Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

of the picture. This did not puzzle him for a moment: he at once entitled the etching “El Zurdo,” the left-handed picador.

      The wood-engraving, a bullfighter holding his cloak, is less well known: here the technique is far more difficult, because the line has to be cut into the wood with a graver and no mistake can be corrected, but Picasso handled this new and unforgiving tool with almost the same ease as his pencil: the line is easy, fluent, unconstrained.

      He learned a great deal in Barcelona: but he was outgrowing Modernismo whereas most of his friends at the Quatre Gats were still devoted to its somewhat faded innovations. His friend Junyent did say, “The nineteenth century has died with the consolation of seeing the splendor of a great art on the horizon of the infinite, a lofty art, strong, complex, earthy and spiritual,” but he also observed that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais had reached the highest point ever achieved in painting.

      The more Picasso heard of Paris, particularly in this year of 1900, the year of the Exposition Universelle, the talk of the western world, and the more he learned of France from the papers he saw, the more provincial Barcelona seemed. A great deal of its modest intellectual ferment was closely connected with nationalism, separatism, Catalan autonomy; and none of this, nor Catalan politics, affected him essentially: in spite of all their kindness for him and of his for them, he remained an outsider in Barcelona. Certainly it had given him a great deal, and certainly it was a tough city, as tough as Marseilles or Naples, with bombs, violence, strikes, repression, a sinister secret police, and the extremes of wealth and poverty: and the Quatre Gats were thorough-going in their amusements in spite of their pipes and their whimsy—morphine was readily available, and both cocaine and the more economical laudanum were to be had over the counter at the nearest chemist’s shop. But Picasso was growing tired of their humorless Sturm und Drang: he had already poked fun at them with his picture of Sabartés, labeled “Poeta Decadente,” draped in a cloak, crowned with a wreath, holding an iris in his hand, and standing in the midst of flames in a dark graveyard. Picasso could be desperately unhappy and he could be moody to the point of getting up in the middle of a conversation and of walking out of the café without a word; but he was never dreary: nor was he reverent. For a being so overflowing with life, the sight of these people taking their decadence so seriously had begun to be wearisome now that it was no longer new.

      Several of the Quatre Gats went to Paris that year, partly to see the exhibition; several were already more or less settled there; and Picasso, Pallarès, and Casagemas made plans to go too. These plans were complicated not only by the general lack of money but by the possibility that Pallarès might obtain a commission to decorate a chapel at Horta; but as the year wore on they grew more substantial.

      By the autumn of 1900 Picasso had become reconciled with his family, and in October it was with his father’s reluctant consent and his mother’s active support that he set off for Paris with Casagemas. Pallarès had in fact received his commission and he could not be with them at the Estación de Francia, but he was to join them in a week or two.

      “And the money for all this, where did it come from?” asked Sabartés.

      “Pallarès, Casagemas and I were going to share. My father paid for the ticket. He and my mother came to the station with me. When they went home, all they had left was the loose change in his pocket. They had to wait until the end of the month before they could get straight. My mother told me long after.”

      By dawn Picasso had crossed the Pyrenees at last. They were well behind him and the train was tearing northwards through France at an exhilarating pace unknown to Spain, belching smoke. A thousand kilometers from the frontier it drew into Paris: they crept from their third-class carriage, deeply covered with smuts, loaded with easels, color-boxes, portfolios, baggage. For a moment it was still Spain, with Catalan and Spanish all around them, tourists for the exhibition, immigrant workers with shapeless bundles; then as the stream flowed off the platform into the open it was Paris. A Paris as dirty as Barcelona or even dirtier but infinitely more full of color: brilliant posters everywhere—Chéret, Bonnard, Steinlen, Forain, Toulouse-Lautrec; sandwichmen; women dressed in bright colors rather than the black of Spain; startling umbrellas. Everywhere the enormous roar of the iron tires of horse-buses, drays, carts, and wagons on the crowded stone-paved streets, littered deep with dung, speckled with the bills handed out by the sandwichmen and thrown away; and mingling with the accustomed omnipresent reek of horse-piss and dung, the new sharp smell of petrol fumes. (Picasso always had a very strong sense of smell.) A bewildering great city, vaster by far than Barcelona or Madrid, and immensely active—no leisurely Spanish pacing here: the French language all round them, a babel of signs, street-cries, directions, people talking, policemen, carters, cab-drivers bawling in their native tongue; and Picasso, the eternal outsider, did not possess a word of it.

      But he did at least know one thing: artists in Paris lived in Montparnasse. Rooms and even regular studios were to be had cheaply in Montparnasse. Junyent was already living there, and they went to see him at once. Although this might only be a short stay, hotels were out of the question, and they must find a room, preferably with some furniture in it.

      They had hit upon a place in the rue Campagne-Première, just off the boulevard Montparnasse, and Picasso was on the point of taking it when he ran into Nonell, who was on the wing for Barcelona, portfolio packed and ready to depart. He at once offered them his studio in the rue Gabrielle, far over on the other side of Paris, on the hill of Montmartre, close to the Sacré Coeur.

      There was no refusing so handsome an offer, and when Pallarès arrived in a few days’ time, too soon for them to have had his letter so that they could meet him at the station, he found them comfortably installed, quite at home, with two young women, Germaine and Odette.

      It was clear that Picasso was quite pleased with Odette, in his cheerful way, although he could not communicate verbally with her at all: it was equally clear that Casagemas was very, very much more affected by Germaine. Presently Ramon Pichot came to see them and a third girl was produced, Germaine’s sister Antoinette. (Pallarès was already deeply in love in Spain; and he was some ten years older than the rest.) How five of these shifting relationships developed is far from clear, but the sixth, Casagemas’ longing for Germaine, grew steadily more obvious.

      Picasso was much attached to Casagemas; they were intimate friends, and he knew about his impotence—in fact, he had introduced Casagemas to Rosita, one of his favorite Calle d’Avinyó girls, in an effort to help him. Exactly what he did to deal with this present situation has not been recorded except in his subsequent pictures, which are open to various interpretations. What is certain is that later he felt the outcome as deeply as it was possible for him to feel anything.

      A hypothesis, based on his pictures and a few other circumstances, is this: he tried to detach Germaine from Casagemas—no very difficult task, perhaps, once the poor man’s condition had become evident—and then possibly to transfer her to Pichot, whom in fact she eventually married. If he thought that by taking the girl away from Casagemas he would cure his friend’s unhappy passion, he was wrong: he may have succeeded with Germaine, but Casagemas still went about with her, and his desperate love grew day by day.

      In any case these days were filled to overflowing for Picasso, and he had little time to look after his friend. There was such a very great deal to be seen: the enormous wealth of the Louvre; the vast, spreading Exposition Universelle itself, which included exhibitions of art in the new-built Grand and Petit Palais and, in the Champ-de-Mars, a retrospective of French painting over the last century—acres of official pictures, but also David, Delacroix, Ingres, Daumier, Courbet, Corot, the Impressionists.

      All this was exciting for the foreign artist, but less so for the native. The Paris of 1900 had grown used to Impressionism and although Monet, Sisley, and some others were still painting purely Impressionist pictures, the first impetus had long since died away. The group’s last exhibition had taken place fourteen years before amidst a violent quarrel about who was Impressionist and who was not, and their successors had never had quite the same impact. Neo-Impressionism produced some wonderful pictures, but Seurat had died in 1891, and apart from Signac and perhaps Cross there were few painters whose divisionist or pointillist technique looked anything more than the application of another man’s rules.