But undoubtedly it has power, ability, and talent.”
As it became increasingly obvious that he would have to go home again he offered all the pictures that Berthe Weill had been unable to sell, to anyone who would give two hundred francs for the lot. This was in January, the cruelest month, and to warm them a little—warmth being a substitute for food as well as a blessing in itself—he burned his drawings and his watercolors, a great heap of them.
He remembered this as the hardest time he ever went through, not only because of the hunger and the cold but above all because of his disgust, deep discouragement, and near-despair. Yet it came to an end: Madame Bernard bought the “Maternity” alone for two hundred francs. On January 13, 1903, Picasso drew another of his auques, showing the story of Max Jacob—Max writing a book, taking it to a publisher—reading it aloud—leaving the publisher’s office with his hat on one side, crying Olé, olé!—dining at Maxim’s with women of the town—being given a crown of laurels and a ham by Fame—and almost immediately afterwards he took the train for Barcelona.
Before leaving he went to Montmartre and asked Pichot to keep his pictures for him: in the course of the next year or so Pichot mislaid them entirely, and if they had not eventually been found, stuffed away out of sight on the dusty top of a cupboard, “there would,” said Picasso, “have been no Blue Period, because everything I had painted up until then was in that roll.”
If Picasso was speaking seriously he must have had an idea of the Blue Period quite unlike that of the art-historians, since many of the finest Blue pictures were painted during the following eighteen months in Barcelona, and since the period does not come to an official end until 1904: but it is a thousand to one that he was doing nothing of the kind—he almost never spoke of the official periods at all, but said, “that was painted at the Bateau-Lavoir, that at Céret, that in the boulevard de Clichy,” and so on. At all events his palette showed little change until he returned to Paris, met his first relatively permanent mistress, and exorcised the ghost of Casagemas.
For Casagemas was with him still: Picasso lived at home in the family flat, and, above all at first, he ate at home; but he worked in the very studio in the Riera de Sant Joan that he had shared with Casagemas, his friend Angel de Soto having taken it some time before. Here he was surrounded by the immediate presence of his friend; even the pictures, the furniture, and the servants they had painted together were still there; and presently he began a series of drawings that was to culminate in one of the most significant pictures of this period, that which some dealer or critic entitled “La Vie” and which, although its allegorical content is open to many interpretations, is certainly concerned with Casagemas’ death and the part Picasso played in that tragedy.
But although the drawings began early, the picture itself was not painted until the end of 1903 or more probably in early 1904, and Picasso did a great deal before then. First he picked up the threads of his old life, going to see Pallarès, Sabartés, his friends at the Quatre Gats, and many, many others. And then, although he was never concerned with politics, the atmosphere of Barcelona in 1903 was enough to force itself upon a man with much less social awareness, much less human solidarity, than Picasso. Revolutionary agitation among the students was so great that the authorities closed the university altogether; there were seventy-three strikes in that one year alone, some accompanied by riots; the repression was exceptionally harsh and bloody; and the hunting down of anarchists and “subversive elements” went on with even greater zeal. Unemployment increased; the fate of the poorer working people and of the outcasts, the old, the blind, the crippled, grew more desperate still. This was reflected in Picasso’s painting: 1903 was the year of the “Old Jew” (an ancient blind beggar with a little bright-eyed boy guarding him), the “Blind Man’s Meal” (a thin figure, quite young, seated at a table, holding a piece of bread and feeling for the pitcher), and of the “Old Guitar-Player”; of many lonely whores, drinking without joy and waiting interminably, of “La Celestina,” a dignified wall-eyed bawd (bawds are a great feature of the Spanish tradition: another Ruiz, the Reverend Juan, arch-priest of Hita in the fourteenth century, wrote about one, and both the young and the old Picasso drew and painted dozens, though few men can have needed their services less), and of “The Embrace,” a recurring theme, here exemplified by a naked pregnant woman clasped to a naked man, their bowed heads merged in great but motionless distress. Picasso was deeply concerned with poverty, with blindness (poverty’s ultimate degree), and with solitude; and his means of communicating his concern at this period has been labeled mannerist because of a similarity between his treatment of emaciated limbs, angular postures, and elongated hands and that of El Greco or Morales. The label is useful, no doubt, and certainly Picasso had the greatest respect for El Greco; but perhaps it is even more to the point that he, like so many other Spanish painters who could really see, lived in a country where extreme poverty was endemic and where emaciated forms were common—a country, too, which was the first to receive the greater and the lesser pox, with its attendant blindness, from the New World, and where both were so very widely spread.
Hands: Picasso studied them from his earliest days to his last, and it is easy to pick striking examples of his use of those almost autonomous creatures to say widely different things. One is the “Guitar-Player” of 1903, whose tall, gaunt figure is cramped into the rectangle of the frame and whose raised left hand, stopping the strings at the top of the diagonal formed by foot, knee, the guitar, and the guitar’s long neck, suddenly arrests the line with four pale transversal bars across the darkness, forming a point of tension that counterbalances the sharply-bowed blind head. Another is a somewhat later watercolor of a madman, whose gesticulating, reasoning fingers are far more lunatic than even his hairy face.
But not all the work of the Barcelona Blue Period is sad; far from it. Picasso often went to see his friends the Junyer-Vidal brothers, who had inherited a haberdashery, so that Sebastià now devoted more of his time to cotton thread and knitted drawers than to painting. Picasso spent many an evening behind the shop, and since he could not be easy without a pencil in his hand, he drew on the backs of their trade-cards and sometimes on their bills: the drawings were generally amusing and often bawdy, though many harked back tenderly to his peasant days with Pallarès at Horta; and the brothers kept them, forming a collection of scores or even hundreds.
Another friend was Benet Soler, a tailor who is said to have worked in Paris; he had a shop in the Plaza de Santa Ana, a few steps from the Quatre Gats, and he loved pictures, especially Picasso’s. In exchange for clothes he accumulated one of the finest collections of the Blue Period ever gathered under one private roof, including a great many drawings and even some curious engravings done, as Soler’s daughter told Josep Palau, with the point of a needle in the flat triangular chalks that tailors use for marking cloth. What is more, Picasso painted the tailor’s portrait several times, just as he painted so many of his friends, particularly Sebastià Junyer-Vidal, Angel de Soto, and Sabartés; and this year he undertook a family piece, a calm, good-humored triptych showing the whole household and their dog.
There were many other portraits this year, among them perhaps that of Corina Romeu, though it is sometimes dated 1902. If it does belong to 1903 it may have been a farewell present, for in July the Quatre Gats closed its Gothic doors; when they opened again it was to admit only the members of the Cercle de Sant Lluc, the new masters of the place. This was a severe blow to Picasso and his friends: they had met so often at the Quatre Gats and it had been there for so many years of their youth that it had come to seem eternal. They were lost without it, for the more recent Guayaba was not the same thing at all; and Picasso, for one, was driven to even harder work. Then came a second blow. Pèl i Ploma died, to be succeeded by Forma, from which Picasso was excluded, although the leading figure in the new review was still Utrillo.
Picasso wrote to Max Jacob from the Riera de Sant Joan: as usual he put no date, but from his mentions of work and boredom he was probably writing after the death of the Quatre Gats. The letter is written on the official paper of Soto’s father, an inspector-general of internal customs, and it is illustrated back and front with the view from the studio window—churches, roofs, a bell-tower.
Mon chere Max je te ecrite en face de ce que je t’ai desine premier-mente il y a beaucoup temps que je ne te ecrit pas et vrement ce pas pour ne penser pas à toi cet pasque je trabaille