionism most seem to be post hoc, approximate labels, fortuitous in origin and often misleading in application.

      On the other hand, a repeated theme, a steady preoccupation, is something else again; and at this time Picasso was particularly concerned with windows, as he had been earlier and as he was to be again. The first of the present series is quite straightforward, a drawing of the window over the way from his in the Calle d’Escudellers, a window with a young woman in it, sewing: she is labeled Mercedes. The next is the same window, but closed and blind: a painting this time—the gray house, the iron bars of the balcony, the yellow curtain behind the glass, all strangely important. Then comes a painting of his own window, the lower part veiled with a piece of translucent cloth: just that and nothing more. The cloth is suffused with amber light; the dark brown crossbars and frame stand out against the pale, featureless day beyond. The picture belongs entirely to the twentieth century; it is devoid of literature and it is profoundly satisfying: it is the truth, or a truth and a significant one, about that window and that light. Nothing could be farther from Art Nouveau.

      After that another window, closed but showing a suggestion of a landscape beyond, green and white: the room is dark, the inner window-sill is draped with something so deeply gray as to be nearly black; and here again there is that feeling of great unspecified significance.

      Still more windows appear, but not alone; they form part of sick-bed or death-bed scenes (his concession to the “decadence” of the time), and they are always closed. In later years Picasso’s windows grew broader; they were often wide open to a world full of sun and color and doves. But in these Barcelona days only one swings back to let the glow of the tawny, sunlit town into the vague gloom of the room: Lola Ruiz stands in front of it, wearing a ghostly white dress. There is something white on the floor beside her, possibly paper with which she is about to light her brother’s fire.

      Another very striking picture indeed is that which he called “El Greco’s Bride,” one of the very few he gave a name. It is a masklike greenish egg-shaped face, bald, sexless; the highly formalized convex forehead and the arches above the blind eyes sweep down the long straight nose in a manner that he was to recognize six or seven years later, when he first saw African sculpture. Yet the mask itself, again like some carved in Africa, gives the impression of concavity as it hangs there upon its white, black-bordered cloth scattered with violets below, reminding one of the Holy Face of St. Veronica, with which the general idea may have originated—there were plenty to be seen in Spanish churches.

      Then again he painted a plunging view of the Riera de Sant Joan from his studio: and he painted it as no one else would have done. The people far below, the little cart, take their urgently living form from two or three strong brush-strokes, and the heavy impasto swirls about to give an effect of aerial height. It has been said that in this period of extraordinarily rapid development Picasso passed through every stage except Impressionism; but surely this is his contribution?

      Of course there are a great many other pictures, most of them still entirely representational, and innumerable drawings; among them a number concerned with poverty, illness, sick-beds and death; bars, café, theater and dance-hall scenes, such as a café-chantant on the Paralelo; a good many whores, including the Lautrec-ish La Chata, a tough one, smoking a cigarette; bull-fights too and bullfighters; studies for posters; nudes, sometimes treated geometrically; and some self-portraits. The Barcelona museum has a dozen and more, and they range from the boy who arrived in the city and the awkward youth of 1896 with large red ears and his hair all over the place to the self-possessed through rather desperate young man of later years. They are interesting not only because he was an interesting person with an interesting face but also because he never saw it twice in the same way. They are all unflattering, they all have that somewhat melancholy, unfocused look of a man gazing in a mirror; but the man in the glass cannot make himself out. Sometimes the face is young, sometimes old, sometimes angular, sometimes (as his friends saw it) round; but although one is labeled Me and although another carries the repeated inscription “Yo el Rey” the nature of each is different; there is no sure, total grasp of the subject, never the unfailing certainty of his portraits of Don José, for example.

      In all this outpouring there is a great variety of approach and a great variety of achievement. An aesthetic so personal and so radically new as Picasso’s necessarily had a long and painful gestation; and his anxiety, doubts, and hesitations are apparent in his work.

      If a man has had premonitions of what in an entirely different context would be called the beatific vision, and if expressing it in his own language of paint entails the destruction of what he and his fathers have understood by painting, it is understandable that he should have periods of doubt about the validity of his revelation: particularly if he is surrounded by people who can have almost no notion of what he is about—by people who swim in the present and the recent past while he is well out into the future. A man reaching as far as Picasso was reaching even then is necessarily lonely: he cannot follow; he can only lead. But he can only lead when he is sure of himself and when he is on the top of his form, when mood, health, light, food, sleep, women, freedom from interruption are all in favorable conjunction.

      It is no part of this book’s aim to represent Picasso as a paragon of all virtues nor indeed of any; he was quite capable of turning out dull pictures and some that most people would call thoroughly bad. These horrid lapses, which would not matter in any of his contemporaries, were perhaps more the effect of gratitude, kindness, and hunger than conviction: when Romeu asked him to do advertisements and menu-cards for the Quatre Gats he produced things in the worst Art Nouveau manner, the thick treacly line, the vulgar, silly romanticism rendered with a sickening virtuosity. And there is a somewhat later portrait of his friend Sebastià Junyent, one of the few labored and technically inept pictures that Picasso ever painted, which can only be explained by tenderness for his model.

      The general impression this period gives is that of eager restless search, of deep and sometimes very unhappy thought, yet with cheerfulness often breaking through. It is true that much later Picasso said, “I do not seek: I find.” But he was always much given to stunning his interlocutors, particularly the more earnest souls; he was extremely impatient of talk about art and he loved a pointed saying far more than what some would call the literal truth, plodding and often essentially false: He would speak according to his mood and according to his audience; he hated to be even very slightly manipulated—the oracle that can be made to work—and his collected sayings contain a mass of mutually exclusive statements. A writer with a point to make could prove any thesis he chose to advance by selecting those that support it. For instance, he also said, “I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search incessantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.”

      This second remark certainly seems to fit the years 1899-1900 even more than it does the rest, for not only did he run in every direction, using his already formidable battery of techniques—pen, pencil, gouache, watercolor, pastel, tempera, oil—but he added etching and wood-engraving, his first essays in which date from 1899, and probably sculpture, though here the date is less certain.

      The story of his first etching has often been told: his friend Canals showed him how to prepare the plate, how to draw the line through the protective coating with a needle so that the metal was exposed, and how to dip it into the acid so that the mordant should bite into the bared copper, thus giving a recess for the ink in the subsequent printing process. Picasso drew a massive picador, booted and spurred, holding his pike, with a fair-sized owl on the ground beside him; but he could not grasp the fact that printing would