Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

and 1902, Picasso had not reached his purer and in a way more impersonal painting, utterly cut off from all literature; and it is true that at twenty he did not always avoid slickness, particularly in his drawing; but talk of the sentimentality of the Blue Period surely tells us more about the speaker than it does about Picasso. He was in fact a remarkably unsentimental being by Anglo-Saxon or even by Spanish standards; in the case of Casagemas, whose death he felt very deeply indeed—it haunted his painting for years, and already he was thinking of another important canvas based upon it—he had no objection to using the Burial as a screen, nor to returning to the studio in the Riera de Sant Joan that they had shared, nor to painting his friend with little wings, smoking a pipe, wearing a hat, and presenting himself to Saint Peter at the gates of Heaven.

      Yet the blue of this time was not always sad by any means: it could be wonderfully tender, as it is in the child holding a dove in London or the little girl eating her soup in New York; or it could be the neutral medium for a statement, as it is in his night-painting of the roofs of Barcelona seen from his studio and other pictures. The period was not always blue, either: throughout his life Picasso confounded those who love neat labels by suddenly producing something anachronistic, either in a backward or a forward sense. During this stay he not only painted a cheerful nude in green stockings and a mother and child by the sea without a touch of blue about them, to say nothing of an advertisement for Lecitina Agell (guaranteed to cure lymphatism and weakness in the bones) and posters for a neighboring food-shop, but he also made several drawings which do not belong to this epoch at all, since they prefigure his work in the 1930s.

      Another drawing shows a corner of his studio, the “ingrato y sordido taller de la calle del Conde de Asalto” as Eugenio d’Ors calls it. It is of no great importance in itself, being a kind of private note, perhaps to do with the interesting angles made by the easel, the canvas, and the chair, for Picasso drew to himself as some men talk to themselves, and he drew incessantly; but it is worth mentioning here because it also says something about his way of working. Although he used a palette as his symbol for the painter (he did so this year in a drawing of himself on the beach), he was never seen with one on his thumb: he asserted with some indignation that he could hold one, and no doubt as a boy he did hold his father’s; but as a man he either left the palette on the floor or he used newspapers or a chair or a little table or the floor itself or a combination of some of these. And here in the drawing there is the chair with a piece of cardboard on it, a pot, and some brushes. He also had a highly personal way of approaching his canvas. Sabartés describes this in 1901: “I usually found him in the middle of the studio, near the stove, sitting on a rickety chair, rather a low one as I remember. The discomfort did not worry him in the least … he fixed the canvas on the lowest notch of the easel, which forced him to bend almost double as he painted…. If he had to look attentively at the palette (it was on the floor, a mass of white in the middle and the other colors, mostly blue, dotted round the edge) he still kept a sideways eye upon the canvas; his concentration never left either. Both were in his field of vision and he took in both at the same time.” And again in 1940, when he had no easel in his refuge at Royan he bought a gimcrack object so small that he was obliged to paint crouching, with his belly between his knees. Nevertheless he strongly resisted Sabartés’ attempts at making him buy another, just as he resisted all change in his habits or his physical surroundings: his bones were intensely Spanish, and Spaniards, on taking leave of one another, will often utter their ancient, traditional spell, “Que no haya novedad,” may no new thing arise: a curious wish for Picasso, but one that he accepted with perfect equanimity.

      Any account of Picasso must be a tale of apparent contradictions: his work was of essential importance to him, of an importance that cannot be exaggerated, and he vehemently insisted upon quietness and solitude for it, yet he would use bad tools and perishable materials, so that many of his constructions are now little more than wrecks and some of his finest pictures are crumbling off the fibro-cement upon which he painted them; he was totally indifferent to comfort, yet he fussed about his health and he was easily terrified by a scratch or a cold. He was eager to get money, yet in France, where the law gives artists a royalty of 3% on the price of all their works sold by auction (and in his later years Picassos not only fetched enormous prices but also passed rapidly from one speculator to another), he refused to cash the large and frequent checks; he was intensely conservative in his habits, yet his painting was a continuous revolution, in perpetual flux. At this time he was particularly concerned with solitude—again and again the theme of the solitary recurs, often a woman, sitting hunched at a café table—yet he was himself gregarious.

      One of the places where he sought company was of course the Quatre Gats, where he painted a capital portrait of Corina Romeu, produced some more advertisements, and designed the card announcing the birth of the Romeus’ first son; another was the Guayaba, in the now-vanished Piaza de l’Oli. It began as a studio in which his friend Joan Vidal Ventosa worked as a restorer, a photographer, and a maker of poker-work decorations and it developed into a kind of club frequented mostly by the younger customers of the Quatre Gats: its name was a facetious corruption of Valhalla, for Barcelona was still at the height of its enthusiasm for Wagner and the North. Here he renewed many old acquaintances and made several new ones, some of which ripened into friendship. There was Eugenio d’Ors, then a young law student, and who early in that year of 1902 had published a much-discussed article on Nonell in Pèl i Ploma. He maintained that the object painted should be an active, not a passive, element in the painter’s life, and that it should be an entity with a continuing existence of its own—a view that coincided with Picasso’s and that might have strengthened it, if Picasso by this time had needed any outside support. But by now he had come out of his egg, as the Catalans say: agreement may have been agreeable; it cannot have been decisive.

      Other friends were the Fontbonas, the sculptor Emili, whom he had known in Paris, and his brother Josep, a medical man. It was at Gracia, in the Fontbonas’ house, that Picasso made his first sculpture (also of a woman, bowed down, sitting on the ground with her arms folded); and in his invaluable Picasso i els seus amics catalans, the fruit of years of patient, scrupulous research to which this book owes a great deal, Josep Palau i Fabre shows that he almost certainly did so in this same year of 1902. Picasso himself could not remember, and experts have wrangled over the date for years.

      The Reventós brothers, Ramon the writer and Cinto the gynecologist, also came to the Guayaba: Picasso had known them long before, and he often went to see Cinto at his hospital, where he walked about the wards in an atmosphere of complicated misery, disease, loneliness, and death. He was also allowed into the place where the corpses lay, and to the end of his life he kept a woman’s head that he painted there.

      But although these meetings and these studies were absorbing, and although for a while he was passionately interested in a strip-tease girl called La Belle Chelita—so interested that one day Sabartés, calling at noon, found him still in bed, surrounded by his night’s work, a great series of delicate, exquisite, explicit nudes that were never seen again—Barcelona was not Paris; and Picasso was not happy; he was not even superficially happy.

      He wrote to Max Jacob: it was an illustrated letter, and the drawing on the back—a dead horse being dragged out of the bull-ring—is wonderfully fluent; the same cannot be said for his handwriting, which was now further embarrassed by attempting a foreign language. As far as the letter can be made out it runs:

      Mon cher Max il fait lontaim que je ne vous ecrit pas—se pas que je ne me rapelle pas de toi mes je trabaille vocoup se pour ça que je ne te ecrit Je montre ça que je fait a mes amis les artistes de ici me ils trouven quil ia trot de amme me pas forme se tres drole tu sais coser avec de gen con ça mes ils ecriven de libres tres movesas et ils peingnen de tableaux imbeciles—se la vie—se ça

       Fontbona il trabaile vocoup mes il ne fait rien

       Je veux faire un tableaux de le desin que je te envoye yssi (les deux seurs) set’ une tableaux que je fait—set’ une putain de S. Lazare et une seur

       Envoys moi quelquechose crit de vous pour la “Pel & Ploma”—

       Adie mon ami crit moi

       ton ami