Discover Pablo Picasso and His Revolutionary Art

The text below is the excerpt of the book Pablo Picasso (ISBN: 9781783104253), written by Anatoli Podoksik, published by Parkstone International.

Pablo Picasso’s years of travel consisted of several phases within a seven-year period, from sixteen to twenty-three, from his initial departure to Madrid, the country’s artistic capital, in 1897, to his final settling in Paris, artistic capital of the world, in the spring of 1904. As it had during his first visit, on his way to Barcelona in 1895, Madrid to Picasso meant first and foremost the Prado Museum, which he frequented more often than the Royal Academy of San Fernando in order to copy the Old Masters (he was particularly attracted by Velazquez). However, as Sabartés was to note, “Madrid left a minimal imprint on the development of his spirit.” It might be said that the most important events for Picasso in the Spanish capital were the harsh winter of 1897-1898 and the subsequent illness that symbolically marked the end of his “academic career”.

In contrast, the time spent at Horta de Ebro – a village in the mountainous area of Catalonia, where he went to convalesce and where he remained for eight long months (until the spring of 1899) – was of such significance for Picasso that even decades later he would invariably repeat: “All that I know, I learnt in Palarés’s village.” Together with Manuel Palarés, a friend he had met in Barcelona, who invited him to live in the family home at Horta, Pablo carried his easel and sketchbook over all the mountain paths surrounding the village, which had preserved the harsh quality of a medieval town. With Palarés, Picasso scaled the mountains, spent much of the summer living in a cave, sleeping on beds of lavender, washing in mountain springs, and wandering along cliffs with the risk of plunging into the turbulent river far below. He experienced nature’s power and came to know the eternal values of a simple life with its work and holidays.

Indeed, the months spent at Horta were significant not so much in the sense of artistic production (only a few studies and the sketchbooks have survived) as for their key role in the young Picasso’s creative biography, with its long process of maturing. This basically short biographic period merits a special chapter in Picasso’s Bildungsroman, a chapter portraying scenes of bucolic solitude spent amid pure, powerful and life-giving nature, reflecting feelings of freedom and fulfilment, offering a view of natural man and of life flowing in harmony with the epic rhythms of the seasons. But, as is always the case in Spain, this chapter also includes the brutal interplay of the forces of temptation, salvation and death – those “backstage players” in the drama of human existence.

Palau i Fabre, who described Picasso’s first stay at Horta, notes: “It seems more than paradoxical – I nearly said providential – that Picasso should have been reborn, so to speak, at that time, when he left Madrid and the copying of the great masters of the past in order to strengthen his links with the primitive forces of the country.”

Another point: the value of the young Picasso’s experience at Horta de Ebro is that it should provide scholars with food for thought, regarding both the question of his Mediterranean sources and Iberian archaism at a crucial moment of his formation in 1906 and his second trip to Horta ten years later (1909), which marked a new stage in his artistic development: Cubism. After his first stay at Horta de Ebro, a matured and renewed Picasso returned to Barcelona, which he now saw in a new light: as a centre of progressive trends and as a city open to modern ideas. Indeed, Barcelona’s cultural atmosphere was, on the eve of the twentieth century, brimming with optimism. Calls for a Catalan regional renaissance, the agitation of anarchists, the latest technological wonders (the automobile, electricity, the phonograph, the cinema), and the novel idea of mass production served as a backdrop for the growing certainty in young minds that the new century would usher in an unparalleled flowering of the arts. It was therefore not surprisingly in Barcelona, attracted to contemporary Europe, and not elsewhere in patriarchal, lethargic Spain, that Modernism appeared. The Catalan version of cosmopolitan, artistic fin-de-siècle tendencies combined a broad spectrum of ideological and aesthetic influences, from Scandinavian symbolism to Pre-Raphaelism, from Wagner and Nietzsche to French Impressionism and the style of popular Parisian journals.

Picasso, who was not yet eighteen, had reached the point of his greatest rebelliousness; he repudiated academia’s anemic aesthetics along with realism’s pedestrian prose and, quite naturally, joined those who called themselves modernists, that is, the non-conformist artists and writers, those whom Sabartés called “the élite of Catalan thought” and who were grouped around the artists’ café Els Quatre Gats.

Much has been said concerning the influence of Barcelona modernism on Picasso’s turn-of-the-century work, regarding which Cirlot notes: “Critics find it very useful to be able to talk about ‘influences’ because it enables them to explain something they do not understand by something they do, often completely erroneously and resulting in utter confusion.” Indeed, the issue of temporary influences of style (Ramón Casas, Isidro Nonell, Hermenegildo Angladay Camarasa), which tends only to obscure the authentic, natural elements of Picasso’s profound talent, should be eliminated from our consideration. Barcelona modernism served to give the young Picasso an avant-garde education and to liberate his artistic thinking from classroom clichés. But this avant-garde university was also merely the arena for his coming-to-be. Picasso, who in 1916 compared himself with a tenor who reaches a note higher than the one written in the score, was never the slave of what attracted him; in fact, Picasso invariably begins where influence ends. True, during those Barcelona years Picasso was much taken with the graphic “argot” practised by contemporary Parisian magazines (the style of Forain and Steinlen, who drew for Gil Bias and La Vie Parisienne, among others). He cultivated the same kind of sharp, trenchant style, which excludes the superfluous and yet, through the interplay of a few lines and dots, manages to give living expression to any character or situation, depicted through ironic eyes. Much later, Picasso was to say that in essence all good portraits are caricatures; during his Barcelona years he drew a wealth of caricature portraits of his avant-garde friends – as if caught up in a frenzy of graphic inspiration. He seems to have been trying to conquer his model, to subject it to his artistic will, to force it into the confines of a graphic formula. It is also true, however, that the literary, narrative quality of the boy Pablo’s handwritten and illustrated La Coruña journals find their way into this new, modernistic form.

During 1899 and 1900 the only subjects Picasso deemed worthy of painting were those which reflected the “final truth”: the transience of human life and the inevitability of death (see The Kiss of Death). Bidding the deceased farewell, a vigil by the coffin, a cripple’s agony on a hospital bed, a scene in a death room or near a dying woman’s bed: repentance of a ne’er-do-well husband… a long-haired poet steeped in sorrow… a lover on bended knee… a grief-stricken young monk. All these were versions of that same theme (the Museo Picasso in Barcelona has no less than twenty-five such graphic works and five painted sketches). Finally he executed a large composition called The Last Moments, which was shown in Barcelona at the beginning of 1900 and later that same year in Paris at the Exposition Universelle. Picasso then re-used the canvas for his famous Blue Period painting La Vie (the earlier work was only recently discovered thanks to X-ray examination). Everything in The Last Moments is theoretical: its morbid symbolism, its characters (the young priest standing at the dying woman’s bedside) and even its style, which bespeaks the artist’s affinity with the “spiritual” painting of El Greco, then considered the founding father of the anti-academic, modernist tradition. That painting belonged to Picasso only to the extent that he himself belonged to that period, the period of Maeterlinck, Munch, Ibsen, Carrière. The marked resemblance between the Symbolist The Last Moments and Science and Charity of Picasso’s school days is not accidental. Notwithstanding the youthful preoccupation with the theme of death, its quasi-decadent embodiment here creates the impression of an abstract exercise, as do many of the works Picasso produced in the Catalan modernist style. Decadence was foreign to Picasso; he inevitably looked at it with an ironically raised eyebrow, as a manifestation of weakness and lifelessness. He passed too rapidly through modernism and, having exhausted it, found himself at a dead end, without a future. It was Paris that saved him, and after only two seasons there he wrote to his French friend Max Jacob in the summer of 1902 about how isolated he had felt in Barcelona among his friends, “local painters” (he sceptically underlined these words in his letter), who wrote “very bad books” and painted “idiotic pictures”.

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