Picasso: A Biography. Patrick O’Brian

a little miserable bony blindfolded old horse up against the pink barrier of a bull-ring. The spectators, two men (one in a bowler, one in a Cordovan hat) and an opulent woman, are so large that they make the horse look even more wretchedly small. The horse is unpadded—the eight- or nine-year-old Pablo had already seen some dozens disemboweled in the arena—and the picador with his armored leg sits right down in the deep Spanish saddle. The two are remarkably well observed; and my impression is that they are observed quite objectively: but I may be mistaken; there may be compassion for the horse.

      The picador has a little of that wonderful quality which is often to be seen in children’s paintings, but not a great deal. And some of this quality may be owing to the holes that take the place of the people’s eyes, holes that do away with the surface and give their expressions an impassive fixity. These holes, however, were supplied by Lola, Picasso’s sister, when she was busy with a nail.

      Upon the whole, these early pictures from Málaga and La Coruña that have survived rarely show anything of that almost impersonal genius which inhabits some children until the age of about seven or eight, then leaves them forever. Picasso’s beginnings were sometimes childish, but they were the beginnings of a child who from the start was moving towards an adult expression: and perhaps because of this the drawings are often dull. It may be that his astonishingly precocious academic skill did not so much stifle the childish genius as overlay it for the time so that it remained dormant, to come to life again after his adolescence and to live on for the rest of his career—an almost unique case of survival. Certainly, during many of his later periods he produced pictures that might well have been painted by a possessed child—a child whose “innocent,” fresh, unhistoric, wholly individual genius had never died and that could now express itself through a hand capable of the most fantastic virtuosity.

      The routine of those days in Málaga must have seemed everlasting to a child: the flat full of people, school when he could not get out of it, perpetual drawing, mass on Sundays, the slow parade up and down the Alameda, families in their best clothes, bands of ornamented youths all together, bands of swarthy tittering girls, grave adults, innumerable relatives, connections, friends, and always the splendid sun—eternal, natural, and taken for granted. All this, with the sea at hand and the pervading warmth, formed the basis of Picasso’s life, the matrix from which he developed. A great deal of it remained with him forever: this Mediterranean world, his wholly real world, was the object of his nostalgia, the only place where he could really feel at home. All his life he loved the sun, the sea, a great deal of company; yet of these early influences one seems to have bitten much less deeply. He was brought up in a deeply Catholic atmosphere, with several unusually devout relations and a religious family tradition (quite apart from his uncle and namesake the Canon and Tío Perico, one of his cousins was destined for the priesthood), and although in some of its aspects the Church in Málaga may have been rather more a processional than a profoundly spiritual body, it is still surprising that Picasso should have been apparently so little marked. There are many contributory factors that can be brought forward for what they are worth: Andalucía, with its large population of crypto-Muslims and crypto-Jews surviving into the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century and its ancestral memory of the Inquisition’s way of dealing with them, was never the most fervent province in Spain; then again the extreme contrast between the slums of Chupa y Tira and the wealth of the Alameda on the one hand and the elementary teachings of the faith on the other may have had its effect in time; while the growing clericalism, not to say religiosity, of the Establishment, the renewed identification of the Church with power, wealth, and authority during Alphonso XIII’s minority cannot but have caused a reaction in an already strongly unconformist and anti-bourgeois mind. “My joining the Communist Party is the logical consequence of my whole life, of the whole body of my work,” he said in 1944; and later in the same interview, “So I became a member of the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since fundamentally I had been on their side forever.”

      Yet no effort of will, no social consciousness, can undo the past nor give a man born and bred a Catholic the same foundation as a child brought up in another faith.

      In those days when the Church still knew its own mind, when it spoke Latin, and when a personal Devil ruled over a blazing Hell filled with the hopelessly damned, damned for ever and ever, many a Catholic child was uneasy about dying. The inward eye more readily forms an image of Hell than of Paradise—in Last Judgments the damned and the terribly powerful, terribly eager fiends that carry them shrieking away are infinitely more convincing than the blessed: the torments can be felt, whereas the ill-defined happiness of a perpetual Sunday cannot—and the descent into the one, or at least into Purgatory for a thousand years, is so much more likely than admission to the other. Absolution is not the magic sponge that some Protestants suppose: it is conditional upon true and whole confession, contrition, reparation, and many other factors. To an anxious mind (and the young Picasso was an anxious child) it is difficult to be quite certain that what seems to be contrition is not mere remorse of conscience, sterile and invalid: it is difficult to be sure that what one has confessed is all that should have been confessed: and perhaps it is even harder for a Spanish child. Spanish Catholicism has always dwelt heavily upon the last things; the skull is a very frequent symbol, and Picasso was less unaffected than he seemed.

      He rebelled against the Church, as he rebelled against everything else, but he retained a deep religious sense: deep, but also obscure, Manichaean, and in many ways far from anything that could possibly be called Christian. I am not referring only or even mainly to his fear of the end, although it reached such a pitch that the slightest illness made him uneasy, while as for death itself, he avoided all mention of it as much as ever he could, except silently in his art, and he often took refuge in anger: as he lay sick in the last weeks of his life an intimate friend, a Catalan, urged him to make a will. “Doing things like that draws death,” he cried furiously, and shortly afterwards turned his friend out of the room—he left no will, only a huge shapeless fortune to be wrangled over: no testament about anything at all except the eventual destination of “Guernica.” Nor am I speaking of such remnants of orthodox belief or perhaps of orthodox magic that led him to make Françoise Gilot promise him eternal love in a church, with the benefit of holy water, or to observe to Matisse that in times of trouble it was pleasant to have God on one’s side—did not Matisse too say his prayers when life was hard? What I mean is his sympathy with such mystics as El Greco and St. John of the Cross and his sense of unseen worlds just at hand, filled with forces good and evil, a sense so strong that he said it was nonsense to speak of religious pictures—how could you possibly paint a religious picture one day and another kind the next? How vividly present the immaterial world was to his mind can be seen from his conversation with André Malraux, which I quote later and in which he spoke of the spiritual essence of African carvings; and nothing shows his sense of the sacred more clearly than his telling Hélène Parmelin that a really good painting was good because it had been touched by the hand of God (whose existence of course he denied from time to time).

      As for the traditional Catholicism in which he was brought up, a most significant aspect of Picasso’s relationship to it is his silence. Apart from such set-pieces of his boyhood as “The First Communion” and “The Old Woman Receiving Holy Oil from a Choirboy,” some adolescent Biblical scenes (including a fine “Flight into Egypt”) and a few imprecise hagiographical pictures, he produced almost nothing with an evident religious bearing until the Crucifixion drawings of 1927, his strange Calvary of 1930, and the 1932 drawing based on the Isenheim altarpiece. Then silence again until the Christ-figures in the bull-fight engravings of 1959, although many other painters, atheist, agnostic, Jewish, vaguely Christian, or ardently Catholic, were working for the Church. Some authorities see no religious significance whatsoever in the “Calvary” and some find it blasphemous; this surprises me, since Picasso’s statement on the Crucifixion strikes me as valid, moving, a furious cry of protest, the expression of a strong emotion that certainly lies within the wide limits of Catholicism. Although this is no more than a tentative hypothesis, it seems to me that Picasso, however desperately lapsed, did retain a certain residual Catholicism at some level of his being, an affectionate or perhaps a cautious respect for the old Church that showed itself in this silence and in the nature of these occasional outbursts. Apart from anything else, he looked upon his sacramental marriage as something different in kind from his other connections; and it is perhaps significant