Picasso: A Biography Read online

  The household was poor, but with a poverty that did not exclude the presence of some agreeable things, such as a set of Chippendale chairs that had presumably reached Spain by way of Gibraltar and that eventually came down to Picasso, and some pleasant Italian pieces of furniture; and Aunt Josefa, at least, owned a gold watch and chain. Nor, in the Spain of that time, did poverty mean the absence of servants, any more than it did in Micawber’s England: there is, indeed, something a little Micawberish about Don José, if Micawber can be conceived without gaiety and without a bowl of punch. Don José too was a hopeless man of business; he too hoped for something to turn up; he too had a wife who never deserted him, although a flat in which the cooking had to be done over charcoal in little raised holes, the water and slops to be carried up and down some fifty stairs, and oil lamps to be cleaned, filled, and lighted every day must have been a trial to her constancy, servants or no servants.

  The flat is still there, and since 1962 (the year of a great Velásquez commemoration) the house has borne a plaque recording Picasso’s birth; it is now numbered fifteen, and it makes the corner, being the most westward of the range of buildings erected by Senor Campos, two matching terraces that fill the whole northern side of the square. They were not built at the happiest period of Spanish architecture, and they do not compare well with the two or three remaining eighteenth-century houses on the west side, but they have a restrained, somewhat heavy dignity and they are at least conceived as a whole: the balconied facades are uniform and the proportions make sober good sense. Each number has its own door that opens on to a hall paved with white marble. Modest double flights of marble stairs lead up to the first floor, where they give way to tiles, growing shabbier as they wind up round the wells in the middle of the building; but all the way up, on each landing, there are fine doors, each with a bright brass judas. Lifts have been installed in some of the houses, spoiling the staircases; electricity-meters by the dozen line the halls; and no doubt the water-supply and drainage have been improved; but otherwise there has been little change, and the pigeons still fly up to the balconies in greedy, amorous flocks.

  Little change in the square itself, either. Many of the plane-trees under which young Pablo and his sisters played are still there; so are the massive stone benches, calculated to resist the successive generations of children who have haunted the gardens since they were first laid out; so are the little plump lions on pillars that guard the side entrances, though their tails have suffered since Picasso’s day. Ninety years ago the paths were sanded: now they are covered with asphalt. The sand made it more convenient for the children to play one of their immemorial games, the tracing of arabesques, those calligraphic patterns with which the Moors (to whom images were forbidden) decorated anything they could lay their hands upon—buildings, carpets, manuscripts, astrolabes: part of the game was to begin the arabesque anywhere and to come back to the starting-place, finishing the whole in one sinuous stroke, never taking one’s finger from the ground. The sand has gone, but there is still plenty of dusty earth under the municipal plants, and the children of Málaga still play this game; and they still cry Ojalá, which may be rendered O may Allah will it.

  It is certain that some of the very earliest Picassos were drawn in the dirt of the Plaza de la Merced; and as he had no inhibitions about the living form it is probable that they were not sterile abstractions. He very soon acquired a mastery of this technique, and it stayed with him. As a very old man in years he would still start a drawing anywhere at all, just as he had done when he was a little boy, amazing his cousins Concha and María by beginning a dog or a cock at any point they chose to name—the claws, the tail—or by cutting the forms out of paper with his aunt’s embroidery scissors on the same terms. Curiously enough this calligraphy never overflowed into his writing: except for some early labored inscriptions he always wrote like a cat.

  Behind the respectable houses lining the east side of the Plaza de la Merced began the slums of the Mundo Nuevo and the Coracha, the gap between the hill of the Alcazaba and that of the higher Gibralfaro; a place full of ruins, with swarms of Gypsies and desperately poor Spaniards living among them. In those days the slums continued round the Gibralfaro; under the Alcazaba they still remain, a most desolate spectacle even in the sun—ruin, filth, makeshift hovels, excrement. The district was called Chupa y Tira (which Penrose happily renders “Suck and Chuck”), from its inhabitants’ way of eating nothing but shellfish soup, shellfish being free and abundant in the more polluted parts of the harbor, and of chucking the shells out of the window once they were sucked clean. This whole area provided the needier housewives of Málaga with an inexhaustible supply of servants, rough no doubt and illiterate certainly, but undemanding. Perhaps the great point of servants is not that they move dust, which does no great harm where it is, but that they bring children of the bourgeoisie into contact with earthy good sense, with real life, its virtues, values, and miseries comparatively undisguised. Picasso may have learned more from Carmen Mendoza, the powerful, strong-voiced, mustachioed woman who took him to school than he did sitting there at his desk (he was an exceptionally dull scholar); and his unrivaled capacity for making a slum of any house in which he lived, however elegant, may perhaps have been based upon his early experience of the Gypsies of the Alcazaba, many of whose values he shared. And it was certainly from them that he derived his taste for the only music that ever really touched him, the cante hondo. Its strange, un-European cadences, its passionate outcry above the sound of a guitar, could be heard—can still be heard—from those miserable booths huddled together out of odd planks and surrounded by filth. Canta la rana, y no tiene pelo ni lana, say the Spaniards: the frog sings, though she has neither fur nor wool.

  Picasso had a prodigious memory, both for forms and for events. He could remember learning to walk with the help of a biscuit-tin, and he could remember his sister’s birth when he was three. The circumstances of his sister’s birth were striking enough, to be sure. Don José was gossiping with friends in the back room of an apothecary’s shop one evening in December, 1884, when the bottles shot from their shelves with a crash. Earthquakes are common enough in those fiery regions for no one to sit pondering when they begin. Everyone darted into the open, and Don José ran home, up the stairs, seized his heavily-pregnant wife, his cloak, his son, and ran down into the square. Pablo was wrapped in the folds of the cloak, but his face peered out, and he saw that his mother had a kerchief over her head, a sight hitherto unknown, and deeply memorable. They hurried along the Calle de la Victoria (it commemorates the Christians’ perhaps illusory victory over the Moors), right along to the far end, skirting the Gibralfaro, to Muñoz Degrain’s little one-storied house, built solidly into the rock. Degrain was visiting Rome at the time, but they settled in, and here Picasso’s sister María de los Dolores—Lola—was born. (This earthquake killed over a thousand, devastating the whole region, and the cholera epidemic of the following year killed at least another hundred thousand more.)

  But even with this astonishing power of recall he could not remember when he began to draw. He had in fact been drawing even before he could talk, and his first recorded words (recorded by his mother) were “piz, piz”—all that he could manage of lápiz, a pencil. He drew in season and out, particularly at school. His parents sent him first to the parochial school and then, when he was declared a “delicate child” after some illness that was supposed to have affected his kidneys, to a private establishment dedicated to St. Raphael: at neither did he learn anything in the scholastic line, neither reading nor writing nor arithmetic. Somehow the rudiments of these arts seeped into him quite early, but they did not do so in the classroom: to the end of his life he was not at home with the alphabet, and although in later years he was as keen as a hawk where the calculation of merchants’ commissions was concerned, his spelling remained highly personal. The one thing he did learn at school was that other people were willing to admit that he was an exceptional being, not subject to the commo
n law.

  Even in a very easy-going establishment a child who sat, not minding his book but drawing bulls or the live pigeon he had brought in his bosom, and who got up without leave to gape out the window, would have been sharply rebuked at the least and more probably flogged; but not Picasso. He would often arrive late when his father rather than Carmen brought him (the school was on the way to the museum) and he would sit there staring at the clock, waiting anxiously for the moment when he would be released, sometimes nursing the walking-stick, pigeon, or paintbrush that he had wrung from Don José as a hostage for his return. It does not appear that he was a wicked, turbulent, or dissipated pupil, but rather that he belonged on another plane: the master and even more surprisingly the other boys accepted this and they neither complained nor imitated his example when he stood up and walked out of the room altogether, looking for the headmaster’s wife, to whom he was much attached. “I used to follow her about like a puppy,” he said.

  Counting came hard: so did telling the time. Once when he was gazing from the classroom window he saw his uncle Antonio, Aunt Eloisa’s husband, who had a post in the town hall over the way. Pablo called out, begging his uncle to come and fetch him away—he was always very much afraid that they would forget him—and in reply to the question “When are you let out?” he replied “At one,” supposing that since one was the first of the numbers it would also be the nearest hour.

  Don José does not seem to have troubled much about his son’s lack of progress in the subjects taught at school, but he did teach Pablo a great deal about drawing and later about painting. He was the heir of the tradition of Spanish realism, but of a tradition sadly diminished and watered-down over the generations by academic doctrine, and most of what he taught was of course purely academic, a photographic realism, very slightly touched with fantasy; but he did have some ideas of his own. For example, he would cut his pigeons out in paper and move them about on the canvas in search of a satisfactory composition: he also handled cardboard and glue with great dexterity. In other hands and in another atmosphere these ideas might have borne earlier fruit. However, he provided his son with a solid, firmly-disciplined basis, and never can a man have had an apter, more eager pupil.

  This may well have been the time of their happiest relationship. The father knew a great deal about the craftsmanship of his calling; at that age the son can hardly have distinguished between technique and the purpose of technique; and Don José, less glum in those years, less battered by life, was vested with the nimbus of the omniscient initiator. Long, long after, Picasso recalled one particular picture of pigeons. He remembered it as an enormous canvas. “Imagine a cage with hundreds of doves in it,” he said to Sabartés. “Thousands of doves. Thousands. Millions. They were perched in rows, as though they were in a dovecote, a prodigious great dovecote. The picture was in the museum at Málaga: I have never seen it since.” Sabartés found it: the physically present birds amounted to nine: the canvas was quite small.

  Picasso never threw anything away if he could possibly avoid doing so, and some of the drawings and paintings of those days in Málaga have survived, together with many more from the following years at La Coroña and hundreds from his adolescence in Barcelona. Of these Málaga pictures, that which is usually called the earliest and which is dated 1890/91 is a little painting of a picador: it is oil upon wood (the smooth cedar tops of cigar-boxes were useful to a child rarely indulged with canvases) and it shows a burly man in yellow seated upon 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 Las
t 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.