Picasso: A Biography Read online

  As for origins, it has been attempted to be shown that the Ruiz family descended from one Juan de León, a hidalgo of immemorial nobility who had estates at Cogolludo in the kingdom of León and who was killed in 1487 during the war for the reconquest of Granada: his grandson settled at Villafranca de Córdoba; and he is said to be the ancestor of the Ruizes. It may be so; but the sudden and irregular appearance of the name Ruiz is not particularly convincing, even taking into account the strange anarchy of Spanish family names at that period. In any event this remote Leonese origin is scarcely relevant: for although, as Gibbon says, “we wish to discover our ancestors, but we wish to discover them possessed of ample fortunes, and holding an eminent rank in the class of hereditary nobles,” and although we sometimes succeed, the practical effect of the more or less mythical Don Juan on the Ruizes cannot have been very great four centuries and eleven generations later; nor can that of the Venerable Juan de Almoguera, Archbishop of Lima, Viceroy and Captain-General of Peru in the seventeenth century, who is stated to have been a collateral.

  In more recent and verifiable times, however, there was another Juan de Almoguera, a Córdoban and a notary, who died in deeply embarrassed circumstances at Almodóvar del Río, leaving a widow and eleven children, the eldest of whom, Maíra Josefa, married José Ruiz y de Fuentes, Picasso’s great-grandfather, while the tenth, Pedro Dionisio, became a hermit. He joined the Venerable Congregatión de Ermitaños de Nuestra Señora de Belén in the mountains of Córdoba in 1792 and became their superior some twenty years later; his health was always poor and he could not always remain in his hermitage; nevertheless he nursed the sick most devotedly during the cholera epidemic of 1834. And when his community was suppressed, expropriated, and expelled at the time of the anticlerical outburst of 1835 he managed to retain a little of their land, a spot from which he could look out over the mountains. He died in 1856, at the age of eighty-one, and he left a vividly living memory: his great-grand-nephew Pablo often spoke of “Tío Perico, who led an exemplary life as a hermit in the Sierra de Córdoba.”*

  The most diligent research has discovered little reliable information about Picasso’s maternal ancestors: they seem to have been obscure burgesses of Málaga for some generations; but Picasso’s maternal grandmother at least was tolerably well provided for, since she owned vineyards outside the town that supported her and her daughters until the phylloxera destroyed them. Her husband, Francisco Picasso y Guardeño, went to school in England, returned to his native Málaga, married Inés Lopez y Robles, had four daughters by her, and went off to Cuba: there he became a customs-officer and eventually died of the yellow fever, in 1883, the news taking some fifteen years to reach his family. The origin of the name Picasso, which is most unusual in Spain (the double s does not occur in Castilian), has resisted all inquiries: some writers have pointed to Italy and particularly to the Genoese painter Mateo Picasso, a nineteenth-century portraitist, and Pablo Picasso himself went so far as to buy one of his pictures. On the other hand, Jaime Sabartés, one of Picasso’s oldest friends, his biographer, secretary, and factotum, discovered a Moorish prince called Picaço, who came to Spain with eight thousand horsemen and who was defeated and slain in battle by the Grand Master of Alcántara on Tuesday, October 28, 1339. And there have been assertions of a Jewish, Balearic, or Catalan origin. These are not of the least consequence, however; the real significance of this unusual, striking name is that it had at least some influence in setting its owner slightly apart, of making him feel that he was not quite the same as other people—a feeling that was to be reinforced by several other factors quite apart from that isolating genius which soon made it almost impossible for him to find any equals.

  To return to Diego Ruiz, the glover, Picasso’s paternal grandfather: in spite of his beating at the hands of the French soldiers, in spite of the near anarchy that prevailed in Spain almost without a pause from 1800 to 1874 (to speak only of the nineteenth century), in spite of the risings for or against the various constitutions, of the Carlist wars, the pronunciamientos, the continual (and often bloody) struggles between the conservatives, the moderados, and the liberals, in spite of the mutinous political generals, the loss of the South American possessions, the stagnation of trade, and the tottering national finances, Diego Ruiz, like so many of his relatives in Málaga, had an enormous family, four boys and seven girls.

  The second of these boys, Pablo, had a vocation that must have rejoiced all his relatives: he entered the Church and did remarkably well, becoming a doctor of theology and eventually, although he had no gift for preaching, a canon of Málaga cathedral and his family’s main prop and stay.

  The profession chosen by Salvador, the youngest boy, cannot have caused anything like the same satisfaction: he decided to study medicine at Granada, and at that time neither medicine nor medical men were much esteemed in Spain. Richard Ford, writing only a few years before Don Salvador began his studies, speaks of the “base bloody and brutal Sangrados,” observing that in all Sevilla only one doctor was admitted into good company, “and every stranger was informed apologetically that the MD was de casa conocida, or born of good family.” In Granada Don Salvador met a young woman, Concepción Marin, the daughter of a sculptor; and being unwilling to part from her he took a post at the hospital when he was qualified, at a salary of 750 pesetas a year. But although Spain was then a relatively cheap country he found that this sum, which at that time represented about $112, or £28, did not allow him to put by enough to marry and set up house; he returned to Málaga, practiced (the Reverend Dr. Pablo was useful to him and his patients included the French Assumptionist nuns and their schoolgirls as well as the convent of Franciscans, whom he did not charge), prospered, and in 1876, seven years after he had qualified, he married Concepción, who gave him two daughters, Picasso’s cousins Concha and María. Later Don Salvador became the medical officer of the port and he also founded the Málaga Vaccination Institute. He was a kind man and a brave one (in the anticlerical troubles he protected the nuns at the risk of his life), and from the financial point of view he did better than any Ruiz in Andalucía: it was as a successful, cigar-smoking physician that he attended Picasso’s birth, reanimating his limp and apparently stillborn nephew with a blast of smoke into his infant lungs. Later he also contributed to the support of young Pablo in Madrid and to the buying of his exemption when the time came for his military service.

  But if Don Salvador’s choice of a calling met with certain reserves at first, his brother José’s can have caused nothing but dismay. Having some skill in drawing, a knack for illustration, he determined to become an artist, a painter; and for some years he persisted in this course. He acquired a fair academic technique; he had a craftsman’s talent and an ability to use his tools; but he had nothing whatsoever to say in terms of paint, or at least he never said it. He produced a large number of painstaking decorative pictures of dead game, flowers (particularly lilacs), and above all of live pigeons, a few of which he sold; and he painted fans. He lived with his elder brother, the Canon, who also supported his surviving unmarried sisters, Josefa and Matilde.

  It is the sad fate of towns that have once been capital cities (and at one time Málaga was the seat of an independent Moorish king) that when they lose this status they become more provincial than those which never emerged from obscurity. Málaga was deeply provincial. Yet it did possess a struggling art-school, the Escuela de Artes y Oficios de San Telmo, which had been founded in 1849; and in 1868 the quite well known Valencian artist Bernardo Ferrándiz became its professor of painting and composition. He was followed by Antonio Muñoz Degrain, another Valencian (they had come to Málaga to decorate the Teatro Cervantes); and the presence of these two painters of more than local fame, more than common talent, coincided with a revival of interest in the arts—a small and temporary revival, perhaps, but enough to induce the municipality to set up a museum of fine arts on the second floor of the expropriated Augustinian monastery which they used as the town hall. José
Ruiz succeeded his friend Muñoz Degrain at San Telmo and he was also appointed the first curator of the museum. His duties included the restoring of the damaged pictures, a task for which his meticulous craftsmanship and attention to detail suited him admirably: what is more, he had a room set aside for this work, and as the museum followed the ancient Spanish provincial tradition of being almost always shut, he did his own painting there as well.

  It was a fairly agreeable life; he had a small but apparently assured income, and any paintings that he sold added jam to his bread and butter; he had many friends of a mildly bohemian character, some of them painters; and he delighted in the bull-fights, better conducted, better understood in Andalucía than anywhere else in the world: at all events it was the happiest life he ever knew.

  But his youth was passing—indeed, it had passed: he was nearly forty—and his family urged him to marry. None of his brothers or sisters had yet produced a son, and the family name was in danger of extinction. They arranged a suitable marriage for him, and although he could not be brought to like the young woman of their choice he did make an offer to her cousin María—María Picasso y Lopez. Yet before the marriage could take place the Canon died: this was in 1878, and he was only forty-seven. His loss was felt most severely; and either because of this or because Don José felt little real enthusiasm for marriage, the wedding was not celebrated until 1880.

  José Ruiz took a flat in the Plaza de la Merced, on the third floor of a double terrace recently built by a wealthy man, Don Antonio Campos Garvin, Marqués de Ignato, on the site of a former convent. Don José was now responsible for a wife, two unmarried sisters, a mother-in-law and, after 1881, a son. Then, in 1884, during a violent earthquake, a daughter appeared: three years later another: at some point María de Ruiz’s unmarried sisters Eladia and Heliodora, whose vineyards had been ravaged by the phylloxera, moved in. And in the meantime the municipality decided to abolish not the museum, but the curator: or at least the curator’s salary. Don José offered to serve in an honorary capacity; and as he had hoped a newly-elected council eventually gave him back his pay.

  But these continual difficulties, the daily worry, overcame a man quite unsuited to cope with them: there was little that he could do, apart from offering to pay his rent with pictures, giving private lessons, and selling an occasional canvas. Fortunately his landlord was a lover of the arts, as they were understood in Málaga in the 1880s; or at least he liked the company of artists, and he accepted a large number of José Ruiz’s paintings. Several were found in his descendants’ possession some years ago; but it was thought kinder not to exhibit them.

  Don José’s worries were real enough in all their sad banality, and many, many people can sympathize with them from experience; but there was also a factor that perhaps only another artist can fully appreciate in its full force. He was a painter; he was entirely committed to painting; and he was losing his faith in his talent—a few years later he gave up altogether. Whether he realized that his original vocation had been false, whether he found at the age of forty and more that he had been no more than one of the innumerable young people with “artistic tastes” and a certain facility who fling themselves into painting only to find that they have no real creative power, or whether he found that what he might have had inside him had now been crushed by domesticity, the artist sucked dry and rendered sterile by women, children, routine, teaching, the result was the same. In his son’s portraits we see a weary man, tired through and through, deeply disappointed, often very near despair. Again and again there is this sad head leaning on his hand, with an expression of profound, incurable boredom, the taste for life all gone; and having seen this José Ruiz one finds it hard to imagine any other. Yet he must once have been young: by all accounts he was a gay bachelor, a haunter of cafés, a witty young man, well liked. His son saw none of this.

  The relationship between the father and son is obviously of the first importance for an understanding of Picasso’s character; but like everything else to do with him it is immensely complex and full of apparent contradictions. On the one hand Picasso dropped his father’s name, a most unusual step in Spain (the only other example that comes readily to mind is, curiously enough, Velásquez), and although Sabartés and others say that Picasso’s Catalan friends to some degree forced the change upon him, and although Ruiz is comparatively commonplace in Spain and difficult for the French to pronounce, these reasons and the rest sound very much like post hoc rationalization. On the other, all through his life Picasso quoted his father’s dictums on painting, finding wisdom in such gnomic utterances as “In hands you see the hand” and speaking of him with great affection and respect. Talking to Brassaï in the thirties he spoke of his bearded father as the very type of man. “Every time I draw a man, automatically I think of my father.… As far as I am concerned the man is Don José, and that will be so as long as I live.… He had a beard.… I see all the men I draw with his features, more or less.” Don José was a good teacher, with a considerable share of technical knowledge; and later, when he found that he could teach him no more he ceremonially handed his brushes over to the boy and never painted again. Could any castrating son ask more? He did all he could to further Pablo’s career; he stretched his canvases; he gave him an independent studio at the age of fifteen; he parted with all his money except for the loose change in his pocket to enable the nineteen-year-old to go to Paris; yet when he died in 1913 his son did not come to his funeral although Picasso was then at Céret, only about a hundred miles away, and although he was not then particularly short of money. Picasso did not bury his father; and late in his life, when he was eighty-seven indeed, he executed a series of etchings in which Don José appears, sometimes as a watcher of bawdy scenes, sometimes as a participant.

  But these complications did not exist—or at least did not exist on the surface—in those early days in Málaga. Don José was the Man: tall, bearded, ageless, dignified, bony, with pale eyes and a grizzling sandy beard (his friends called him el Inglés), quite unlike his busy, plump, entirely human, black-haired wife, and so far removed from his son in every conceivable way that no one could possibly have guessed the relationship. He was the only man in a household full of women; and although it would be wrong and indeed absurd to say that every Spaniard regards women, apart from the sacred mother, as a race to be exploited either as sex-objects or as domestic animals, the notion is common enough in the Mediterranean world, both Moslem and Christian: a century ago it was commoner still, and in Spain it increased the farther south one went. Neither José Ruiz nor his son was likely to be wholly unaffected by it; and this was the atmosphere in which Pablo spent his early years, the only boy of his generation, cosseted by a host of subservient aunts and female cousins, many of whom accepted the doctrine of their inferiority, thus communicating the deepest and most lasting conviction to the young Picasso. His mother, however, stood quite apart: the relationship between them was uncomplicated love on either side, with some mixture of adoration on hers; and it is perhaps worth while recalling Freud’s words on Goethe, with whom Picasso has often been compared: “Sons who succeed in life have been the favorite children of good mothers.”

  These early years were cheerful enough for a child who knew little or nothing about the struggle for existence and to whom the overcrowded, somewhat squalid flat was as natural as the brilliant and almost perpetual sunshine in the square. His father’s increasing gloom was no more than the normal attribute of the Man, and in any case Pablo did not see much of Don José, who went off regularly to teach and to work at the museum in a room “just like any other, with nothing special about it,” as Picasso told Sabartés, “perhaps a little dirtier than the one he had at home; but at least he had peace when he was there.” Besides, the final gloom, the total withdrawal, of Don José did not take place until he left Málaga: at this time he still visited his friends, particularly the admired Antonio Muñoz Degrain, and he still went to see every single bull-fight, taking Pablo with him as soon as the
child was no longer a nuisance.

  This man about whom the household revolved, the only source of power, money, and prestige, the women’s raison d’être, had as his symbol a paintbrush. Although he did not work at home, it was Don José’s custom to bring his brushes back to be cleaned; and from his earliest age Pablo regarded them with an awful respect, soon to be mingled with ambition. At no time did he ever have the least doubt of the paramount importance of painting.

  José Ruiz could not very well work in his flat: it was full of women (to say nothing of the tame pigeons, Don José’s models, and every year the paschal lamb, a pet for a week or so and then the Easter dinner); and two of these women, the penniless aunts Eladia and Heliodora, spent their days making braid for the caps and uniforms of railway employees. What contribution their sweated labor made to the common purse history does not relate; it cannot have been very much, but even a few reales would have been useful in that secret, hidden bourgeois poverty. Only a woman of great good sense, accustomed to frugality, to managing with very little, and to wasting nothing, could have run such an economy: happily for her family Dona Maria, in addition to a great many more amiable qualities, possessed all these. Nothing was thrown away: the flat may not have been particularly clean, but appearances were kept up: and one of Picasso’s earliest memories was that of his grandmother telling him to say nothing to anyone, ever.

  Many children have been told to avoid waste without hoarding great piles and heaps of their possessions, trunks, cardboard boxes, crates overflowing and filling house after house, leaving no room to live, nothing ever thrown away: many have been told to be discreet without growing secretive, if not hermetic, in later life: but these precepts sank deep into Picasso’s unfolding mind. As for the secrecy, which Françoise Gilot speaks of as so marked a characteristic in both Picasso and Sabartés, it is not altogether fanciful to invoke the Holy Office: with short breaks from the thirteenth century right up until 1834 Spain had suffered under the Inquisition, hundreds of years during which Spaniards learned to keep a close watch over their tongues. A relapsed Jew and a Quaker were publicly tortured as late as 1826, and in the Carlist wars (vividly present in his parents’ memory) the supporters of absolute monarchy hoped to bring the inquisitors back with their king. Then again, in some crypto-Jewish families (and there were a great many in Spain) the habit of secrecy was passed on even longer than the faith: by this I do not mean to imply that either the Ruizes or the Picassos had Jewish ancestors, though it is by no means impossible, but only to suggest one more reason for the country’s traditional discretion, since the tradition necessarily affected Picasso.