and Picasso’s drawings show an early, exact knowledge of the female form, although the models at the school were all men. Picasso himself, when asked when he had first made love to a girl, held his hand a little more than a yard from the ground. One of these bawdy-houses was nearby, in the Calle d’Avinyó (Avinyó is the Catalan for Avignon, and to be consistent I should also put the Catalan carrer rather than calle; but calle is what the pilgrim will find written up on the wall), the very street to which the Llotja has recently been removed.
With so much work to do—and the list should include the great number of careful studies from the school’s collection of plaster casts, one a prophetic charcoal drawing of a man carrying a lamb—and with such a close companionship with Pallarès, Picasso had not much leisure for the other students. He did make friends among them, particularly with Josep Cardona Furró, a sculptor, and with Joan Cardona Lladós, a draughtsman; but upon the whole they seem to have been rather a dull lot, and there is no record of the animated discussions of the new worlds of painting and philosophy that were to come a little later, when Picasso frequented the Quatre Gats, with its much maturer, far more aware and living company.
Yet even if these students knew little or nothing of Impressionism and still less of the Neo-Impressionists and Symbolists, they must all have been conscious of the Art Nouveau that was sweeping southwards from France, Germany, England, and the north in general, and that in its Spanish form took on the name of Modernismo. Santiago Rusiñol, one of the most advanced of the earlier generation of painters and a poet (and one of the first men to buy Picassos), had organized several well-publicized Fiestas Modernistas at the nearby Sitges; and during the celebrations of 1895 two of his recently-acquired paintings by the then neglected El Greco were carried in procession. The sillier, more mawkish manifestations of later Art Nouveau make any association with El Greco seem strange, but the connection was more evident in 1895; and whether Picasso was at Sitges or not (most probably he was not) El Greco certainly had great influence on him when in time he reached Madrid.
Before seeing the Prado again, however, he was to spend another year at the Llotja and two summer holidays in Málaga. The first holiday, in 1896, was a period of the most surprising activity. Of the many drawings, pictures, and portraits that he produced in those months, two stand out as being quite exceptional; and neither shows the least trace of Barcelona. Although Picasso respected the professor of painting at the Llotja, Antonio Caba, the director of the school (an awful figure) and an able portraitist, in later life he said he did not like the pictures he painted when he was a boy in Barcelona: he preferred those of La Coruña. Now, back in his native town, he seems to have returned to that earlier state of spirit, with a greater power of expression and more to express.
The portrait of his aunt Josefa (a difficult old lady, pious and contradictory, his father’s eldest surviving sister) has been called by Juan-Eduardo Cirlot “without doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.” Other authorities might not go so far, but the statement is not downright ludicrous: as it hangs there amidst the juvenilia the picture is immensely striking. Against a dark background the little old woman’s strong-featured yellowish face with its big, lustrous eyes, as dark as her nephew’s, peers out under a black cap, completely dominating the room: the brushwork is bold and assured; the picture is eminently successful. Yet Picasso never painted like this again: he never again used the same Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro nor the same Expressionist approach.
In its way the second picture is more surprising still. In the first place, it is a landscape, a rare thing in Picasso’s work, and then it is painted in a manner unlike anything he had done before or was ever to do again: looking at this picture of the red Málaga earth sloping up to the light blue sky and partly covered with prickly-pear cactuses, some living, some dead (they grow wild there) one thinks of the Fauves and, more strongly by far, of van Gogh. The first did not yet exist; the second he cannot have heard of: yet there is the fierce color, and there is the powerful, living brushwork of the earth, a heavy dry impasto laid on as with a palette-knife, contrasting wonderfully with the thinly-painted sky. A second glance shows that the picture is entirely his own, entirely individual; a second thought makes it clear that these influences were utterly impossible; and one wonders how any professor can have had the confidence to teach this fourteen-year-old boy anything but the mere technique of his media.
The confidence was not lacking, however, and back in Barcelona that autumn the men at the Llotja continued to show him how to draw, while his father stretched him two big canvases for pictures that were designed to continue the modest success of the “First Communion” and lead on to sales, commissions, and a steady income. Don José went further than buying the raw materials and giving advice on their use; he even hired a studio for Pablo, in which the paint could be laid on. This first independent studio was in the Calle de la Plata, which runs down into the Calle de la Merced: the word studio, applied to those Picasso knew in Barcelona, does not mean a fine high airy place with a north light but simply a bare room, often very small and ill-lit, where he could work—where the mess would not matter; and here the word independent was strictly relative too, since the garret was only just round the corner from the family flat, within easy reach of parents.
One of these pictures, a bayonet charge (probably connected with the fighting in Cuba), has vanished: the other, which Don José planned and which he named “Science and Charity,” shows a medical man taking the pulse of a sick woman, while a nun, holding a fair-sized baby, stands on the far side of the bed, proffering a drink (soup, says Sabartés). The doctor was Don José; the nun’s habit was lent by a Sister of Charity from Málaga who now lived in Barcelona; and the genuine baby had been hired from a beggar-woman. Picasso made several drawings and studies in watercolor and oil for this picture; he worked hard on it, and the result pleased his family. “Science and Charity” was sent to the National Exhibition in Madrid, where it received a mención honorífica from the jury and a dart of facetious criticism from a journalist who thought the sick woman’s lead-blue hand looked like a glove (which it does), and to the Provincial Exhibition at Málaga, where not unnaturally it was given a medal, nominally made of gold. The kindest thing that can be said about the picture is that technically it is most accomplished, that there were a great many far worse in the same tradition, and that it gave and still gives pleasure to those who’ like craftsmanship, anecdote, and realistic description. In any case it was the last work of this kind that he ever painted. It was his farewell to the academic tradition in which he had been brought up and which his world accepted; but the fact that he painted no more Science and Charities does not mean that he was yet the full Picasso, the anarchist whose aim was to destroy the false and flabby world of illustration by violence and to bring another, infinitely more meaningful, into existence, a painting that should purge by pity and terror in its own language and according to its own logic rather than provide ornament, prettiness, or transposed literature. At this time his revolt was still latent: he was still in many ways a boy, and protest, aesthetic or social, was still no more than protest within the context of the world in which he lived. But it was also a time at which he covered sheets of paper with all possible variants of his signature, including the zz for ss which is sometimes to be seen in his early pictures; and although it is perhaps going too far to say that this “anxious search” shows a doubt of his own identity, it may well be the sign of an underlying uneasiness soon to rise to the surface.
The rest of his stay at the Llotja was taken up with school studies and with his own drawing: his sketch-books are filled with much the same scenes as before, some of them frankly picturesque, though now the touch is even more confident and the variety of approaches greater, ranging from the purely traditional to a number of experiments in which the geometrical simplification of the essential forms is already apparent. Yet although the beginning of several possible points of departure from tradition can be made out in the drawings and pictures, the evolution, the progression, is not that of an iconoclast but of an extraordinarily gifted student who does not doubt the nature of his world—of Pablo rather than of Picasso.
And it was still as Pablo, the wonderful boy, that he packed his canvases and drawings for the summer holiday of 1897. It was not nearly so happy as those of former years, and
