of Picasso’s recent history, he went on, “Picasso’s is an exceedingly youthful art; it is the product of an observing eye that does not forgive the weaknesses of the people of our time, and it is one that reveals the beauty even of the hideous, a beauty recorded with the restraint and measure of one who draws because he sees, not merely because he can hit off a face from memory. The pastels shown here … are only one aspect of the talent of Picasso, an artist whose work will arouse a great deal of controversy but also the esteem of many who reject ready-made forms and who seek out art in all its manifestations … Pèl i Ploma bows low to the established artists of merit; it also does whatever it can to help the first flight of those who may become the great men of tomorrow.” Then, having recalled that in Paris Picasso was called “the little Goya” because of his looks, Utrillo went on, “We hope that this physical resemblance will not be belied; and our heart tells us we shall prove right.”
This was a kind reception for a nineteen-year-old foreigner in a clannish city where patronage was both scarce and jealously guarded, but Picasso was almost certainly not there to enjoy it. He rarely attended the opening of any of his shows: an understandable reaction, since an exhibiting painter has not only to expose his nakedness on the wall—a nakedness that is no longer under his control, that can no longer be altered, any more than a book that has passed its final proof—but he also has to stand there in his best suit with a dubious drink in his hand, while strangers ask him “what that is meant to represent” and while his friends, uneasily aware that they ought to buy something, conceal their determination not to do so by labored praise. And on this occasion he was short of time as well; as Sabartés observes, he darted through Barcelona like a meteor.
At all events, while the show was still on, and it lasted from June 1 to June 14, 1901, Picasso was in Paris. He had made the journey with Jaume Andreu, a Quatre Gats acquaintance: not a particularly interesting man, it seems, but Picasso needed company, and he rarely made any considerable journey alone.
Manyac was living in Montmartre on the top floor of 130 ter boulevard de Clichy, in the small flat Manuel Pallarès had occupied earlier in the year: he welcomed Picasso and the pictures he brought, invited him to stay and told him that he had already arranged an exhibition, not with Berthe Weill but at the larger, more important gallery run by Ambroise Vollard in the rue Laffitte.
Vollard was a remarkable figure among the Paris art-dealers: dingy, bearded, dusty, apparently bemused. He was one of the few who knew what painting, rather than the sale of pictures, was all about; and although he was not indifferent to profit he loved the living art of his time far more. Indeed he was so much ahead of the taste of his time that the commercial success of his gallery touches upon the miraculous, particularly as there was little of the salesman in his nature. Gertrude Stein had to struggle to buy a picture from him; and her description of his gallery is particularly convincing. “It was an incredible place. It did not look like a picture gallery. Inside there were a couple of canvases turned to the wall, in one corner was a small pile of big and little canvases thrown pell mell on top of one another, in the centre of the room stood a huge dark man glooming. This was Vollard cheerful. When he was really cheerless he put his huge frame against the glass door that led to the street, his arms above his head, his hands on each upper corner of the portal and gloomed darkly into the street. Nobody thought then of trying to come in.”
He came from Réunion, far away in the Indian Ocean; he still had a strong Creole accent and the murk of Paris weighed upon his spirits; he was only thirty-three at this time, yet he looked middle-aged. Perhaps a nostalgia for the tropics was a factor in his love for painters with the sun in their belly, above all Cézanne. Since his great purchase he had not sold many of the pictures—with a few exceptions even the educated public remained indifferent or even hostile—but at least this did mean that there were plenty of Cézannes to be seen in the gallery when the young Picasso was introduced to its owner.
The show, which opened on June 24, 1901, was another shared exhibition, the second man in this case being the Basque Iturrino, a man in his thirties, much esteemed by Vollard; but there were seventy-five Picassos on the wall—bull-fights, nudes, flower-pieces, night-life and café scenes—as opposed to thirty-six Iturrinos, and the critics took more notice of the younger man. For although the Galérie Vollard may not have been as smooth as Durand-Ruel farther along the street or the fashionable Bernheim-Jeune, an exhibition there was taken seriously by the Paris press, and the critics appeared in numbers. Gustave Coquiot, one of the most influential, was enthusiastic about Picasso; so was the perspicacious Félicien Fagus, who wrote in the Revue Blanche itself. Although he indulged in the art-critic’s favorite game of influences, detecting no less than nine—Delacroix, Manet, Monet, van Gogh, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Forain, and Rops—and although he said that Picasso’s enthusiasm had not left him time to work out a personal style of his own, the general tone of the review was strongly favorable: “prodigious skill—youthful, impetuous spontaneity. Picasso is a painter, wholly and beautifully a painter, and his exaltation of his subjects is enough to prove it. Like all absolute painters he worships color for its own sake, and each subject has its own. He is in love with every theme, and for him everything is a theme—the flowers hurling themselves out of the vase towards the light, the flight of the vase itself and even of the table beneath it, and the dancing light-filled air all around them…. The danger for Picasso lies in this very impetuosity, which may well carry him away, leading him to an easy virtuosity, an easier success.”
There is no doubt about the critics’ reception of the exhibition; but although some writers confidently state that all the pictures were sold, while others maintain that the show did fairly well, Vollard himself says that it was not a success. What the merchant considered a success is less plain, yet whether pictures were sold or not, it cannot have made much immediate material difference to Picasso, since most of the money, if not all of it, would have been divided between Manyac and Vollard.
What this exhibition certainly did bring him, apart from praise, was the friendship of Max Jacob, an exceptionally percipient, witty, poverty-stricken critic, poet, and writer who was deeply impressed by Picasso’s work and who sought his acquaintance.
Picasso was living with Manyac in the boulevard de Clichy; he had the second, the larger room at the back; and he still moved about in his Spanish and Catalan world: Pichot, now firmly attached to Germaine; Paco Durio the sculptor, Gauguin’s friend; Fontbona; and many others, including the resourceful Manolo—it is said that on being called up for his military service in Spain he found himself in a cavalry regiment on frontier duty, and that he at once rode his horse into France, sold it, pawned his uniform and weapons, and took the earliest train to Paris, disguised as a monk.
Max Jacob was then twenty-five, but he looked much more; he was an extremely gifted man, well-read, short, bald, charming, sharp-tongued, salacious, fantastic, painfully sensitive and vulnerable, terrified of women, and hopelessly impractical: the son of a Jewish tailor in Quimper. He left an appreciative note at the gallery and Manyac asked him to call on Picasso at the boulevard de Clichy. “He was surrounded by a swarm of poor Spanish painters, who sat on the floor eating and talking. He painted two or three pictures a day, wore a top hat just as I did and spent his evenings behind the scenes in the music-halls of those days, drawing portraits of the stars.” They shook hands, smiled repeatedly, and then, being unable to communicate, shook hands again. Jacob examined the canvases—Picasso had already painted scores since his arrival—and more Spanish friends appeared. Presently formality died away; someone cooked a dish of beans and they sat about in the dust, eating them. Dinner being over, they all of them, except for Picasso, who had no gift in that direction, uttered sounds intended to represent an orchestra playing Beethoven. The next day Picasso and his friends returned the call, flooding into Jacob’s little room on the Quai aux Fleurs: after a long, long time some of the Spaniards went away; Manyac, the interpreter, fell asleep; and Picasso and Jacob, left to themselves, gazed at the Daumiers, the Gavarnis, and the Dürer woodcut on the walls. In some way Picasso conveyed his wish to hear Jacob’s poetry, and he listened to it for what was left of the night. At dawn they separated, and Jacob gave Picasso the Daumiers,
