Picasso: A Biography Read online

  Pablo Ruiz

  PICASSO

  The Works of Patrick O’Brian

  Biography

  PICASSO

  JOSEPH BANKS

  Aubrey/Maturin Novels

  in order of publication

  MASTER AND COMMANDER

  POST CAPTAIN

  H.M.S. SURPRISE

  THE MAURITIUS COMMAND

  DESOLATION ISLAND

  THE FORTUNE OF WAR

  THE SURGEON’S MATE

  THE IONIAN MISSION

  TREASON’S HARBOUR

  THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD

  THE REVERSE OF THE MEDAL

  THE LETTER OF MARQUE

  THE THIRTEEN-GUN SALUTE

  THE NUTMEG OF CONSOLATION

  THE TRUELOVE

  THE WINE-DARK SEA

  THE COMMODORE

  THE YELLOW ADMIRAL

  THE HUNDRED DAYS

  BLUE AT THE MIZZEN

  Novels

  TESTIMONIES

  THE GOLDEN OCEAN

  THE UNKNOWN SHORE

  Collections

  THE RENDEZVOUS AND OTHER STORIES

  Coadjutorici amoenissimae Mariae do dedico

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Appendixes

  1. Picasso’s Family Tree

  2. Picasso’s Relationship to Tlo Perico the Hermit

  3. Picasso’s Stars

  4. Picasso’s Palm

  5. Jung on Picasso

  Index

  Preface

  SINCE this life of Picasso was written several other books have appeared, some on particular aspects of his work, some on the artist as a man; but none has raised such an outcry as Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington’s Picasso, Creator and Destroyer (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1988), nor has any been more strongly condemned since Françoise Gilot published her Life with Picasso in 1964.

  For my part I felt the general indignation very strongly and I had hoped that the timely re-issue of this book would allow me to utter a counterblast to Huffington in the form of a preface. I wrote one with some care, and Tom Phillips, who felt even more indignant if possible, very kindly said that I might use his much-admired review in The Independent, a strongly-worded criticism in which he, as a painter, dealt with some points far better than I could. Altogether it was, I thought, a good foreword, a thorough-going, heartfelt counterblast. But as a matter of routine my publishers showed it to their lawyer for a libel-report and to our astonishment he said it was actionable.

  It was actionable because I too had written a book on Picasso and therefore I could be looked upon as Huffington’s trade-rival, a rival actuated not by honestly-held beliefs but by sordid malice. If I had produced a book on white mice it would have been actionable if I had said that another book on white mice was ill-informed, ill-written and ill-natured. And in this case, believe it or not, it was also dangerous to quote from Tom Phillips’ review, thus giving it a more lasting form than it had in a newspaper.

  That, according to the company’s expert, is the state of the English law; and since Coke defines law as the perfection of reason, one can but bow with all the respect due to perfection, whatever shape it may assume.

  PATRICK O’BRIAN

  1989

  Preface

  THIS BOOK is an attempt at presenting Picasso whole, the man as well as his art; and its title is designed to emphasize the importance of those years of his life when he was Pablo Ruiz, his childhood in Málaga and La Coruña, and above all his adolescence in Barcelona. They shaped him forever; and since the enormous body of his work cannot be fully appreciated without a knowledge of its Spanish, and even more of its Catalan foundations, the early chapters go deep into his family background and his formative years, drawing on the immense collections of early works and documents that he presented to the Museo Picasso in Barcelona in 1970 and on many Catalan texts.

  Art-historians have sometimes divided Picasso the painter, sculptor, draughtsman, lithographer, engraver, and potter from Picasso the man, and for their purpose no doubt the method answers; other writers have spoken of Picasso as though he were only incidentally an artist, concentrating upon the man as he was to be seen away from his easel. The present book aims at striking the mean between these two extremes and at showing a man who, though wholly devoted to his art, spending the most significant and perhaps even the greatest part of his life in his studio, nevertheless lived intensely outside it: yet it does not stray far into the field of criticism, analysis, or interpretation.

  There are several reasons for this, and the first is that Braque was surely right in saying that the only important thing in art is that which cannot be explained. Then, while detailed analysis and technical description certainly have their value, they would be out of place in a book that is intended for the intelligent but unspecialized reader. And as for interpretation, that source of so many books about Picasso, it seems to me of value only when the author is a man as interesting as his subject. In the course of my reading I have necessarily waded through thick clouds of interpretative Teutonic metaphysics and a great deal of homespun psychology; but few of the writers came anywhere near this standard and little of what they wrote shed much light on Picasso. What I have done, therefore, when I come to an important picture, is to describe it as accurately as I can, without obtruding any attempt at explanation on the reader, still less telling him what he ought to think. Then I say something about its impact on me; and when, as it sometimes happens, this differs from the generally accepted view, I give that view as well: it is only for the very early or the very late work, where there is as yet no consensus, that I offer my own opinion and little more.

  Since this is not a book for specialists I have not encumbered it with notes and references, nor with a bibliography. Indeed, the formal bibliography, referring the reader to books long out of print and to articles published in obscure journals fifty years ago, seems a show of erudition of little use to the general reader when it is genuine and ridiculous when it is false: many that I have seen give what they call the first newspaper criticism, an article by Rodríguez Codolá entitled Exposición Ruiz Picasso and published in La Vanguardia of Barcelona in 1897. But as Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño has shown in his Bibliografía crítica y antológica the article does not exist: nor did the exhibition.

  Apart from the many learned and sometimes illuminating monographs on various aspects of his art, there are of course valuable works among the great number that have been written about Picasso; and no one interested in him can fail to find instruction in Barr or delight in Sabartés, Brassaï, Penrose, Fernande Olivier, Geneviêve Laporte, and some others. Yet it seems to me more useful to speak of them in some detail in the course of the book rather than giving a bald list of all the authors I have read.

  But although I give no bibliography, it would be the basest ingratitude if I were not to acknowledge the great kindness and help I have received from Monsieur and Madame Pierre de Saint-Prix, and from many of the friends I have had the honor of sharing with Picasso. Most are mentioned in the text, but there are others whom I must beg to accept my thanks in this place, particularly Madame Marguerite
Matisse-Duthuit, the Comte and Comtesse de Lazerme, Senor Maurizio Torra-Balari, and Monsieur Jean Hugo. And I should like to express my gratitude to Señorita María Teresa Ocaña of the Museo Picasso in Barcelona, to the kind people at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Barnes Foundation at Merion, Pennsylvania, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Louvre, the Bibliothéque nationale, and the Musee national d’Art moderne, who have been so very helpful and cooperative.

  Chapter I

  PICASSO was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, the first, the only son of Doña María Picasso y Lopez and her husband, Don José Ruiz y Blasco, a painter, a teacher in the city’s art school, and the curator of the local museum. The statement is true: it is to be found in all the reference-books. But perhaps it does not convey a great deal of information except to those Spaniards who can as easily visualize the Málaga of Alphonso XII’s time as English-speaking readers can the St. Louis of President Arthur’s or the Southampton of Queen Victoria’s—to those who know the economic, cultural, and social position of a middle-class family in that town and the pattern of life in nineteenth-century Andalucía as a whole. For even the strongest individual is indelibly marked by the culture in which he is brought up; even the loneliest man is not an island; and even Picasso carried his cradle with him to the grave. “A man belongs to his own country forever,” he said.

  Picasso’s Málaga, then, was an ancient city in the far south of Spain, an essentially Mediterranean city, and after Barcelona the country’s most important seaport on that coast: it had been a great port for centuries before Barcelona was heard of, having a natural harbor as opposed to Barcelona’s open beach; but long before Picasso’s time the silting up of this harbor and the activity of the Catalans in building moles had reversed the position, and whereas in 1881 ships had to lie off Málaga and discharge their cargoes into lighters, in Barcelona they could tie up in their hundreds alongside the busy quays. Yet Málaga still had a great deal of shipping; its great bay provided shelter, and the smaller vessels could still use the harbor at the bottom of that bay, where the white town lies along the shore with the hills of Axarquia rising behind it, while the Gibralfaro rears up five hundred feet and more in the city itself, with a huge Moorish castle standing upon its top.

  Compared with the booming town of the present day, the Málaga of 1881 belonged to a different world, a world innocent of concrete and in many ways much nearer to the middle ages than to the twentieth century: tourism has changed it almost beyond recognition. When Picasso was born Málaga still relied upon its ancient industries, shipping, cotton-spinning, sugar-refining, the working of iron, and the production of wine, almonds and raisins, and other fruit: the fertile, irrigated, subtropical plain to the west of the town supplied the cotton and the sugar-cane (the Arabs brought them to Spain) as well as oranges, lemons, custard-apples, and bananas, while the slopes behind produced almonds, the grapes for the heavy, potent wine and for the raisins; and iron-ore came from the mountains. The city of that time had only about 120,000 inhabitants as opposed to the present 375,000 (a number enormously increased by holiday-makers from all over Europe in the summer), and they lived in a much smaller space: there was little development north of the hills or beyond the river, and what is now land on the seaward side was then part of the shallow harbor. This made for a crowded, somewhat squalid city, particularly as there was little notion of drains and the water-supply was inadequate; a real city, however, with its twenty-seven churches and chapels, its four important monasteries (the survivors of a great many more before the massive suppressions, expropriations, and expulsions of 1835), its bullring for ten thousand, its still-unfinished cathedral on the site of a former mosque, its splendid market in what was once the Moorish arsenal, its garrison, its brothels, its theaters, its immensely ancient tradition, and its strong sense of corporate being. Then, as now, it had the finest climate in Europe, with only forty clouded days in the year; but in 1881 traveling in Spain was an uncommon adventure and virtually no tourists came to enjoy the astonishing light, the brilliant air, and the tepid sea. Only a few wealthy invalids, consumptives for the most part, took lodgings at the Caleta or the Limonar, far from the medieval filth and smells of the inner town. They hardly made the least impression upon Málaga itself, which, apart from a scattering of foreign merchants, was left to the Malagueños.

  Their town had been an important Phoenician stronghold until the Punic wars; then a Roman municipium; then a Visigothic city, the seat of a bishop; and then, for seven hundred and seventy-seven years, a great Arab town, one in which large numbers of Jews and Christians lived under Moslem rule. The Moslems were delighted with their conquest: they allotted it to the Khund al Jordan, the tribes from the east of the sacred river, who looked upon it as an earthly paradise. Many Arabic travelers spoke of its splendor, Ibn Batuta going so far as to compare it with an opened bottle of musk. Málaga was a Moslem city far longer than it has subsequently been Christian, and the Arabs left their mark: even now one is continually aware of their presence, not only because of the remains of the Alcazaba, a fortified Moorish palace high over the port, and of the still higher Gibralfaro, from which the mountains in Africa can be distinguished on the clear horizon, but also because of the faces in the streets and markets and above all because of the flamenco that is to be heard, sometimes from an open window, sometimes from a solitary peasant following an ass so loaded with sugar-cane that only its hoofs show twinkling below.

  The Spaniards who reconquered Andalucía came from many different regions, each with its own way of speaking; and partly because of this and partly because of the large numbers of Arabic-speaking people, Christian, Jew, and Moslem, they evolved a fresh dialect of their own, a Spanish in which the s is often lost and the h often sounded, a brogue as distinct as that of Munster: one that perplexes the foreigner and that makes the Castilian laugh. In time the Moors and the Jews were more or less efficiently expelled or forcibly converted, and eventually many of the descendants of these converts, the “new Christians,” were also driven from the country; but they left their genes behind, and many of their ways—their attitude towards women, for example. Then again there is a fierce democratic independence combined with an ability to live under a despotic regime that is reminiscent of the egalitarianism of Islam: no one could call the Spaniards as a whole a deferential nation, but this characteristic grows even more marked as one travels south, to reach its height in Andalucía. And as one travels south, so the physical evidence of these genes becomes more apparent; the Arab, the Berber, and the Jew peep out, to say nothing of the Phoenician; and the Castilian or the Catalan is apt to lump the Andalou in with the Gypsies, a great many of whom live in those parts. For the solid bourgeois of Madrid or Barcelona the Andalou is something of an outsider; he is held in low esteem, as being wanting in gravity, assiduity, and respect for the establishment. Málaga itself had a solid reputation for being against the government, for being impatient of authority: it was a contentious city, in spite of its conforming bourgeoisie. In the very square in which Picasso was born there is a monument to a general and forty-nine of his companions, including a Mr. Robert Boyd, who rose in favor of the Constitution and who were all shot in Málaga in 1831 and buried in the square; it also commemorates the hero of another rising, Riego, after whom the square was officially named, although it has now reverted to its traditional name of the Plaza de la Merced, from the church of Nuestra Señora de la Merced, which used to stand in its north-east corner. There were many other risings, insurrections, and pronunciamientos in Málaga during the nineteenth century, including one against Espartero in 1843, another against Queen Isabella II in 1868 (this, of course, was part of the greater turmoil of the Revolution), and another in favor of a republic only eight years before Picasso’s birth. But although many of these risings, both in Málaga and the rest of Spain, had a strongly anticlerical element, with churches and monasteries going up in flames and monks, nuns, friars, and even hermits being expelled and dispossessed, the Spaniard
s remained profoundly Catholic, and the Malagueños continued to live their traditional religious life, celebrating the major feasts of the Church with splendid bull-fights, making pilgrimages to local shrines, forming great processions in Holy Week, hating what few heretics they ever saw (until 1830 Protestants had to be buried on the foreshore, where heavy seas sometimes disinterred them), and of course baptizing their children. It would have been unthinkable for Picasso not to have been christened, and sixteen days after his birth he was taken to the parish church of Santiago el Mayor (whose tower was once a minaret), where the priest of La Merced gave him the names Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, María de los Remedios, and Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad, together with some salt to expel the devil.

  In most countries this array of names would imply an exalted origin: but not in Andalucía. The Ruiz family belonged to that traditionally almost non-existent body, the Spanish middle class. José Ruiz y Blasco, Picasso’s father, was the son of Diego Ruiz y de Almoguera, a glover and by all accounts an amiable and gifted man with artistic tastes, a great talker; but in that subtropical climate there was no fortune in gloves, and Don Diego also played the double-bass in the orchestra of the municipal theater. This Diego Ruiz was born in Córdoba in 1799, well before Goya painted the “Tres de Mayo,” and he remembered the French occupation of Málaga very well indeed (his father, José Ruiz y de Fuentes had removed there during the Peninsular War), for not only did the French sack the city in 1810, but they also beat the young Diego for throwing stones at them. It is said that they beat him almost to death, for it was during a general’s parade that he threw his stones: however that may be, he recovered sufficiently to set up shop in due time, to marry María de la Paz Blasco y Echevarria, and to have eleven children by her. It is the Spanish custom to use two surnames on formal occasions, one’s father’s and one’s mother’s, often connected with a y, but to hand down only the paternal half: thus Diego’s son José was called Ruiz y Blasco, both the Almoguera and the Echevarria disappearing. Echevarria, by the way, is a name that has a Basque sound about it, and this may account for the often-repeated statement that Picasso’s father was of Basque origin. Then again a Spanish woman retains her patronymic on marrying and adds to it her husband’s, preceded by de, so that Diego’s wife was known as Señora Blasco de Ruiz.