Picasso: A Biography Read online

  There were other factors that kept him from keeping a close watch on Casagemas, and one was his conviviality. He had quantities of friends whom he saw every day, an abundance of animal spirits, and a great deal of energy. He may have been something of a foreigner in Barcelona, but here in Paris he was a thorough Catalan; and like those American expatriates who never move outside the American colony, he stayed almost entirely in his own well-populated Paris Catalonia. He did meet Steinlen, then at the height of his fame, but apart from that and the girls in Nonell’s studio and a few other contacts he remained in the little world to which his ignorance of French confined him.

  Yet he also longed to know Paris as a whole, and being a great walker he explored it thoroughly on foot, at least in a north and south direction. Muffled in a great-coat against the northern air and carrying his sketchbook, he would emerge into the rural Montmartre and hurry down the hill. Rural it was in those days, in spite of the growing night-life, a village with quiet, unpaved, tree-lined lanes, vineyards that still held out against the. spreading town, and genuine, if motionless, windmills; there was even a sloping stretch of waste-land covered with bushes called the maquis, where people shot cats and called them rabbits; and Parisians used to take their summer holidays in Montmartre, for the benefit of the air. But Paris was building fast, and it was building in stone, much of it from the nearby quarries. His route soon led him to new and busy streets where houses were going up at a great pace and where a singular noise rose above the din of wheels and the clop of hooves—the masons sawing their blocks of stone. These great blocks, white, pure, and sharp-angled, rose up through rectangular wooden towers—Cubism for those who could see it—and these towers were also covered with brilliant posters, a form of art practically unknown to Barcelona. The masons sang as they worked, and the streets were filled with the cries of greengrocers pushing their barrows, the call of glaziers walking along with a frame of glass on their backs in the hope of broken windows, and that of coopers, offering to sell new barrels or to repair old ones: wandering dealers in old clothes, too, and the rhythmic howl of Savoyards, wheeling a boiler, with a tin tub and buckets to carry the hot water upstairs, in case anyone should choose to take a bath.

  Still farther down and nearer the Seine with its bâteaux-mouches, river-buses, barges, and general shipping, his path brought him to fashionable quarters: a luxury unheard of in Barcelona and an even greater contrast between rich and poor—the familiar international rags on the one hand and then men in tall shining hats and morning-coats, women of an astonishing elegance, and a colored elegance. Color everywhere, above the filth, and perhaps the most brilliant of all the countless soldiers: France had half a million men under arms, waiting for the inevitable war against Germany; and most of them wore baggy crimson trousers, splendid Impressionistic dashes in a crowded street.

  Then across the water and right up to Montparnasse, leaving the great exhibition and its innumerable tourists far behind. Here there were dozens of Catalans, many of whom he had known at the Quatre Gats—Casas, Utrillo, Fontbona, Isern, Pidelaserra, Junyent—and here were some of the most important contacts he was ever to make, contacts that he did not seek but found. How kind they were to him, particularly these older, established, French-speaking men who were in a position to give their kindness an evident form! They introduced him to their friends, in spite of his singular garments—loud checks, decadent ties, a vile “English” cloth cap—and in spite of a certain roughness of manner: for although in some areas he was the most sensitive man living, in others he could be strangely obtuse: no one ever succeeded in really civilizing Picasso. They introduced him to Steinien; and among others he also met Josep Oller and Pere Manyac.

  The first was a middle-aged Catalan who had lived in Paris since his childhood and who had done very well. He owned the Moulin Rouge, the Jardin de Paris, the Nouveautés theater and a race-course or so. He too liked the young Picasso, and he gave him a pass that admitted him to all the Oller establishments, to a night-life that he could never have afforded and one that provided him with an immense amount of raw material.

  The second was also a Catalan, the son of a Barcelona manufacturing ironmonger in a large way of business. His name was sometimes spelled Manyac, sometimes Manyach, and sometimes Mañac: Picasso spelled it Manach. Finding himself on bad terms with his father in the early nineties, he came to Paris; and there, having artistic leanings, he set up as a picture-dealer, acting as an intermediary between the Catalan painters and the Paris market. He was perfectly fluent in French and he knew a great many people, including Berthe Weill, “the good fairy of modern art.” It was he who introduced Nonell, Sunyer, Canals, and Manolo to her, and on this occasion he produced Picasso, whose work impressed him deeply. Berthe Weill at once bought three pictures, an oil and two gouaches of bull-fights, for a hundred francs; and Pere Manyac, his opinion fortified by her approval—what more convincing than payment in cash?—offered to take Picasso under contract.

  These contracts are perhaps somewhat less known in England and the United States, but they were and are common practice in France: they stipulate that the artist shall make over the entirety of his production to the merchant in exchange for a stated sum, usually to be paid by the month. In principle the whole of the artist’s work becomes the merchant’s exclusive property, although a clause often gives the artist the right to retain say a dozen pictures for himself. In this case there was no such clause; and the stated sum was a hundred and fifty francs a month, then about five pounds sixty or twenty-two dollars.

  When one reflects that a good Picasso of this period, his “Moulin de la Galette” for example, would fetch at least fifty thousand times this amount, the contract seems a little hard, if not unconscionable, particularly as Picasso would produce two hundred pictures a year and sometimes many more, to say nothing of his drawings. But on the other hand Manyac could not tell how soon the public would share his taste nor whether they would ever do so at all: and he did not know, nor could he guess, Picasso’s enormous dynamism and the consequent volume of work that the contract would cover. He was taking a risk; he was not at all rich, having no gallery of his own and living in a two-roomed flat; and although perhaps he was a keen dealer with an appetite for profit, he cannot be called a shark. Picasso’s portrait of him, in Washington, shows a big man with uneven eyes, deeply puzzled.

  It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say what a hundred and fifty francs represents in our money: needs have changed so widely, and the pattern of life is no longer the same. As far as exchange-rates go, the franc was worth 9.4 old pence or a little over 19 cents in 1900: but here are some figures that may give a better notion of what money meant to the Parisians at the beginning of the century. (To be exact, they were compiled in 1903; but the cost of living was fairly stable in those years.) Of the 883,871 households in the city, 71.1%, classed as poor, had an average annual income of 1,070 fr (£43), and they paid 275 fr of this in rent; the 16.2% who were called comfortably off had 5,340 fr a year; the 5.4% of rich had 28,925 fr (£1,157); and the 1.3% of very rich 282,500 fr. In those days a workingman’s average daily wage was four francs fifteen, a good cook earned sixty-five francs a month, and a judge of the court of appeal a thousand. A copious dinner with wine in a moderately good restaurant cost two francs fifty; a common eating-house would feed one for a franc, with bread and wine thrown in; and one could go from one end of Paris to the other on a bus for fifteen centimes. A hundred and fifty francs was not wealth nor anything like it, but a man could live with less: it meant a well-filled belly, wine, tobacco, and shelter.

  Few unknown painters, just nineteen years old, who had never seen a hundred and fifty francs all in one golden mass, nor yet the promise of a year’s independent carefree living, ever had such an offer; fewer still would not have been overjoyed, filled with an elastic excitement and delight renewed every waking day for weeks; and none would have refused to sign it. Picasso signed: but his joy was diminished if not done away with by the state
of Casagemas. He perceived that the unhappy man was drinking himself sodden, and that he was getting worse day by day.

  It is said that Picasso had promised to spend Christmas with his family in Barcelona. He may well have done so: in his unwillingness to give immediate pain he would very often make large promises for tomorrow, next week, next month, or another time, but he rarely felt bound where the future was concerned. Whether or no, as December wore on it became clear that Casagemas would have to be taken away: he was in great danger in Paris.

  Between the train that had brought Picasso north and the train that was now taking him south again, only some sixty days had elapsed. They were sixty days into which he had crammed an enormous amount of experience: he had seen a very great number of pictures; he had seen the exhibition, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais (with friezes colored at so much the yard by a host of needy painters, including Matisse and Marquet), the great telescope, the moving pavement, and the official pavilions of the various nations including that of Spain, in which there were pictures by Moreno Carbonero and other worthies known to Picasso, but only Zuloaga excited much favorable comment: the papers called him the new-born Goya. As for the attractions, he probably left them to one side; they were expensive and rather dreary for the most part: “One hoped to discover Sodom and Gomorrah,” said one visitor. “All one found was the Dead Sea.” He had seen a brilliant night-life very unlike the dives of Barcelona; and although his had been no more than a foreigner’s Paris he had seized some essential aspects, both within himself and in the form of several paintings and many, many drawings. And as well as his sick, distracted friend, he took with him a contract that meant his freedom, his living, and perhaps recognition.

  Yet Casagemas was his main concern. After a few days at home in Barcelona, which did Casagemas no good, Picasso took him down to Málaga: the sun, the total change of air and scene, the New Year festivities with aunts, uncles and cousins would set him up.

  But the sun of Málaga was cold, Picasso’s family distant. The Ruiz affair and his conduct in Madrid were still rankling. They did not ask him or his unkempt and now unpresentable friend to stay and they had to take a room at a fonda: even there the woman of the house would not let them in until Picasso told her who his relations were. Málaga was no longer his home.

  He felt it very deeply indeed. Presently the Ruiz and even the R vanished from his signature for ever. And after some days of going from café to wine-shop to brothel with Casagemas he saw that his effort had brought him not only a mortal affront—it had not only destroyed his Málaga forever—but it had also been useless. He could do nothing for Casagemas. The unhappy man kept himself steadily drunk and he sat there hour after hour in those dreary brothels; but all the brothels in the world would do no good to him.

  Nevertheless Picasso went on trying. Málaga had failed to provide the affection, the family atmosphere, and the New Year cheerfulness that an affectionate heart would have expected, but at least it had Gypsies, the cante hondo and the guitar, and Picasso knew where to find them. He took Casegemas there, and he drew the singers and their audience. But it was no use. Casegemas vanished, taking the train northwards.

  There was no point at all in remaining in Málaga: Picasso fled from the unhappy place—he never saw it again—and went to Madrid. Why Madrid I cannot tell, unless he had already conceived the plan of collaborating with Soler, who appears in the next chapter: though a desire to avoid Casagemas may have had something to do with his decision.

  Casagemas traveled on, reaching Paris early in 1901. He was in better physical shape now and on February 17 he wrote a large number of letters: Manolo came to see him in the boulevard de Clichy and Casagemas welcomed him kindly, promised him help, and asked him to dinner that same evening. On the way they posted the letters.

  In the restaurant just at hand they were joined by Pallarés, the Catalan art-collector Alexandre Riera, Odette, and Germaine. It was a good dinner and they drank several bottles of wine. Casagemas seemed nervous and on edge, and towards the end of the meal he stood up to make a speech in French, which Manolo did not then understand. While he was still speaking he darted his hand to his pocket: Germaine saw the pistol coming and ducked; the bullet only grazed the back of her neck. Manolo grappled with him, but Casagemas wrenched the gun up to his temple, fired, and died within the hour.

  Chapter V

  IT was in Madrid that Picasso heard of Casagemas’ death. Apart from the immediate shock it did not seem to affect him a great deal at first: his painting showed no evident signs for several months.

  He was extremely busy in the capital, for he and a friend of his who lived there had decided to found a literary and artistic review: it was to be called Arte Joven—joven being young—and it was to bring Catalan Modernismo to the Castilians, playing the part of Pèl i Ploma and Joventut in Barcelona, but in a more decided and more generally left-wing manner—not that it was to be in any way a political review, however.

  This friend, Francesc d’Assís Soler, a Barcelona Catalan, had already published some pieces in the intellectual magazines, and he was to be the literary editor. He was also to provide the money: not that he had much, but he was the son and the Madrid representative of the manufacturer of a wonderful Electric Belt that would cure almost anything, especially impotence in men, and he did at least possess the few pesetas that would launch Arte Joven and keep it going until advertisements and increasing circulation should set it on its independent feet.

  Soler already knew Madrid and many of its inhabitants, including several of the “generation of ’98,” then very much the avant-garde in Spanish letters, such as Pio Baroja and his brother the painter, Martinez Ruiz, who wrote under the name of Azorín, and Bargula, and when the first issue of Arte Joven came out, dated March 31, 1901, and priced at fifteen centimos, it contained not only Baroja’s Orgía macabra but three noble sonnets by Miguel de Unamuno, no less. There was also a letter from Barcelona by Ramon Reventós and some translations from the Catalan. And just as Casas, the art-editor of Pèl i Ploma, filled the review with his own work, so Picasso did almost all the illustration of Arte Joven; and among his drawings, pastels, and decorations there blazed and sparkled the indispensable Belt, the only paying advertisement in the paper.

  The other numbers had pieces in favor of Nietzsche by Pompeu Gener and in favor of anarchy and of killing the law by Azoríin: but ArteJoven’s anarchism was of the armchair kind, and neither Azorín nor the editors were in much danger from his article, since all it recommended was abstention from voting in the elections. They also contained advertisements for the Quatre Gats, for the Belt of course, and for a book to be written by Soler and illustrated by Picasso. It was to be called Madrid, Notas de Arte, a pictorial and poetic discovery of the city on the lines of Verhaeren’s L’Espagne noire, the Spanish translation of which had woodcuts by Dario de Regoyos, the friend of Gauguin. The advertisement shows the two authors side by side and it is the only example among the many self-portraits in which Picasso makes himself appear serious and respectable, intelligent, earnest, and sensitive: like Soler he is wearing a fine black silk stock, his hair is carefully arranged, and he has done away with the disastrous little bristly beard that made him look so like one of the four cats in an advertisement he did for Romeu. Several of his drawings for the book appeared in Arte Joven, together with portraits of his friends both in Madrid and Barcelona, bar and café interiors, women, ranging from a flowered Pre-Raphaelite yearning head (perhaps his very last bow in that direction) to a truly sinister stout middle-aged whore in a daric doorway numbered 69, and a good many “social” scenes of bourgeois and the like, remarkable for their direct cruelty.

  But the book never came out, and after five issues Arte Joven appeared no more. Picasso had been living hard in Madrid. First he had stayed in a boarding-house, where they regaled him with fried eggs; but fried eggs, his figure for high luxury, were beyond his means and the regular hours irked him; presently he moved to a place of his own, and
since he meant to stay in Madrid indefinitely he took a lease for a year. This lease he preserved, together with innumerable other papers long since out of date; it survived removal after removal, part of a steadily growing mass of mingled junk and precious drawings, all stuffed into wom cardboard boxes; and some forty years later Sabartés chanced upon it in one of the slums piled upon a piece of furniture in the dining-room of Picasso’s house in Paris. The agreement, dated February 4, 1901, covered one room on the top floor of 28 Calle Zurbano.

  “Handsome street,” said Sabartés. “Fashionable district.”

  “Yes,” said Picasso. “But I lived in a garret. No fire; no lighting. I was never so cold in my life.”

  All he could afford was a camp-bed with a straw mattress, a deal table, and one chair; and at night he worked by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle. He had lived hard before and he was to live hard again, working furiously all the time, and it never worried him unduly—it certainly never checked his flow. He put up with lack of water, drainage, and light as an ordinary part of a painter’s life; as far as food was concerned he was naturally abstemious, and although he smoked continually he drank little wine and his apéritif was mineral water. But even his Spartan frame had its limits; the cold numbed his generous Mediterranean spirit; and here in Madrid there was the paper to look after too. He and Soler had to try to find subscribers and to sell advertising space; they did not know how to do it and they failed. It was not for want of effort: Picasso went to great lengths, even writing to one of his Málaga uncles, presumably not Salvador but the husband of an aunt, asking him to take the paper. “What are you thinking of?” replied the uncle. “And what kind of a man do you think I am? This is not what we had hoped for from you. Such notions! Such friends! If you go on this way…”