Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

Rue de la Merced 3 — Barcelona

      Espagne

      My dear Max it is long since I have written to you—it is not that I do not remember you but I am working a great deal that is why I do not write

      I show what I do to the artists of this place but they think there is too much soul but no form it is very amusing you know talking to people like that but they write very bad books and they paint idiot pictures—that’s life—that’s what it is

      Fontbona works a great deal but he achieves nothing

      I want to make a picture of this drawing I am sending you with this (the two sisters) it is a picture I am doing of a St. Lazare whore and a nun

      Send me something you have written for Pèl i Ploma

      Good-bye my friend write to me

      Your friend

      PICASSO

      On the front of the letter, surrounded by the text, there is a drawing of himself labeled “Picasso in Spain” and showing him in a broad-brimmed hat, with a Romanesque church and a bull-ring in the background. And the drawing which he enclosed did in fact turn into a grave, statuesque, and even hieratic painting, highly formalized and reminiscent of some Catalan Romanesque carving and fresco—in 1902 there was a great exhibition of medieval art in Barcelona, and Catalonia is extraordinarily rich in Romanesque. (The St. Lazare to which he refers was a hospital in Paris where venereal diseases were treated and to which still another medical friend admitted him as a visitor.)

      In April of this year Manyac’s remaining rights in Picasso enabled him to arrange a show with Berthe Weill, who now had a gallery of her own. Most of the thirty works she hung were painted before the full Blue Period: there were some of the “Spanish” pastels that he had brought to Paris, there was the hetaira with the collar of jewels, several of his cabaret or Toulouse-Lautrec phase, and some of those pictures which had shocked the newly-arrived Sabartés with their violent colors, but there were also blue pictures such as “Le Tub,” and it may be that the exhibition seemed to be running in several directions at once. The well-known critic Adrien Farge wrote the preface to the catalog in the usual dithyrambic strain; but everyone knows that the writer of a preface is not on his oath, and although many of the kind things that he said were also true, the visitors remained, upon the whole, unconvinced. There is the usual uncertainty about just what was sold and how the proceeds were shared, although Berthe Weill does state that at about this time a collector bought the splendid “Moulin de la Galette,” the first picture Picasso painted in his second visit to Paris, for two hundred and fifty francs, while the “Omnibus” fetched a hundred and sixty. But in any case the artist’s gains were not enough to allow him to make his third journey north.

      This had to wait until October of the year 1902, when he set off, full of hope, with a friend, the painter Sebastià Junyer-Vidal. Once more Picasso recorded this journey in an auca, a series of drawings that show the pair in their third-class carriage (unforgiving wood and iron in those days), with Picasso in the corner seat, smoking his pipe. It is clear that they are cold—they pace the platform at Montauban huddled in their greatcoats—and that they were colder still by the time they reached Paris some twenty-three hours later; but they stride away from the Gare d’Orsay—Junyer carrying the trunk—with every appearance of good spirits; while a last but alas purely hypothetical picture shows the famous art-dealer Durand-Ruel giving Junyer a great bag of money. Picasso might reasonably have had great expectations, for although his earlier visits had not made him much richer they had brought him valuable contacts and a far greater measure of success than usually falls to a very young man.

      But this time everything was against him; nothing went right. First he took a room in the Hôtel des Ecoles, in the Latin Quarter, far from his old haunts in Montmartre and Montparnasse, far from his established friends; then he shared a still cheaper room under the roof of the primitive though picturesque Hôtel du Maroc in the rue de Seine with the sculptor Agero.

      A vast bed under the sloping ceiling almost filled the room, so that the painter had to lie down if the sculptor wanted to move about; while a single round window, like a port-hole, provided all their working light. Nevertheless, Picasso managed to paint an admirable Maternity, a mother and child by the sea, in pastel; and he did a great deal of drawing. The rent was small, something in the nature of five francs a week for both, but even so it was beyond their means, and Max Jacob observed that “neither Picasso nor the sculptor used to eat.” From time to time he brought them fried potatoes.

      In 1902 Max Jacob was twenty-six; after a brilliant school career in his native Brittany he had attended the Ecole coloniale in Paris, with some idea of governing the French empire. This only lasted for about six weeks, however, and his art-studies at the Académie Jullian were equally brief, although he was in fact unusually gifted. By 1902 he had already been a lawyer’s clerk, a barrister’s secretary, a baby-sitter, a piano-teacher, and an art-critic, and now he was keeping body and soul together by coaching a small boy. Yet brighter days were coming: a wealthy relative called Gompel, who owned Paris-France, a shop in the boulevard Voltaire (and who later owned several Picassos) said that Max might come and work there as a warehouseman in the basement. Jacob took a fifth-floor room nearby, fair-sized but unheated, and although it had only one single bed in it he at once invited Picasso to come and stay. This was the timeliest invitation, for Picasso had recently had a most unpleasant experience with a group of Spaniards who also lived in the rue de Seine. Exactly what this experience was is not known: Picasso was unwilling to speak of it even to Sabartés, and Sabartés has passed on even less; but it evidently concerned money (these people were quite well off), selfishness, and contempt, and it filled him with a disgust for life, a disgust that he remembered with far more pain than the hunger and the piercing cold of that Paris winter. Clearly he had been wounded in his pride; and as Zervos says, he was the proudest man on earth.

      Picasso was always fond of working by lamp or candle light, and this was just as well, since it allowed the two friends equal shares of the narrow bed; Picasso slept in it by day, while Jacob was at the shop, and Jacob slept in it while Picasso drew all through the night.

      For a while life was kinder; they ate omelets, beans, and Brie. But Max Jacob was not quite suited to a fixed employment and he gave so little satisfaction at the shop that in spite of the tie of blood, of his evident distress, and indeed of his imminent starvation he was turned away.

      In later years Picasso told the story of a sausage that they bought in their last extremity of destitution: it was, it seems, a great bargain, bought from a stall in the street; but on being brought home and warmed it swelled, swelled, and at last exploded, leaving nothing but its skin and the reek of putrid flesh: it cannot have been so amusing at the time, however, particularly as most of his valuable contacts were behaving in much the same way. Nobody would buy his pictures. It is true that some people did try to help him: Berthe Weill showed his work no less than three times during this year, for a fortnight in spring, a fortnight in summer, and now for a full month in the winter: they were mixed shows, and in two of them the almost unknown Matisse was of the company, though he and Picasso did not meet. Félicien Fagus, who had praised Picasso in 1901, praised him still, while Charles Morice at least took notice of him in the influential Mercure de France. Fagus’ article in the Revue Blanche was less in connection with one of these exhibitions than with the Spanish painters in general, those “who had recently invaded Paris, bringing with them a freshness untainted by the least academicism, a painting neither weary nor exploited”: but most surprisingly in one of his good sense he ended, “They do not yet have a great man, a conquistador who absorbs everything and renews everything, the originator of a fresh epoch, the creator of a boundless world.” For his part Morice, writing in December, 1902, spoke of “the extraordinary, sterile sadness that weighs upon the whole of this very young man’s work—a body of work that is already beyond counting. Picasso, who was painting before he learned to read, seems to have been given the mission of expressing everything that exists, and of expressing it with his brush. It might be said that he is a young god who wants to refashion the world. But a gloomy god. The hundreds of faces that he has painted all grimace. Never a single smile. One could no more live in his