is not the place for a detailed history of Catalonia and its capital: but the culture into which Picasso was plunged was determined by that history, and since he passed his most formative years in Barcelona, becoming integrated with the Catalan community, speaking their language, and making his earliest and most lasting friends among them, some modest outline is essential to an understanding of the forces that worked upon the vital years of his adolescence and early manhood.
In the middle ages Catalonia was an independent country, lying on both sides of the eastern Pyrenees, but with most of its territory in the Peninsula. The Moors had held it for a while, but Charlemagne soon thrust them out, and in the ninth century Wilfred the Shaggy cut himself free from all foreign allegiance and ruled without contest as a sovereign chief of state.
His country was poor in natural resources, but rich in an active, enterprising population. (“From a stone the Catalan will draw bread” says the Spanish proverb.) After the turmoil of the Moorish wars those who lived upon the coast early returned to commerce, carrying on the Roman tradition; and in spite of their indifferent harbors they soon became one of the most important trading nations in the Mediterranean. Barcelona rivaled Venice and Genoa; Catalan ships sailed to the North Sea and the Baltic, to Alexandria and points beyond; Catalan maritime law and marine insurance were accepted as standard far and wide; and while the other states of Spain were shut off from the rest of Europe, preoccupied with centuries of war against the Moors or with fratricidal struggles for power, Catalonia flourished, with a splendid literature of its own, a highly distinctive architecture, a school of painting which bears comparison with that of Lombardy, a renowned university, and a general culture that had long been wide open to influences from France, Provence, Italy, Byzantium, and the learned Moors and Jews of southern and central Spain.
This was the golden age to which Picasso’s Catalan friends looked back with a resentful nostalgia—the age when the Counts of Barcelona, who by marriage had become kings of Aragón, carried the Catalan tongue far beyond its original limits, conquering the Balearic islands, Sicily, Naples, Corsica, Sardinia, the Moorish Valencia, and all the Moslem country down to Murcia, an age whose architectural glories still filled their city.
Even in the early seventeenth century Cervantes could speak of Barcelona as “the seat of courtesy, the haven of strangers, the refuge of the distressed, the mother of the valiant, the champion of the wronged, the abode of true friendship, unique both in beauty and situation,” but although the splendid buildings were still there, the glory was already gone. That unhappy marriage with the heiress of Aragón was followed in the course of time by the union of Aragón and Castilla in the persons of Ferdinand and Isabella. Their heir, the Habsburg Charles V, inherited a united Spain from which the last Moorish rulers had been expelled, together with vast possessions in America; and already Catalonia was an oppressed country, cut off from all commerce with the New World, the great fresh source of wealth. For centuries the Castilians had disliked their industrious neighbors, and the Emperor Charles, who knew little of Spain when he came to the throne, sided with the Castilians; and so it continued, generation after generation, with what the Catalans looked upon as one piece of oppression after another, and with bloody risings from time to time, until the end of the Habsburg line in Spain.
In the bitter wars that followed—Marlborough’s wars—the Catalans supported the Austrian pretender: his successful rival, the French Bourbon who ruled Spain as Philip V, took Barcelona by storm and turned upon the Catalans with great severity. He suppressed Catalan as the official language, imposing Castilian in its place, abolished their ancient privileges, the Cortes and the fueros, closed the university of Barcelona, and built a citadel and a much-hated ring of walls to enclose and overawe the city.
The policy of repression and assimilation continued with even greater force; local laws and customs were done away with; the language was discouraged. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this policy had some success; it certainly came close to destroying Catalan literature, although it was unable to kill the language itself—a language closely related to the Provencal in which many of the earlier poets wrote; a harsher language to the unaccustomed ear, but one capable of the utmost subtlety in the hands of such writers as Ramon Llull (Caxton published him in translation) or Ausiàs March; and, with its comparative absence of vowel endings, perhaps the most masculine of Romance dialects.
But there was always a resistance, both political and cultural; and with the coming of romanticism the Catalan poets began their Renaixença, a movement designed not only to revive the country’s literary culture but to express the nation’s wish for at least some measure of independence. The Renaixença was strongly supported, often by people with little concern with poetry or the arts: in 1841 the university was restored, and some years later the hated walls went down but still the Catalan was not master in his own house.
The Barcelona that Picasso explored in 1895 presented some analogies with Joyce’s Dublin: there was the same nationalist revival, the same passionate resentment of a foreign government, the same memory of a glorious past now overshadowed, the same tradition of deep opposition to central authority, the same conviction of a higher culture oppressed by a lower; and historically there had been the same readiness to call in foreign aid to get rid of the oppressors. But the religious element was lacking; and whereas Joyce’s Dublin was desperately poor, Barcelona had been growing steadily richer ever since the restoration of the monarchy in 1874. The port was now handling eight thousand ships a year; the manufactures had increased enormously; the city had spread far beyond its ancient limits; and Barcelona’s taxes, though grudgingly paid, provided a great part of the government’s income.
Yet these were the days of unrestrained capitalism, and Barcelona also possessed a huge urban proletariat. Picasso had been acquainted with squalor ever since he was born, but the misery of a great industrial city was something far beyond his experience; so was the reaction to this misery. For whereas the victims of the chronic agricultural depression in Spain suffered in silence, or at least without rioting, the intolerable conditions in Barcelona led to strong left-wing movements, to frequent strikes, and to anarchism. Anarchism was preached all over Europe and America at that time, but nowhere did it take such a hold as in Barcelona; and there it added a still more eruptive element to the general anti-government atmosphere. An anarchist had set off a bomb in the crowded Liceo theater shortly before Picasso’s arrival, on the grounds that “there could be no innocent bourgeois”; and the Ruizes had hardly settled down before another bomb was lobbed right into the great Corpus Christi procession. The Establishment called the bombs “infernal machines”: it had no sympathy whatsoever for those who thought that the existing order had to be destroyed to bring a decent society into being, and very little for those who proposed a less radical reform. But Picasso never belonged to the Establishment at any time, and protest, both moderate and extremely violent, appeared early in his work.
It did not appear at first, however. As a boy he was no part of the community: although he had no difficulty in making himself understood, the city being bilingual, he had only to open his mouth to make it clear that he was a stranger and a stranger of no great consequence, for an Andalou was instantly labeled idle, Gypsyish, mercurial, and above all not serious, a very grave charge in hard-headed Catalonia. And since he had no gift for languages this was his status throughout his early adolescence. It was as an outsider that he discovered Barcelona, and perhaps for that very reason he saw the squalor and injustice more clearly than the natives.
Little of this was visible in the new districts outside the walls, with their broad streets crossing at right-angles, but the heart of Barcelona lay in the old town, and that was where the Ruizes lived. The flat in the Calle Cristina soon proved too dark and inconvenient and after a short stay in the nearby Calle Llauder they removed to number three in the Calle de la Merced, a tall, five-storied house with a battered coat of arms over its gloomy entrance, facing equally tall houses on the other side of a street some four yards wide: a dank street into which the sun could hardly penetrate except at midday and the kind of house that Don José would naturally have chosen. It was only a hundred yards or so from the art-school and he stayed there for the rest of
