at a feast attended by local artists, who had the effrontery to baptize him painter in champagne, he did comparatively little work.
His uncle Salvador had grown even more prosperous; he had recently married the forty-year-old niece of the Marqués of Casa-Loring, a great social advancement; he had a fine house on the Alameda itself, and he was looked upon as the head of the Ruiz family, some members of which he either helped or supported entirely. As such he disapproved of Pablo’s way of signing his pictures Picasso, or P. R. Picasso, or at the best P. Ruiz Picasso. Don Salvador liked the pictures (he hung “Science and Charity” in a place of honor) but there were sides of his nephew’s character that he did not care for at all. It may be that in imposing his authority as the protector and in making Pablo aware that he was a poor relation he overplayed his part, and it is certain that although Don Salvador himself suggested that Pablo should be sent to Madrid, to the Royal Academy of San Fernando, where his friends Moreno Carbonero and Muñoz Degrain were now influential professors, he nevertheless calculated the sum necessary for his nephew’s support with all the sensible, contriving economy that the rich so often exercise on the poor’s behalf. The Málaga medal turned out to be made of brass, only very, very thinly plated with gold. The sum was to be advanced by the Doctor, by Don Baldomero Chiara, María Picasso’s brother-in-law, perhaps by some other relatives, and by Don José: it was to pay for his journey, his keep, his fees, and his materials.
“It must have been a small fortune,” said Sabartés.
“I’ll tell you what it was,” replied Picasso. “A mere vile pittance, that’s what it was. A few pesetas. Barely enough to keep from starving to death: no more than that.”
In the autumn of 1897 (the same year that an anarchist killed Canovas, the prime minister), the pittance carried him to Madrid, that expensive capital, where he found himself a room in the slummy Calle San Pedro Martir, in the heart of the town; and there he celebrated his sixteenth birthday. He had never been away from home before; he had never had to manage his own affairs or handle anything but pocket-money; and although the Ruizes had always been poor in the sense of having little or no superfluity, Pablo had no intimate, personal experience of true poverty; he had never lacked for food or warmth. This essential lesson was soon to come, but first he had to put his name down for the Academy—once called the Academia de Nobles Artes and familiar to Goya: much decayed since then, but still filled with his works—and to undergo the severe entrance examination.
He described himself on the form as a “pupil of Muñoz Degrain.” He may have thought this a politic stroke or he may have wished to set himself off from his father. He cannot have meant it as a statement of fact. But pupil of José Ruiz or of Muñoz Degrain, he passed the examination with stupefying ease, just as he had done at the Llotja; and the same amount of legend surrounds the feat.
Having been admitted with acclaim, he attended a few of the classes, found that they were as bad as the Llotja or worse, and then neglected the Academy entirely, except for its splendid collection of Goyas. There was no family routine to oblige him to go, and in any case he had all the wealth of the Prado just at hand, with time to absorb, copy, and enjoy El Greco, Velásquez, and Goya, who with van Gogh and Cézanne were the most important masters he ever knew.
A less obvious reason for his neglect was the presence of Muñoz Degrain and Moreno Carbonero at the Academy. They were both shockingly bad painters, and although Muñoz Degrain had some notion of light and although Carbonero was a good draughtsman, their canvases were the epitome of official art at its nadir. (There is some connection between size and worth in the official mind, and their pictures were often huge.) And they were not even competent: one vast Muñoz Degrain, preserved at Málaga, is the illustration of an anecdote about a man serenading a woman on a balcony; a cloaked rival, now slinking off, has shot him with a blunderbuss; and the woman’s face has turned a startling green, as well it might, for her lover is weltering in his gore. It is so eminently, ludicrously, bad that at this distance of time one feels a glow of affection for the painter; but in 1897 this cannot have been the case with Picasso. As a small boy he had liked Muñoz Degrain: since then he had developed enormously, and although he had not yet made the decisive move to Modernismo, he was now surrounded by the greatest paintings that Spain had yet produced, and the contrast must have been painfully striking. At no period of his life was Picasso easily embarrassed, but meeting Muñoz Degrain just then must have been painful; and as for Moreno Carbonero, Picasso simply despised his teaching. He despised all Spanish teaching: “If I had a son who wanted to be a painter,” he wrote to a friend at this time, “I should not keep him in Spain for a moment, and do not imagine I should send him to Paris (where I should gladly be myself) but to Munik (I do not know if it is spelt like that), as it is a city where painting is studied seriously without regard to set theories of any kind, such as pointillisme and all the rest….”
In Madrid he found a class-mate from his first year at the Llotja, Francisco Bernareggi, an Argentinian; and when Picasso was not walking about the streets of the city, drawing indefatigably, they went to the Prado together and copied the pictures they admired. It is significant of Picasso’s continuing respect for his father’s judgment that they both sent their copies back to Don José in Barcelona. Velasquez, Goya, and Titian he approved of, but when they sent him their versions of El Greco he wrote, “You are taking the wrong path.” Among Picasso’s was a late Velásquez portrait of Philip IV, from which it is clear that the student had either not yet acquired the master’s touch or that in his poverty he could not afford the master’s materials, particularly his famous brushes. There is also a version of one of Goya’s “Caprichos,” the bawd and the whore who were to reappear so often in much later years, and a careful, affectionate drawing from an early nineteenth-century print of José Delgado, otherwise Pepe Illo, the illustrious Andalusian bullfighter and the author of La Tauromaquia o Arte de Torear, which Picasso was to illustrate sixty years later. He had something of Picasso, and of the Gypsy, in his amused, knowing, proud old face—he was close on fifty (ancient for a torero) when a bull killed him at last, in 1801. Bulls: all these years, from early Málaga to Madrid, Picasso had loved to see them live and die. The drawings and paintings that he made have not always been mentioned in their place, often being more by way of personal memoranda, but they run through his life, a constant presence.
The sketch-books are filled with his usual street-scenes, including some wonderfully drawn horses; and here again we see his preoccupation with his name. On one page Ruiz is written in careful capitals, each letter beneath the other: next to it P. Ruiz, ringed about with the kind of halo-line that he was using then, and not far off the initials P.R. several times repeated. And in some places we see the Picazzo that he had tried out before. This was at a time when his father had shown particular love and generosity.
The most striking of the drawings and paintings, however, are those which show his first steps towards Modernismo and indeed towards a world far beyond it. Two landscapes of the Buen Retiro, painted in misty fin-de-siècle colors, clearly point in that direction; and in a drawing labeled “Rechs the Pre-Raphaelite,” with its symbolic oil-lamp, the connection is obvious. (The Pre-Raphaelite movement, though at its last tepid gasp, formed one of the heterogeneous ingredients of Modernismo.) And of course he was aware of the movement: in a letter written at this time he said, “I am going to make a drawing for you to take to the Barcelona Cómica to see if they will buy it…. Modernist it must be….” But there is also a group of gaunt chimneys rising above a wall that foreshadows an art from which anecdote and the picturesque are entirely banished, while unnamed forms, new or archaic, assume a vital significance; and an enigmatic window with an iron balcony, a subject to which he was to return again and again in later life.
Another friend he met in Madrid was Hortensi Güell, a young Catalan writer and painter from Reus, whose portrait he drew later in Barcelona, a few months before Güell killed himself. This was the first of Picasso’s friends to commit suicide.
Young people are surprisingly frail, in spite of their ebullient spirits and elasticity, and there are times when misfortune or unkindness will destroy
