northwards stood the still older Barrio Gótico, with its medieval houses and palaces by the cathedral, which itself was no distance at all from the Ramblas, the main artery of the old city, a broad, tree-filled avenue running right down to the port, with a fine shaded promenade in the middle, always crowded with people and enlivened by a flower-market, a bird-market, cafés—a continual flow of life. And on the far side of the Ramblas lay the densely-populated Barrio Chino, a rabbit-warren of deep, winding lanes, full of whores and sailors: picturesque slums, with their dark wine-shops lined with enormous barrels, seamen’s bars full of music, purple characters walking about, and the Mediterranean sun blazing down on the innumerable lines of colored washing hanging from the high façades, but slums nevertheless.
It was a dirty city, upon the whole, with the middle ages lingering on in many parts of it, and the streets packed with horses, mules, and asses, carrying paniers or pulling carts, drays, wagons, carriages, omnibuses, cabs; a city smelling not only of horse and humanity but of the port, the fish-markets, hot olive oil, and the countless factory-chimneys.
But it was an immensely living one, with nothing of that air of decrepitude and death so familiar in the rest of Spain, and it was inhabited by a race with the reputation of working extremely hard, of worshiping money and success, an unpolished, hard-headed nation. The removal of the court had long since changed the nature of Cervantes’ “seat of courtesy,” and Picasso’s Barcelona was emphatically a commercial city, one that according to Jean Cassou “had never heard of good taste”: which, when one considers the castrating effect of good taste, was just as well for Picasso. Yet the prevailing materialism was tempered by a strong sense of religion, by a natural gaiety, and (whatever Cassou may say) by a certain feeling for the arts.
It was Catalan businessmen who had launched Gaudí some twenty years before Picasso’s arrival; it was they who supported the thriving opera-house, the concerts, and the many choirs that sang Catalan songs both for pleasure and as a means of nationalist assertion. Their sensitivity to painting was less than it had been in the fifteenth century, when the municipality commissioned masterpieces from Huguet and Dalmáu; and one gallery alone, the Saló Parés (together with temporary exhibitions in the hall of the Vanguardia newspaper), was all that Barcelona could support in the way of living artists. Yet even at this time, when in every country but France painting was at its lowest, most dreary ebb, they did patronize their favorite Fortuny, they did possess an artistic club, dedicated to St. Luke, and it was their sons and even daughters who filled the busy art-school.
This school was in the Exchange, a fine late-eighteenth-century building that incorporated the great Catalan-Gothic hall of its fourteenth-century counterpart built during the reign of Peter the Ceremonious. It was down by the harbor, its function being to accommodate merchants, ship-owners, and marine insurers in their dealings, and the Catalans called it the Llotja, just as they called Peter En Pere. The official, Castilian, name was La Lonja, while En Pere came out as Pedro; and this dual system, which is to be found at every turn, makes it difficult for a writer to be consistent. The Catalans themselves often waver; Jaume Sabartés, a Barcelonan born and bred, signed his invaluable books on Picasso with the Castilian Jaime, and many a Catalan Joan uses the more familiar Spanish Juan outside his own country.
This was the school that José Ruiz wished his son to attend. The elementary classes would have been an insult to his talent, but for entry to the higher schools of life, antique and painting two examinations were required, both of them of an adult standard, the minimum age being twenty.
These examinations he had to undergo, for although Don José’s colleagues might be persuaded to accept that a short boy of thirteen was “apparently about twenty years of age” if in fact he really could draw as well as a mature art-student, they did not choose to make public fools of themselves by admitting a beginner, and they set him the tests in all their rigor. At this level they had nothing to do with ordinary school subjects, which perhaps was just as well: his first task was to draw a school model draped in a sheet; the second was a standing nude.
A certain amount of legend has gathered about these examinations, and while some writers say that although a month was allowed, Picasso did the work in a single day; others prefer one hour instead of the permitted twenty-four.
In fact the two surviving drawings are dated September 25 and 30, 1895, but even so there is no doubt that he produced them in a surprisingly short time. They ignored the art-school convention that would have turned the first model into a toga’d Roman and the second into a reasonably noble figure: Picasso drew exactly what he saw, a school model draped in a sheet and a stocky, ill-proportioned little man, very naked in the hard north light. But he did so with such extraordinary academic ability that there could be no question of the result; he was at once put down on the list of those admitted to the higher school for the academic year 1895–96. There were a hundred and twenty-eight of them, in alphabetical order, and he was the hundred-and-eighth, his second surname being spelled Picano.
Most of the other names were typically Catalan—Puigvert, Bosch, Batlle, Campmany, Creus—and none achieved any wide notoriety. But number eighty-six was Manuel Pallarès Grau, who happened to be Picasso’s neighbor in his first anatomy class. Pallarès was a powerful rustic youth of rising twenty, an art-student of some standing, and of course he was much bigger than Pablo; but in spite of these differences they made friends at once. Indeed, the whole school accepted him, his personality and his obviously outstanding gifts doing away with the chasm between thirteen and twenty, a time when each year counts for ten. Here again it was taken for granted that Picasso was an extraordinary being, to whom common laws did not apply. Neither extreme youth nor extreme age ever mattered to Picasso where human relationships were concerned; all his life he met people he liked on the direct plane of immediate contact, unobscured by the accidental differences of birth, age, or nationality; and he and Pallarès, his earliest and certainly his most valuable friend in Barcelona, remained deeply attached as long as they lived.
These first two years in Barcelona were comparatively quiet, industrious, and dutiful. It seems absurd to speak of any exceptional industry and sense of duty in a man who never stopped working all his life, whose output has been estimated at over fifteen thousand paintings to say nothing of his sculpture, engravings, and countless drawings, and whose sense of what was due to his art led him again and again to throw away success, critical and financial, when he was poor and needed both; but his later morality was his own alone, and here the words are used as they are understood by bourgeois families who want their son to “get on.” He lived at home, of course, and he attended the school regularly: he had put himself down for several courses, including History of Art and Aesthetics, and although in time he took to cutting these lectures, he was assiduous in all classes where there was a model. What is more, he perpetually walked about Barcelona with Pallarès, drawing with scarcely a pause, filling albums and sketch-books with street-scenes, horses, cats, dogs, whores, bawds, anarchist meetings, scores and scores of hands, paired and single, beggars, soldiers leaving for the unpopular Cuban campaign, soon to end in war with the United States. And he was busy at home, drawing and painting his family—a pastel of his mother, at least three portraits of his father, many drawings and paintings of the patient Lola—and preparing a big canvas for the spring exhibition of Fine Arts and Artistic Industries. It is a strictly academic picture, somewhat in the manner of the respected Mas y Fontdevila, and certainly painted under Don José’s supervision: it shows Lola in the white dress and veil of a girl at her first communion, kneeling before an altar with her father standing beside her. There is more Industry in it than one usually associates with Picasso, but within its limits it is an accomplished piece of work, and when it was shown (with the wild price-tag of 1500 pesetas—fifty pounds at the then rate of exchange) it met with a certain amount of mild praise.
This was also the time when Picasso produced a sudden little output of religious pictures, including the charming “Rest on the Flight to Egypt” that he kept with him all his life: they amount to a dozen or more, and it is as though the fourteen-year-old Pablo were making a determined effort to be a “good boy.” At about this period, however, he also rid himself
