Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

Denis, Vallotton, Vuillard, and Bonnard were carrying on with modern painting in their quiet, domestic way, sometimes galvanized by their connection with Gauguin; but the strong current had been broken, and although there was still a feeling of newness and discovery in the air, the younger artists had no clear rallying-point. The writers of the time, always ready with theory, tried with some success to persuade them that they were or should be Symbolists in the literary sense. They lived in an odd mixture of fin-de-siècle aestheticism and the slowly-crystalizing new outlook, between Mallarmé and Jarry as it were much of the confused, eclectic Art Nouveau with which they were surrounded looked backwards, and so did the Rose-Croix of Joseph Péladan and his followers; yet many of the young men had seen something of van Gogh, Gauguin, and even Cézanne.

      The Parisians of 1900 were not starved for painting. Every year the huge official Salon des Artistes français showed room after room of unbelievably debased academic pictures—slick portraits, illustrations of trifling, often sentimental anecdote, picturesque nooks, and very, very curious nudes—while the dissident Société nationale des Beaux-Arts did much the same, though in their Salon might be seen the now semiofficial watered Impressionism. Yet neither of these Salons was always and entirely devoid of worth: the young Matisse was happy to show at the Nationale, and the Beaux-Arts professor who taught him and for whom he retained a respectful affection all his life, the amiable Gustave Moreau, regularly sent his pictures to the Artistes français, where Rouault also exhibited. But it was at the third Salon, that of the Indépendants, that the new painting was really to be seen. The Société des Indépendants was founded by Seurat, Signac, Redon, and their friends in 1884, and at their second exhibition they hung four pictures by Henri Rousseau, commonly known as the Douanier, while in the years before 1900 they also showed Bonnard, Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, the then virtually unknown and quite unsalable van Gogh, and many other splendid painters.

      This was the atmosphere in which Picasso was to live, but for the moment it was not the pictures shown in any of the Salons nor yet the crowded Exposition that gave him his view of the living art of Paris. His most profitable days were spent walking about the streets. In the first place there were the posters everywhere, and then such shows as the Revue Blanche’s Seurat retrospective, and of course the commercial galleries. There were fewer than there are today, and most were concerned with old masters or established academics; but among those dealers who handled modern painting some rose far above the shop-keeper level. Durand-Ruel in the rue Laffitte encouraged many of the younger men, including Odilon Redon, Bonnard, the Nabis and the painters of the Rose-Croix, who were also to be seen at Le Barc de Bouteville’s place; Bing’s Galérie de l’Art nouveau showed Munch; Berheim-Jeune van Gogh; and Ambroise Vollard, also in the rue Laffitte, was devoted in a more than commercial sense to Cézanne, whom he had inherited from Tanguy. Although the State had refused to accept Caillebotte’s Cézannes as a gift in 1894, Vollard bought no less than two hundred, holding important exhibitions in 1895 and again in 1899, while he also showed several of the new painters, including Picasso’s friend Isidre Nonell, as well as publishing books such as Verlaine’s Parallèlement with illustrations by Bonnard. And then there was the struggling Berthe Weill, who did her best for all the young; sooner or later almost every famous name in twentieth-century painting from Matisse to Modigliani passed through her shop, though with very little profit to herself—as late as 1909 she sold “a pretty little van Gogh” for sixty francs. In his wanderings Picasso saw a great deal in these shops and their windows: he made his first-hand acquaintance with Cézanne and Degas and Gauguin, for example, and it was now that he came to realize what a truly great painter Toulouse-Lautrec was.

      There were other factors that kept him from keeping a close watch on Casagemas, and one was his conviviality. He had quantities of friends whom he saw every day, an abundance of animal spirits, and a great deal of energy. He may have been something of a foreigner in Barcelona, but here in Paris he was a thorough Catalan; and like those American expatriates who never move outside the American colony, he stayed almost entirely in his own well-populated Paris Catalonia. He did meet Steinlen, then at the height of his fame, but apart from that and the girls in Nonell’s studio and a few other contacts he remained in the little world to which his ignorance of French confined him.

      Yet he also longed to know Paris as a whole, and being a great walker he explored it thoroughly on foot, at least in a north and south direction. Muffled in a great-coat against the northern air and carrying his sketchbook, he would emerge into the rural Montmartre and hurry down the hill. Rural it was in those days, in spite of the growing night-life, a village with quiet, unpaved, tree-lined lanes, vineyards that still held out against the spreading town, and genuine, if motionless, windmills; there was even a sloping stretch of waste-land covered with bushes called the maquis, where people shot cats and called them rabbits; and Parisians used to take their summer holidays in Montmartre, for the benefit of the air. But Paris was building fast, and it was building in stone, much of it from the nearby quarries. His route soon led him to new and busy streets where houses were going up at a great pace and where a singular noise rose above the din of wheels and the clop of hooves—the masons sawing their blocks of stone. These great blocks, white, pure, and sharp-angled, rose up through rectangular wooden towers—Cubism for those who could see it—and these towers were also covered with brilliant posters, a form of art practically unknown to Barcelona. The masons sang as they worked, and the streets were filled with the cries of greengrocers pushing their barrows, the call of glaziers walking along with a frame of glass on their backs in the hope of broken windows, and that of coopers, offering to sell new barrels or to repair old ones: wandering dealers in old clothes, too, and the rhythmic howl of Savoyards, wheeling a boiler, with a tin tub and buckets to carry the hot water upstairs, in case anyone should choose to take a bath.

      Still farther down and nearer the Seine with its bateaux-mouches, river-buses, barges, and general shipping, his path brought him to fashionable quarters: a luxury unheard of in Barcelona and an even greater contrast between rich and poor—the familiar international rags on the one hand and then men in tall shining hats and morning-coats, women of an astonishing elegance, and a colored elegance. Color everywhere, above the filth, and perhaps the most brilliant of all the countless soldiers: France had half a million men under arms, waiting for the inevitable war against Germany; and most of them wore baggy crimson trousers, splendid Impressionistic dashes in a crowded street.

      Then across the water and right up to Montparnasse, leaving the great exhibition and its innumerable tourists far behind. Here there were dozens of Catalans, many of whom he had known at the Quatre Gats—Casas, Utrillo, Fontbona, Isern, Pidelaserra, Junyent—and here were some of the most important contacts he was ever to make, contacts that he did not seek but found. How kind they were to him, particularly these older, established, French-speaking men who were in a position to give their kindness an evident form! They introduced him to their friends, in spite of his singular garments—loud checks, decadent ties, a vile “English” cloth cap—and in spite of a certain roughness of manner: for although in some areas he was the most sensitive man living, in others he could be strangely obtuse: no one ever succeeded in really civilizing Picasso. They introduced him to Steinlen; and among others he also met Josep Oller and Pere Manyac.

      The first was a middle-aged Catalan who had lived in Paris since his childhood and who had done very well. He owned the Moulin Rouge, the Jardin de Paris, the Nouveautés theater and a race-course or so. He too liked the young Picasso, and he gave him a pass that admitted him to all the Oller establishments, to a night-life that he could never have afforded and one that provided him with an immense amount of raw material.

      The second was also a Catalan, the son of a Barcelona manufacturing ironmonger in a large way of business. His name was sometimes spelled Manyac, sometimes Manyach, and sometimes Mañac: Picasso spelled it Manach. Finding himself on bad terms with his father in the early nineties, he came to Paris; and there, having artistic leanings, he set up as a picture-dealer, acting as an intermediary between the Catalan painters and the Paris market. He was perfectly fluent in French and he knew a great many people, including Berthe Weill, “the good fairy of modern art.” It was he who introduced Nonell, Sunyer, Canals, and Manolo to her, and on this occasion he produced Picasso, whose work impressed him deeply. Berthe Weill at once bought three pictures, an oil and two gouaches of bull-fights, for a hundred francs; and Pere Manyac, his opinion fortified by her approval—what