one,” supposing that since one was the first of the numbers it would also be the nearest hour.
Don José does not seem to have troubled much about his son’s lack of progress in the subjects taught at school, but he did teach Pablo a great deal about drawing and later about painting. He was the heir of the tradition of Spanish realism, but of a tradition sadly diminished and watered-down over the generations by academic doctrine, and most of what he taught was of course purely academic, a photographic realism, very slightly touched with fantasy; but he did have some ideas of his own. For example, he would cut his pigeons out in paper and move them about on the canvas in search of a satisfactory composition: he also handled cardboard and glue with great dexterity. In other hands and in another atmosphere these ideas might have borne earlier fruit. However, he provided his son with a solid, firmly-disciplined basis, and never can a man have had an apter, more eager pupil.
This may well have been the time of their happiest relationship. The father knew a great deal about the craftsmanship of his calling; at that age the son can hardly have distinguished between technique and the purpose of technique; and Don José, less glum in those years, less battered by life, was vested with the nimbus of the omniscient initiator. Long, long after, Picasso recalled one particular picture of pigeons. He remembered it as an enormous canvas. “Imagine a cage with hundreds of doves in it,” he said to Sabartés. “Thousands of doves. Thousands. Millions. They were perched in rows, as though they were in a dovecote, a prodigious great dovecote. The picture was in the museum at Málaga: I have never seen it since.” Sabartés found it: the physically present birds amounted to nine: the canvas was quite small.
Picasso never threw anything away if he could possibly avoid doing so, and some of the drawings and paintings of those days in Málaga have survived, together with many more from the following years at La Coruña and hundreds from his adolescence in Barcelona. Of these Málaga pictures, that which is usually called the earliest and which is dated 1890/91 is a little painting of a picador: it is oil upon wood (the smooth cedar tops of cigar-boxes were useful to a child rarely indulged with canvases) and it shows a burly man in yellow seated upon a little miserable bony blindfolded old horse up against the pink barrier of a bull-ring. The spectators, two men (one in a bowler, one in a Cordovan hat) and an opulent woman, are so large that they make the horse look even more wretchedly small. The horse is unpadded—the eight- or nine-year-old Pablo had already seen some dozens disemboweled in the arena—and the picador with his armored leg sits right down in the deep Spanish saddle. The two are remarkably well observed; and my impression is that they are observed quite objectively: but I may be mistaken; there may be compassion for the horse.
The picador has a little of that wonderful quality which is often to be seen in children’s paintings, but not a great deal. And some of this quality may be owing to the holes that take the place of the people’s eyes, holes that do away with the surface and give their expressions an impassive fixity. These holes, however, were supplied by Lola, Picasso’s sister, when she was busy with a nail.
Upon the whole, these early pictures from Málaga and La Coruña that have survived rarely show anything of that almost impersonal genius which inhabits some children until the age of about seven or eight, then leaves them forever. Picasso’s beginnings were sometimes childish, but they were the beginnings of a child who from the start was moving towards an adult expression: and perhaps because of this the drawings are often dull. It may be that his astonishingly precocious academic skill did not so much stifle the childish genius as overlay it for the time so that it remained dormant, to come to life again after his adolescence and to live on for the rest of his career—an almost unique case of survival. Certainly, during many of his later periods he produced pictures that might well have been painted by a possessed child—a child whose “innocent,” fresh, unhistoric, wholly individual genius had never died and that could now express itself through a hand capable of the most fantastic virtuosity.
The routine of those days in Málaga must have seemed everlasting to a child: the flat full of people, school when he could not get out of it, perpetual drawing, mass on Sundays, the slow parade up and down the Alameda, families in their best clothes, bands of ornamented youths all together, bands of swarthy tittering girls, grave adults, innumerable relatives, connections, friends, and always the splendid sun—eternal, natural, and taken for granted. All this, with the sea at hand and the pervading warmth, formed the basis of Picasso’s life, the matrix from which he developed. A great deal of it remained with him forever: this Mediterranean world, his wholly real world, was the object of his nostalgia, the only place where he could really feel at home. All his life he loved the sun, the sea, a great deal of company; yet of these early influences one seems to have bitten much less deeply. He was brought up in a deeply Catholic atmosphere, with several unusually devout relations and a religious family tradition (quite apart from his uncle and namesake the Canon and Tío Perico, one of his cousins was destined for the priesthood), and although in some of its aspects the Church in Málaga may have been rather more a processional than a profoundly spiritual body, it is still surprising that Picasso should have been apparently so little marked. There are many contributory factors that can be brought forward for what they are worth: Andalucía, with its large population of crypto-Muslims and crypto-Jews surviving into the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century and its ancestral memory of the Inquisition’s way of dealing with them, was never the most fervent province in Spain; then again the extreme contrast between the slums of Chupa y Tira and the wealth of the Alameda on the one hand and the elementary teachings of the faith on the other may have had its effect in time; while the growing clericalism, not to say religiosity, of the Establishment, the renewed identification of the Church with power, wealth, and authority during Alphonso XIII’s minority cannot but have caused a reaction in an already strongly unconformist and anti-bourgeois mind. “My joining the Communist Party is the logical consequence of my whole life, of the whole body of my work,” he said in 1944; and later in the same interview, “So I became a member of the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since fundamentally I had been on their side forever.”
Yet no effort of will, no social consciousness, can undo the past nor give a man born and bred a Catholic the same foundation as a child brought up in another faith.
In those days when the Church still knew its own mind, when it spoke Latin, and when a personal Devil ruled over a blazing Hell filled with the hopelessly damned, damned for ever and ever, many a Catholic child was uneasy about dying. The inward eye more readily forms an image of Hell than of Paradise—in Last Judgments the damned and the terribly powerful, terribly eager fiends that carry them shrieking away are infinitely more convincing than the blessed: the torments can be felt, whereas the ill-defined happiness of a perpetual Sunday cannot—and the descent into the one, or at least into Purgatory for a thousand years, is so much more likely than admission to the other. Absolution is not the magic sponge that some Protestants suppose: it is conditional upon true and whole confession, contrition, reparation, and many other factors. To an anxious mind (and the young Picasso was an anxious child) it is difficult to be quite certain that what seems to be contrition is not mere remorse of conscience, sterile and invalid: it is difficult to be sure that what one has confessed is all that should have been confessed: and perhaps it is even harder for a Spanish child. Spanish Catholicism has always dwelt heavily upon the last things; the skull is a very frequent symbol, and Picasso was less unaffected than he seemed.
He rebelled against the Church, as he rebelled against everything else, but he retained a deep religious sense: deep, but also obscure, Manichaean, and in many ways far from anything that could possibly be called Christian. I am not referring only or even mainly to his fear of the end, although it reached such a pitch that the slightest illness made him uneasy, while as for death itself, he avoided all mention of it as much as ever he could, except silently in his art, and he often took refuge in anger: as he lay sick in the last weeks of his life an intimate friend, a Catalan, urged him to make a will. “Doing things like that draws death,” he cried furiously, and shortly afterwards turned his friend out of the room—he left no will, only a huge shapeless fortune to be wrangled over: no testament about anything at all except the eventual destination of “Guernica.”
