Richard Dorment's review of the first volume of John Richardson's Life
of Picasso appeared in the TLS of September 13, 1991.
Although one often thinks of Picasso as a Catalan, in fact he grew up all over
Spain. He was born in Malaga in the far south in 1881, but when he was ten
his father accepted a post as a drawing master in La Coruna on the stormy
north-west Atlantic coast. Only when the family finally settled in Barcelona
in 1895 did Picasso adopt Catalan as his first language. But despite
Barcelona’s relative sophistication (and despite fourteen months in Madrid),
the forces which moulded the young Picasso were inevitably provincial.
Catholic, and on the whole second rate. His father, Don José Ruiz Blasco, a
pigeon-fancying hack artist, encouraged his talented son to paint lugubrious
academic machines. A bad painter, a bad teacher, and, in his son’s eyes,
“bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois”, he raised his sights for Pablo only as
high as an academic post in one of the State art schools. That, and maybe a
bit of a name for himself in Spain.
Volume One of John Richardson’s projected four-volume A Life of Picasso takes
us up to 1906, when the artist was twenty-five and about to begin work on
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. Reproduced, but not discussed, on the last page
of this book, the picture Richardson describes as “the most innovative
painting since Giotto” seems to lie in wait for the reader, casting its
shadow on the hundreds of pages that have gone before. Richardson has a long
and complicated story to tell, and this first book is about the blind alleys
down which Pablo Ruiz Blasco lurched before he finally emerged as “Yo El
Rey” – Picasso. The metamorphosis from provincial prodigy to international
celebrity is illustrated by the forty or so self-portraits reproduced here,
as well as by the signatures painstakingly copied from a succession of
heroes with which he signed his own works: “Forain”, “Steinlen”, “Daumier”,
“Goya”, “Paul Picasso” (ie Paul Gauguin). From the lachrymose sentiment of
tenebrist and modernista works painted in fin-de-siècle Barcelona and
Madrid, to the ethereal, but still derivative, beauty of the Blue and Rose
periods, Richardson chronicles one false start after another. Only as one
puts this book down does one realize, with something of a shock, that it is
merely a prologue to the career that lies ahead.
Initially, Richardson is, of course, dealing with a nineteenth-century artist
– and a very conservative one at that. In big early works such as “Science
and Charity” and “First Communion”, specifically painted for the Expositións
de Bellas Artes in Barcelona and Madrid, and in two altar-pieces painted for
a Barcelona convent at the age of sixteen (since destroyed), we inhale the
air of sweet piety that hung over late nineteenth-century Spain like
incense. There was nothing unusual about the young Picasso’s formal
training. Nor was he the child prodigy he liked to remember late in life.
Though he soon learned to despise academic methods (“in art one must kill
one’s father”), he never despised the discipline those methods entailed nor
the fruits they produced. It was a youth spent endlessly drawing from
plaster casts and from the life that turned him into the greatest
draughtsman (but not the greatest painter) of all time.
Picasso never found it hard to make friends. One of the earliest was
Manuel.Pallarès, with whom he spent six months in 1898 living naked and
close to the soil in or near the mountain village of Horta de Ebro, in the
Alta Terra between Catalonia and Aragon. There he learned to hunt, chop
wood, light a fire, milk a cow and kill a chicken. This experience was
crucial in the transformation of a middle-class, streetwise boy into an
artist who felt himself to be in touch with elemental, eternal things.
Rather more interesting than Pallarès is the painter Carles Casegemas. A
charming manic depressive, given to spouting Maeterlinck and Verlaine, he is
the prototype for all the literary men with whom Picasso would surround
himself throughout his life, the blueprint for Max Jacob, Apollinaire,
Cocteau and Michel Leiris. Casegemas is also the first in a series of
psychotics who would become attached to Picasso and then kill themselves.
And like many others we will meet in the volumes to follow, his life has no
particular importance apart from his association with the artist. If
Casegemas is remembered, it is as the catalyst whose death brought on the
long lingering dusk of the Blue Period.
As a precocious teenager hanging around the Barcelona café Els Quatre Gats,
Picasso made friends with a fairly distinguishedcircle of avant-garde
modernista painters. Santiago Rusi-nol, Ramon Pichot, Miquel Utrillo, Isidre
Nonell and Ramon Casas mingled art nouveau with symbolism and social realism
in their work. Modernisme encompassed both high art and illustration, and
also had strong political – and particularly anarchist – overtones. Just as
Horta had enabled Picasso to see himself as a man of the soil, these
painters helped him assume the identity of a “modern” artist. Visually, the
sources from which their art derives – Steinlen, Beardsley, Puvis de
Chavannes and Munch – are more significant for Picasso’s development than is
anything he took directly from them. And although in both Barcelona and
Paris Picasso sometimes seems to move in exclusively anarchist circles,
Richardson dismisses the idea that Picasso actively participated in their
politics. This rings true. For all his liberal sympathies, he was
essentially apolitical, and anyway, he was terrified of the police.
On his first trip to Paris in 1900 to see the Exposition Universelle, he stuck
close to these Catalan cronies, but on his second, longer, stay in 1901 he
began to make friends with French literary bohemians. During Picasso’s early
years in Paris, Rodin, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin were all still
working. When Picasso finally found the thread which was to lead him via
Gauguin’s primitivism to the “Demoiselles”, two of the pictures most
important to the breakthrough were the latter’s “Bathers” and “Riders on the
Beach”, both painted only four years earlier, in 1902. At his first show at
Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in the spring of 1901 he was still churning out
slick imitations of Toulouse-Lautrec, reminiscent of some minor Scottish
Colourist. But later that same year, the first Blue Period pictures began to
emerge. By appropriating the literary enthusiasms of the circle of poets he
soon gathered around him, Picasso gradually turned himself into an artist of
intellectual substance, learning, he said, that “art emanates from Sadness
and Pain”.
The agent for this change is Max Jacob. Cultivated, homosexual, and violently
in love with the indifferent young Spaniard, Jacob taught Picasso to speak
French and to love French literature, especially the poetry of Verlaine and
Baudelaire (but not Mallarmé or Rimbaud, who came later, through Guillaume
Apollinaire). Through Jacob’s interest in cabbala, astrology, palmistry and
the tarot Picasso began to introduce mystery and ambiguity – particularly
sexual ambiguity – into his art. And it is this lingering symbolist perfume,
the sense of things implied but not seen, that will permeate his Cubist
period.
In the summer of 1901, the impotent Casegemas blew his brains out in a
Montmartre restaurant after first taking a pot shot at a woman named
Germaine Gargallo (later Picasso’s mistress, later still the wife of his
friend Ramon Pichot, and known to the world as the floozie in the moulting
feather boa at the bar in Picasso’s “Au Lapin Agile”). When this story is
usually told, it is said that in Picasso’s first Blue Period picture, “The
Burial of Casegemas” he attempted to exorcize the guilt he felt both
for having brought Casegemas to Paris in the first place, and for having
been in Spain at the time of his suicide. Richardson disagrees. He dismisses
the picture, a blasphemous parody of El Greco’s “The Burial of Count Orgaz”,
as “art school facetiousness” – a callow nineteen-year-old’s attempt to keep
at arm’s length the reality of his friend’s death. Much more significant for
Picasso’s growth as a man and as an artist are two small “Heads of
Casegemas”, which he painted for himself and never sold. Though Richardson
points out that the version now in the Musée Picasso appropriately pays
tribute to Van Gogh (another artist who shot himself), I wonder whether
Picasso could have seen a reproduction of Hubert Von Herkomer’s shockingly
realistic portrait of Queen Victoria on her death-bed, painted earlier that
same year.
In the small “Head of Casegemas”, Picasso forced himself to look at what he
had not actually seen: the bullet hole in the painter’s right temple.
Picasso is like St Thomas in reverse, unable to believe in this death until
he could see and touch this wound. Beginning with this picture, between 1901
and 1906 he gradually discarded second-hand poetic sentiment to confront the
facts of Casegemas’s death, his own desperate poverty, and the syphilis he
probably contracted around this time. He replaced the comforting evasions of
fin-de-siècle art with something more shocking and more challenging. This he
did by trial and error, imitating a succession of masters in the hope that
the next would provide him with the vocabulary he needed.
One by one they failed him. Beardsley, Nicholson, Whistler, Steinlen and
Toulouse-Lautrec: in the end, all are artists who celebrate the surface of
things. It now seems odd that for one moment Picasso thought that Puvis de
Chavannes’s decorative classicism might be an adequate conduit for the
tragic emotions he sought to express in the series of paintings inspired by
the syphilitic prostitutes in the Saint-Lazare prison, but he did. Many of
his gorgeously maudlin paintings of these lonely figures shuffling across
empty landscapes or huddled in the white moonlight are fundamentally phoney
because their seductive beauty is it odds with the genuine misery on which
they are based.
Picasso would eventually find a deeper and more direct approach to experience
through Gauguin and El Greco. But first he had to live through what feels
like the long depression of the Blue Period, followed by the emotional
coldness behind the false dawn of the Rose. In the end, like a child
learning to separate from its mother, he would learn to do without the
consolation of visual beauty. This is what makes him an infinitely greater
artist than, say, Matisse.
Meanwhile, the life. There is something thrilling about its quickening pace,
as the cast of characters we know as the bande à Picasso gathers around the
painter at the Bateau Lavoir, his “rendez-vous des poètes” in Montmartre.
These people were Picasso’s education; for us readers they have the added
virtue of being highly entertaining. There is Jacob, a superb mimic dancing
barefoot and en pointe and singing in a falsetto soprano until the room full
of friends rocked with laughter. (Very different were the bearded Leo
Stein’s imitations of Isadora Duncan, which one contemporary described as
“too beautiful to be burlesque”.) We first meet Gertrude Stein in the boxing
ring, sparring with her welterweight partner and causing the chandelier in
the flat below to sway (“now give me one on the jaw. Now give me one in the
kidney”). It is not so much her mind as her solid bulk that would inspire
the lumbering nudes that precede the “Demoiselles”. Alfred Jarry, having
drunk his tipple of absinthe diluted with red ink, briefly flashes by on his
bicycle, waving his rusty Browning revolver. Though Picasso did not in fact
meet him, Jarry’s sexual iconoclasm stands in relation to the “Demoiselles”
as Apollinaire’s melancholy harlequins and saltimbanques do to the imagery
of the Rose period. Then there are the dealers and collectors: the saintly
Jewess Berthe Weill, the opportunistic Cajun Ambroise Vollard, the
perceptive American Leo Stain, the prissy Prussian Wilhelm Uhde or the
pig-faced Russian Sergei Shchukin.
With each, Richardson does his detective work, explaining how simple
biographical facts about the people who surrounded Picasso can help to
explain motifs which become a part of the artist’s lifelong imagery. The
best example is his discovery that a beautiful watercolour of 1904 shows
Fernande Olivier’s violent husband, a frightening lout named Debienne,
watching over the sleeping Fernande. But then, as though to neutralize the
danger in which he had symbolically placed his mistress, a second
watercolour shows Picasso himself lovingly guarding her sleeping form. Years
later, Picasso fuses the two images into a scene in which as a faun, both
frightening and loving, he unveils the sleeping Therèse Walter.
Then there are the incidents from Picasso’s childhood which will surely
reverberate through future volumes. Black Spanish Catholicism clung to him
long after he thought he had shaken it off. Late in life he told his second
wife Jacqueline of a vow made to God in 1895: if his favourite sister
Conchita recovered from diphtheria, he, Pablo, would never paint or draw
again. That he remembered this secret after sixty years suggests that his
childish relief at Conchita’s death – a death which enabled him to fulfil
his destiny – had left him strangled by guilt. And though Richardson does
not here elaborate on the story’s importance for the artist’s later life, it
helps to explain Picasso’s compulsion to sacrifice a succession of women in
order to continue to paint – in Richardson’s apt phrase – his “inspirational
guilt”.
Paris itself is a character in this book, but a strange and unfamiliar Paris,
a dangerous place where everyone carries a gun, and whole areas are
controlled by bands of razor-wielding apaches. Through the memoirs of those
who belonged to the bande à Picasso (and notably those of Fernande Olivier),
we enter a city in which suicides, murders, drugs and casual violence are a
part of the fabric of everyday life. A complex of wooden studios like the
Bateau Lavoir into which Picasso moved in 1904 had only one tap and one
toilet. In summer, it was so hot that Picasso painted naked while Fernande
lounged on the bed wearing only a scarf wrapped round her waist, trailing
clouds of her favourite scents, Chypre or Smoke. In winter, we catch a
glimpse of him trudging through the falling snow across Paris to
Montparnasse to sell a picture for a few francs, like a character from
Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème.
“Picasso’s subjects usually have their origin in everyday life”, Richardson
writes, and proceeds to discuss the pictures in terms of the biographical
information they yield. For example, “The Family of Saltimbanques” in the
Chester Dale Collection of the National Gallery in Washington is seen in
relation both to Picasso’s interest in palmistry and to his use of drugs.
Richardson shows that the composition is based on the imprint of the
artist’s left hand. His use of opium apparently began as early as 1904 and
continued at least until 1908 when the drug-crazed young German painter G.
Wiegels hanged himself in his studio at the Bateau Lavoir. Opium, henbane,
hashish, morphine, ether: all were ubiquitous in Picasso’s circle, and
freely available at the local chemist’s or private fumiers around Paris.
That the artist was stoned when he painted the “Family of Saltimbanques”,
and pictures like it, goes a long way towards explaining the lack of
tension, the dulled eyes, the emotional isolation of individual figures and
the dreamy mood of the Rose period. Richardson memorably conjures up the
“Family of Saltimbanques” as it might have looked in Picasso’s studio
at night, by gaslight, seen through clouds of opium. He concludes his
masterly treatment of the picture by pointing out that its real subject is
the very young painter’s, and his friends’, inexperience of life. It is
Picasso’s version of the question Gauguin asked in his masterpiece “D’où
venons nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?”
In general, Richardson is not afraid to make critical judgments, and many of
his opinions are harsh. He is reserved in his admiration for the overvalued
Blue Period (“twisted sentimentality”). Albert Barnes’s Picassos were not
first rate, his “Ascetic” of 1903 too stridently blue, his “Blind Flower
Seller” of 1906 an ambitious failure (though in its present condition I
wonder how Richardson can tell). This naturally leads to disagreements. How
can Richardson dismiss the artist who painted the “Portrait of Pere Mañach”
of 1901 as a poor colourist? The picture is luscious with aquamarines,
pinks, poison yellows and that amazing red tie. When Picasso claimed to have
anticipated the Fauves, he was wrong, but not all that wrong. Then too,
there are a few paintings which Richardson seems to pass over too quickly.
In the “Two Boys”, also in Washington, Picasso’s use of two identical and
almost faceless ciphers posed side by side in standard academic positions
(one as the Spinaro, the other as a Kouras) is significant precisely because
the subject is not the boys themselves, but the space around and between
them. This seems to me almost as important for Cubism as the primitivism
which immediately succeeded it.
John Richardson sets his opening pages in the recent past, with Picasso alive,
an old man reminiscing with his future biographer about the early days. The
book that follows is told, as it were, in flashback. Richardson got to know
Picasso in the 1950s when he was living with the art historian and collector
Douglas Cooper in the South of France. Picasso knew that Richardson would
write his life, and over and over we hear his own voice explaining,
correcting, doubting. A close look at the reproductions of photographs shows
that many of them are signed by Picasso and inscribed to Richardson, and
when we ask ourselves how the author could possibly have known this or that
obscure fact or telling detail about Picasso's private life, the footnote
gives us the answer: he asked him. But one of the most remarkable things
about this masterly biography is Picasso’s wit and intelligence as
communicated through Richardson. Perhaps this should not be surprising. But,
as Richardson explains, those famous photographs of Picasso “clowning” in
front of photographers in the 1960s, have left the impression of a man less
sardonic, less verbally sophisticated than he actually was. As in so many
areas, Richardson sets the record straight, demonstrating that Picasso’s
knowledge of poetry and drama was both profound and discriminating. To the
end of his life, Picasso was baffled by Gertrude Stein’s writings, which,
not speaking English, he could never quite be sure were as incomprehensible
as he found them. To him the words she claimed to use “cubistically” made no
sense. “That sounds rather silly”, he tells Richardson. “With lines and
colours one can make patterns, but if one doesn’t use words according to
their meaning, they aren’t words at all.” His dry humour too is often
evidenced. When the passage in which Stein described Picasso's creative
process as “he empties himself and the moment he has completed emptying
himself he must recommence emptying himself . . .” was explained to him, he
commented, “She’s confusing two functions.”
This is a biography conceived on a grand scale. The cast of major and minor
characters numbers in the hundreds, there are dozens of journeys, a
bewildering number of changes of scene, and a stylistic development that is
anything but predictable. It is the highest compliment one can pay John
Richardson that he handles it all with patience and subtlety, taking us step
by step, month by month and sometimes day by day into Picasso’s mind,
building up a picture of the young Picasso that will, I think, never be
surpassed.
