Picasso: A Biography Read online

  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 that as he came into the world with the rites of the Church, so he left it with at least some of them.

  In 1891, in Málaga, the ten-year-old Picasso was more concerned with the ritual of the bull-ring than with any other sacrifice, and he recorded it diligently: but the days of his ordered, natural life were coming to an end. He now had a second sister, Concepción, born in 1887, and the flat was by so much the smaller; his father was growing even more withdrawn; and then, in a decision that caused great unhappiness, the municipality finally closed the museum. There had never been any margin for living in the Ruiz family, and this blow was disastrous.

  In his distress Don José found a post at La Coruña: he was to teach drawing and decoration in the Escuela Provincial de Bellas Artes. La Coruña is in Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, a great way off in the north, and obviously the whole family would have to live there. All at once Don José became aware that his son was if not wholly illiterate then something very like it. Illiteracy and a total inability to add two and two would for the time being have mattered little in his native city, where friends and connections would naturally stand by the boy; but in a remote and savage province like Galicia the rules would have to be obeyed, at least by strangers, and to get into any school Pablo would have either to pass an entrance examination or present a certificate of competence. There was no possibility of his passing an examination in any subject but drawing, no possibility at all, so Don José went to see a friend who had the power of granting certificates. “Very well,” said the friend, “but in common decency the child should at least appear to be examined.”

  The child appeared, and after some fruitless questions of a general nature, the child remaining mute, the examiner presented him with a sum, three plus one plus forty plus sixty-six plus thirty-eight, telling him kindly how to write it down and begging him not to be nervous. The first attempt was not wholly successful and the sum had to be written again: this time, when he showed it up, Pablo noticed that the examiner had made the addition himself on a scrap of paper, left obviously in sight. He memorized the figure, returned to his desk, wrote down the answer, drew a line beneath it with some complacency, and received his certificate.

  This valuable paper was packed, together with all the family’s portable possessions, and the home in the Plaza de la Merced fell to pieces. Dr. Salvador helped his brother to a passage by boat, and at the end of that summer of 1891 Picasso first took to the sea, at the beginning of his long voyage.

  *Family trees are always difficult to follow in a narrative: these are shown diagrammatically in Appendixes 1 and 2.

  Chapter II

  LA CORUÑA: a leaden sea and a weeping sky. Don José had looked forward with misgiving to this remote little town in a backward province, but he could never have imagined the cold, sodden reality: on seeing it, he withdrew into his humid lodgings, appalled. Until a southerner has had the living experience of it, he cannot possibly conceive the difference between the Mediterranean civilization, lived largely out of doors, and that of the north, where people huddle in unsociable family groups, each in its own house, to keep out of the cold and the rain.

  The voyage had been arduous in the extreme, and rather than face the equinoctial gales off Finisterre and the full horror of the Bay of Biscay the family left the ship at Vigo, although this meant taking the train to Santiago de Compostela and then the diligence on to La Coruña—eight hours of a crowded, lumbering horse-drawn vehicle, something between a coach and a covered wagon, in the pouring rain with two small children and a baby: the road in a chronic state of disrepair.

  Their arrival was inauspicious; they had left Málaga with the grapes ripening in the sun and the sugar-cane standing tall, perhaps the most delightful season of the year, and they reached La Coruña in time for the onset of the prodigious autumn storms. All this ironbound north and northeastern coast of Spain is exposed to the great winds that tear in over three thousand miles of Atlantic ocean, sweeping low cloud and vast sheets of rain before them; and the north-east comer is even more exposed than the rest. Galicia’s rainfall is the highest in the Peninsula, five and a half feet a year falling upon every square inch of Santiago, as opposed to London’s twenty-three and a half inches and New York’s forty-two. When it is neither blowing nor raining it is often foggy, as though the elements were hopelessly entangled; and this fog resolves itself into a cold, penetrating drizzle that streams upon the granite cliffs and the wet granite houses. There are pleasant days in the course of the year, when the sun peers through, lighting the pure sandy beaches, and when the deep fjords take on a certain charm; but then the warmth acts upon the piles of rotting kelp that the gales and furious tides (unknown in the Mediterranean) drive up to the high-water mark, and they breed swarms of noisome flies. In any case the Ruizes
saw none of these fine days for the first months of their stay: autumn, winter, and spring had to pass slowly by before there was any hope of sun, as they understood the term.

  These horrors impressed the young Picasso deeply, as well they might; but perhaps even more than by the incessant rain, the wind, the coal fires, the smoke-laden fog and the cold, he was shocked by the fact that in the streets the people spoke a different language. This was his first experience of being a foreigner, cut off; and for many small children the experience of hearing another language all round them, so that they are outsiders, debarred from the incessant, involuntary communication of the crowd and surrounded with secret, incomprehensible words, is deeply disturbing. The language spoken in La Coruña and the rest of Galicia is Gallego, a somewhat archaic variety of Portuguese, and although it is of course a Romance language other Spaniards do not understand it at all. The people can speak Castilian too, but among themselves it is Gallego: even now, with generations of military service and compulsory education in Castilian, a great many of them communicate in their own tongue, and in 1891 it was still more general. Figures for the turn of the century show 1,800,000 Gallegan-speakers out of a total population of just under two million.

  The contrast between Málaga and La Coruña was very great indeed, but it could have been equaled in other parts of Spain, a country separated by its geography and its history into such markedly distinct regions that some of the early rulers took the title of emperor of the Spains, dwelling upon the plural. Navarra, Aragón, Castilla, León, and Catalonia were once sovereign states, so were Asturias, Estremadura, Jaén, Córdoba, Sevilla, and several others; and Galicia was one of them, a geographic, economic, and linguistic entity far closer in habits and culture to Portugal than to León or Castilla, and inhabited by a race with the reputation of being hardy, honest, industrious, stupid, and unpolished: indeed, the word Gallego had a certain currency in the rest of Spain as a term of reproach, meaning boor. Traditionally, in such cities as Madrid, it was the Galician who brought the water, coal, and wood, carrying it up innumerable flights of stairs.

  This damp former kingdom, then, retained its individuality (and its diet) over the centuries, and the uprooted child Picasso was confronted not only with a strange language but also with strange forms and faces that to an Andalou scarcely seemed Spanish at all. The Moors did reach Galicia; but although they came from bitterly inhospitable regions, most being Berbers, they withdrew after no more than five years, unable to bear the climate. It is true that they were also encouraged to withdraw by the plague and the army of King Alphonso of Asturias, but the great point is that they went away without having bred there. No trace of the Moor remains in blood, customs, or architecture: these are the descendants of the native Iberians, the Suevi and the Visigoths, with perhaps the slightest touch of Roman.

  Faced with this different civilization, the Ruizes retired into their second-floor flat in the Calle Payo Gómez and watched the rain beating against the windows. They discussed the weather interminably—there was a great deal of it to discuss—and Don José at least felt the cold reach to his heart. His wife had a new home to set up, three children to look after, and the strangeness of Galician shopping to cope with—the makings of a gazpacho were hardly to be found, far less a bottle of generous wine. This left her little time for introspection, and in any case hers was a much happier temperament. For Pablo and his sisters too the initial horror faded; there was, after all, a new town to be seen, a town built on a peninsula with a harbor on one side, a beach on the other, and cliffs at the far end. It was not much of a town compared with Málaga—about a third of the size—and its solitary delight, apart from the port and the bull-ring, was a Roman tower on the howling eminence at the end of the peninsula, an erection called the Torre de Hercules by the inhabitants and the caramel tower by Don José. With its later additions it soared up four hundred feet, still serving as a lighthouse; and when the great Atlantic rollers drove in to break with a measured thunder at the foot of the cliff and sent their spray up to the tower it had a splendor of its own.

  The port was busy enough, but even when it was visible it was not to be compared with Málaga. The exports were hogs, horse-beans and roots (mostly for Cuba, then still a Spanish possession), and the imports mainly coal, arriving in dirty tramp-steamers from England and South Wales. The bull-ring was closed when they arrived, but even when it opened it was a disappointment. There is little comprehension of the corrida outside Andalucía, little grasp of those fine points that distinguish it from mere bull-baiting (or at the worst a vile butchery) and so raise it to the level of a savage, dangerous, poetic sacrifice. When the bullfighters are aware that the congregation does not know what the mystery is about, they will only perform, not officiate; and after a while, the season having come round at last, Don José was so disgusted that he gave up attending.

  Picasso drew the tower, as he drew everything else in La Coruña. The early drawings are still childish, or rather boyish, many of them being Illustrations to jokes about the weather; others, particularly those in the margins and blank pages of his schoolbooks, show the kind of battle that most schoolboys draw—Romans, savages, people with spears, swordsmen slashing away at one another. There are also some capital bulls. The school-books which Picasso preserved are in the museum at Barcelona: they resemble almost all school-books in being dog-eared, battered, and tedious, but they are of a considerably higher standard than might have been expected. One, which has selections from the classics and which Picasso adorned with a pen-and-ink Moor’s head and some pigeons far livelier than his father’s, has quite advanced Latin verse and passages from Cicero. How much Pablo made of it is another matter, but at least he had got into the school and he did well enough not to be sent away; furthermore at this time he wrote, or was compelled to write, a far more elegant, legible hand than he had ever used before or was ever to use again. The school in question was the Instituto da Guarda, and Picasso was admitted to the primer curso, the first year of the secondary cycle: the next year, in 1892, he also matriculated at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, where his father was teaching, while at the same time he carried on with his studies at the Instituto.

  At no time of his life was Picasso a willing writer of letters. In La Coruña he invented a way of communicating with his relatives in Málaga that called for little effort in the literary way: this was a small news-sheet “published every Sunday,” called sometimes Asul y Blanco and sometimes La Coruña, in which he drew local people, dogs, pigeons (one of his small advertisements reads “Pedigree pigeons purchased: apply second floor, 14 Calle Payo Gómez”), the “caramel tower” on a tray, and wrote short dispatches such as “The wind has started, and it will go on blowing until there is no La Coruña left,” or “The rain has begun already. It will not stop before summer,” or “At the time of going to press this publication had received no telegrams of any kind.” Then there were more jokes, some illustrated and most of this general nature: During an arithmetic examination: Master, “If you are given five melons and you eat four, what have you left?” Pupil, “One. “Master, “Are you sure that is all?” Pupil, “And a belly-ache.” Most of the people are struggling with the wind or the rain or both (La Coruña’s main industry seems to have been the manufacture and repair of umbrellas); and to show Málaga the extreme wild remoteness of these parts there is a drawing of the Galician bagpipes.

  These too are still entirely boyish productions, with little hint of what was so soon to appear; and it is worth pointing out that the spelling entonses, for example, or asul, rather than the orthodox entonces and azul, shows that Picasso had retained his Andalusian way of speaking (the Castilian pronounces z and soft c as th, whereas the southerner makes no attempt at any such thing—nor do many South Americans, Andalusian in origin). These mistakes, together with others that have nothing to do with phonetics, also show that Picasso remained impervious to printed shape: which is strange, when one considers his astonishingly accurate recall of other forms, even t
hen. And what is more curious still is his mirror-version of the final question-mark: this might have been influenced by the Spanish convention of starting a question with another question-mark, upside-down, but later he sometimes inverted the esses of his signature, and when he took to etching and engraving he could not or would not grasp that the printing of the plate necessarily reversed the legend. It is as though there were some confusion in the mental process that separates right from left.

  These childish things were soon to be left behind, however, and although the facetious illustrative sketch reappeared at intervals, the young Picasso suddenly moved on to an extraordinary degree of maturity, to serious and as it were total painting. He might perhaps have done so a little earlier if his father had set about his education as a painter more seriously; but the separation from his friends, his native climate, his whole way of life, coming on top of his other reasons for unhappiness, quite crushed Don José’s spirit: he hardly ever went out, but stood at the window, watching the rain. When he did leave the house, it was to go to the art-school, just over the way, or to Mass: the then unchanging Mass was one of the few remaining links with his former life—that and the pigeons, which he still kept, and which he still painted from time to time, although with little enthusiasm, and that little diminishing fast. This is the Don José that his son painted, a man so deeply sad that it is painful to look at some of the portraits. Yet at this time he was still capable of making friends—his final withdrawal came later—and one of them was Dr. Raimundo Pé rez Costales, an interesting man who had been minister of labor and of the fine arts under the short-lived and anarchical First Republic of Pi y Margall in 1873: according to Sabartés he was so much attached to Don José that when the Ruizes left La Coruña, Dr. Costales settled at Málaga in the hope that his friend would eventually return to his native town.