Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

do you think?” he asked, referring to all these new and disturbing pictures.

      “I shall get used to them in time,” replied Sabartés; and Picasso, quite unmoved, hurried out to find him a room in a nearby hotel—a double room, since Mateo de Soto had also arrived from Barcelona and had been staying with Picasso for the last few days, a visit that made Manyac uneasy.

      It was not only the streams of poverty-stricken Spaniards that made Manyac low in his spirits: it was also this unpredictable change in Picasso’s painting. The bull-fights and other “Spanish” pictures he had brought with him from Barcelona and the brightly-colored canvases he had painted during his first months in the boulevard de Clichy were marketable: at this rate Picasso might be a profitable investment. But nobody would buy these latest pictures: the merchant hated the Blue Period entirely. How rarely tradesmen know their own business! Not one would buy a single painting from van Gogh in his lifetime; and Manyac, with the wealth of the Indies in his hands, urged Picasso to keep to a sound commercial line. The wealth of the Indies, for the Blue Period contains some of the most generally accessible pictures he ever painted, and in time their prices soared to heights unknown for a living painter. Why this should be so has puzzled many observers, including Picasso. It is as though cultivated (and immensely wealthy) lovers of the arts, who would never think of requiring music to tell a story, still longed for a certain degree of literature in their pictures: as though, on being asked, “What is that meant to represent?” they wished to be able to give an answer. (In later days Picasso himself, when asked by a woman “what that represented,” replied, “Madame, that represents twenty million francs.”)

      In most of the recollections of those early days in Paris, it is of the cheerful young Picasso, overflowing with an extraordinary vitality, that one reads, the leader of the bande à Picasso, fooling about all night, haunting low cafés, music-halls, the circus. Yet the other Picasso, the very lonely man, working for six and working in solitude, striking out into an unknown sea, never certain of his direction except when he was in the very act of painting, was there and his pictures prove it: but clearly a man who works alone is, as a worker, largely invisible.

      The loneliness of the creative artist has often been described; but can it ever be emphasized enough? People may hinder him, but since by definition self-expression is not the expression of any other man, none can help him. It is as though the artist were walking a tightrope, with only room for one; and although an ordinary hack may stagger along in no great danger, six inches from the ground, the fall of an enormously gifted, enormously ambitious man with something important to say is a plunge into a measureless abyss. Picasso certainly had something very important to say, and although Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, and above all Cézanne were of value to him in his preparation for saying it, the essence of the matter was his alone; he either succeeded or failed entirely by himself; and if he failed his life had no meaning. Death and creation have this in common, that a man is entirely alone in both.

      Even in a time when a strong, living tradition carries an artist along, the amount that a man as exceptional as, say, Uccello, owes to it is surely very slight; in the young Picasso’s day painting, as a corporate activity that he could respect, was dead, and he had to rediscover it for himself. For himself and by himself: even if he had been acquainted with them, the pleasant, comfortable Nabis, the avant-garde of the time, would have had no idea of what he was talking about; van Gogh had killed himself eleven years before; Gauguin was in Tahiti; Cézanne was equally inaccessible in Provence; Toulouse-Lautrec was in his grave. Picasso did not yet know Braque or Matisse, and although he moved about with a crowd of gay, amiable companions, as though he were afraid of being alone when he was not working, only one of them was a man of anything remotely like his size; only Max Jacob was a man with whom, if it had been his way, he could have talked about the deeper implications of his painting. It was not his way at that time, and although he did go profoundly into these matters with Braque and Derain in their Cubist days, it was not his way in later life either: he preferred producing the evidence of his views to talking about them, partly no doubt because words are essentially beside the point where painting is concerned, and also perhaps because his deep-seated reserve made him unwilling to expose his private springs—no one was so adept at evading a question on aesthetics as Picasso: to avoid being pried into and made to commit himself he would use mockery, bad faith, and self-contradiction with baffling skill. But even if he had chosen to take Max Jacob into his confidence, the barrier of language would have prevented it. By this time he had picked up a rudimentary sort of French, but it was totally inadequate for such purposes; and even if he had been as fluent as Bossuet no amount of words could have said so much, nor so accurately, as a single picture.

      One of the most eloquent pictures of this period is the self-portrait that he painted late in his stay. It is a half-length of a man muffled in a dark greatcoat, standing against a background featureless except for a darker upright bar on the extreme left: from the somber coat and the almost black hair his pale face stands out with startling intensity, and from a distance you think it might be a van Gogh. Then you see that it is a Picasso, and with a shock you realize that it is the artist himself. He has a collar of beard, a ragged mustache, and his singular great eyes are sunken and diminished. They look somewhat down, focused on infinity, and they have something of that same loneliness which is to be seen in his famous blue portrait of Sabartés, painted in this same year: the picture that is often called “Le Bock.” (It shows Sabartés waiting in front of a tall mug of beer, and like many of Picasso’s portraits it was painted from memory.) But whereas the loneliness of Sabartés was due to his being alone in a foreign city and to his being so myopic that he was cut off even from that strange world, Picasso’s was the loneliness of a man cut off by genius, one who is beginning to realize that on anything but the superficial plane he can communicate only in a language that will not be generally understood for years, if at all. Sabartés’ could be cured by the eventual appearance of his friends in the café; Picasso’s could only be alleviated, never completely removed.

      The face in this self-portrait is no longer youthful: Picasso had been living hard, he had been ill, and he suffered much from the winter cold; but there is much more to it than that. This face is marked by a different kind of suffering altogether, by doubt and inner conflict and deep unhappiness.

      “He believed that Art was the child of Sadness and Pain,” says Sabartés. “He believed that unhappiness suited reflection, and that pain was the basis of life.” It is easy to make fun of a pronouncement of this kind; but no candid observer, looking at this portrait and the other pictures he painted at the time, will deny that Picasso had a right to utter it, nor that he paid the full price for his opinions.

      Yet this haggard face belonged to the same young man who racketed about Montmartre, the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse, and the music-halls. It was largely the music-halls that accounted for the top-hat mentioned by Max Jacob; and he mentioned the hat not because it was as rare and formal an object as it has since become—in 1901 the top-hat, though hard pressed by the bowler or derby, was still common even on the lower fringes of the middle class—but because it was unusual in a young painter, who would ordinarily have worn a beret or a felt or, in the case of Picasso, a broad-brimmed anarchistical sombrero. However, Picasso was an odd mixture of lavishness in some things and parsimony in others: equipping himself for Paris was important to him at the age of twenty and although his income scarcely allowed for any clothes at all he set about it so thoroughly that Vollard speaks of him as being “dressed with the most studied elegance.” He bought a fine black coat, a white silk scarf, a gardenia on occasion, and this top-hat. He was proud of it, and he made an India-ink drawing of himself in his glory, looking a little self-conscious, with a background of bare-bosomed women.

      This is a very different portrait from the big oil: yet both are genuine, both are aspects of the same being. But a very short study of the two shows which says more about the subject: the sadness was deeply engrained, the gaiety superficial and intermittent, though intense.

      Where the hat was kept, Sabartés does not relate, although he gives a convincing description of the slum to which Picasso had reduced two-thirds of poor Manyac’s flat—the “Burial of Casagemas” propped up against the wall to hide what even Picasso felt should not be seen, the little table covered with books and papers that were put on the floor when they wanted to eat, the newspaper table-cloth, the heaps