back and front with the view from the studio window—churches, roofs, a bell-tower.
Mon chere Max je te ecrite en face de ce que je t’ai desine premier-mente il y a beaucoup temps que je ne te ecrit pas et vrement ce pas pour ne penser pas à toi cet pasque je trabaille et cuant je ne trabail pas alors on se amuse ou on se enmerde. Je te ecri ici à l’atelier je ai trabaiye toute la journe
¿Ce que on te donne de vacances dans Paris Sport o Paris France? Si ce que on te donne alor tu dois venir à Barcelona me voir tu peux pas penser con ça me feras plesir.
Clocher à Barcelone
Mon vieux Max je panse à la chambre de Buolevard Voltaire et à l’omeletes les aricots et le fromage de Brie et les pommes frite me je pense osi à les jours de misere et se bien triste, et je mant souviens de les espagnols de la Rue de Seine avec degut je pens rester ici l’ver prochain pour fer quelquchose
Je te anbrase ton vieux ami
PICASSO
My dear Max I am writing to you looking out onto what I drew for you first it is a long time since I wrote to you and really it is not because I do not think about you it is because I work and when I am not working why then I have fun or I am bored black I am writing to you here in the studio I have worked all day long
Do Paris Sport or Paris France give you holidays? If they do you must come to Barcelona to see me you cannot imagine how that would please me
A bell-tower in Barcelona
My dear old Max I remember the room in the boulevard Voltaire and the omelets the beans and the Brie and the fried potatoes I also remember the wretched days of poverty and it is very sad, and I remember the Spaniards of the rue de Seine with disgust I think I shall stay here next winter to get something done
I embrace you your old friend
PICASSO
Picasso had contributed drawings up to the very last number of Pèl i Ploma: why was he excluded from Forma? At this distance of time it is impossible to say, but Josep Palau may well be right when he points out that a formalist aesthetic was gaining favor in Barcelona and that Picasso had been reproached for the want of that very quality and for “too much soul.” For some temperaments conflict of opinion is much the same as personal antagonism—artists who care deeply about their work rarely remain friends for long—and in any case Picasso was never an easy man to get along with.
He and Soto, for example, disagreed about how their studio should be used. The sharing should have been ideal, since Soto worked at the town hall, leaving the daylight hours to Picasso; but Picasso was a night-bird, and all his life he found it hard to leave his bed: often he would only start to work in the afternoon, going on far into the darkness by artificial light. But by then Soto would be back, and often he brought friends. When Picasso had been working well for most of the day this did not matter and they would all have a splendid time, with a bucket on the end of a rope bringing wine and ready-cooked food from the shop below; but when he had not—when their noisy presence broke even his powers of concentration and obliged him to leave his holy work, then his fury spread general gloom, if it did not provoke ugly scenes.
Early in 1904 they parted, but without quarreling; and as Picasso had sold some pictures he was able to move to a place of his own in the Calle de Comercio, a dreary broad street near, but not too near, his parents’ home and just by Nonell.
It was here that he painted the portrait of one Lluis Vilaró, a flour-merchant; and since he wrote Al amigo, recuerdo de Picasso, 15 Mz 1904 on the back, it is likely that the canvas was a present from the poverty-stricken artist to the wealthy businessman. Picasso, like his father before him, had long known the shameless greed of buyers, their appetite for free pictures, their conviction that they are doing a favor by paying anything at all, and their profound if unacknowledged belief that “painting is really play, not work”; and although he never descended to the anxious baseness with which many painters approach potential customers, the portrait Was probably thrown in as a make-weight for some pieces that Vilaró actually bought. This early experience was one of the factors that made him so exceedingly unwilling to be manipulated in later life—to have pictures wheedled out of him. He could be stone deaf to a hint, although at the same time he could be wonderfully generous when the impulse came from within.
Yet neither the immortalized flour-merchant’s hypothetical purchases nor other sales can have amounted to very much, for although Picasso could pay his rent he could not afford the more expensive materials (some people, in search of a simple explanation of this period, have suggested that it was all based on the cheapness of blue paint) and just then his father was busy stretching him an important canvas: perhaps the kind and it must be said long-suffering Don José still dreamed of another “Science and Charity.”
These details we owe, as we owe so much, to Sabartés, who had himself taken a couple of rooms not far away, opposite the Llotja. They were at the very top of an ancient house, and a narrow spiral staircase led up to them. In theory one room was to be a studio, but Sabartés had long since ceased to believe in himself as a sculptor; he was a modest creature, and a visit to the Egyptian rooms in the Louvre had quenched his ambition forever. In fact he took the place as much for the stairs and its dilapidated charm as anything else. Picasso came to see him, and almost at once the bare whitewashed walls were covered with murals, blue murals: first appeared a great nude, and then over against it a half-naked Moor hanging by the neck from a tree, his phallus erect in his death-agony and his one remaining slipper about to drop on to a couple making violent love beneath the tree, without a stitch between them. Then, turning to the oval window in the partition between the rooms, Picasso made it into an enormous eye; and beneath the eye he wrote, “The hairs of my beard, though separated from me, are just as much gods as I am myself.”
He painted these pictures at great speed, with the same total concentration that he had shown at the Zut, and, says Sabartés, as though the pure line were already there and his concentration allowed him to see it. Few people ever beheld them: the sculptors Fontbona and Gonzalez, Soto, the landlord, some prospective tenants, and the workmen who effaced them.
This does not apply to the important picture I have already mentioned, the big oil called “La Vie,” one of the largest of the Blue Period, the outcome of the many drawings that he made in the Riera de Sant Joan but painted in the Calle de Comercio. A very great many people have seen it, and a very great many have explained its meaning. The explanations differ, but they do possess one thing in common—the assumption that the interpreter knows more about Picasso than ever Picasso knew. In the course of a wide reading on the subject I have been surprised to find how often writers will say “unconsciously Picasso was expressing…”, “without being aware of it, Picasso absorbed…”, or (speaking of the mourners and the figure on the white horse in the “Burial of Casagemas”) “these were Picasso’s subconscious symbols for himself.”
For his part, the painter, speaking to Antonina Vallentin, said, “I was not the one who gave it that title, ‘La Vie.’ I certainly had no intention of painting symbols; I just painted the images that rose before my eyes. It is for other people to find hidden meanings in them. As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language…”
The images that rose before him in this case were four figures and two of his own paintings: on the left of the picture there is a girl, naked, standing very close to Casagemas and leaning both arms on his shoulder; Casagemas is wearing a slip, and his hand, held low, points at an older woman on the other side of the picture, barefoot, dressed in a dark, “classical” robe and holding
