of orthodox magic that led him to make Françoise Gilot promise him eternal love in a church, with the benefit of holy water, or to observe to Matisse that in times of trouble it was pleasant to have God on one’s side—did not Matisse too say his prayers when life was hard? What I mean is his sympathy with such mystics as El Greco and St. John of the Cross and his sense of unseen worlds just at hand, filled with forces good and evil, a sense so strong that he said it was nonsense to speak of religious pictures—how could you possibly paint a religious picture one day and another kind the next? How vividly present the immaterial world was to his mind can be seen from his conversation with André Malraux, which I quote later and in which he spoke of the spiritual essence of African carvings; and nothing shows his sense of the sacred more clearly than his telling Hélène Parmelin that a really good painting was good because it had been touched by the hand of God (whose existence of course he denied from time to time).
As for the traditional Catholicism in which he was brought up, a most significant aspect of Picasso’s relationship to it is his silence. Apart from such set-pieces of his boyhood as “The First Communion” and “The Old Woman Receiving Holy Oil from a Choirboy,” some adolescent Biblical scenes (including a fine “Flight into Egypt”) and a few imprecise hagiographical pictures, he produced almost nothing with an evident religious bearing until the Crucifixion drawings of 1927, his strange Calvary of 1930, and the 1932 drawing based on the Isenheim altarpiece. Then silence again until the Christ-figures in the bull-fight engravings of 1959, although many other painters, atheist, agnostic, Jewish, vaguely Christian, or ardently Catholic, were working for the Church. Some authorities see no religious significance whatsoever in the “Calvary” and some find it blasphemous; this surprises me, since Picasso’s statement on the Crucifixion strikes me as valid, moving, a furious cry of protest, the expression of a strong emotion that certainly lies within the wide limits of Catholicism. Although this is no more than a tentative hypothesis, it seems to me that Picasso, however desperately lapsed, did retain a certain residual Catholicism at some level of his being, an affectionate or perhaps a cautious respect for the old Church that showed itself in this silence and in the nature of these occasional outbursts. Apart from anything else, he looked upon his sacramental marriage as something different in kind from his other connections; and it is perhaps significant that as he came into the world with the rites of the Church, so he left it with at least some of them.
In 1891, in Málaga, the ten-year-old Picasso was more concerned with the ritual of the bull-ring than with any other sacrifice, and he recorded it diligently: but the days of his ordered, natural life were coming to an end. He now had a second sister, Concepción, born in 1887, and the flat was by so much the smaller; his father was growing even more withdrawn; and then, in a decision that caused great unhappiness, the municipality finally closed the museum. There had never been any margin for living in the Ruiz family, and this blow was disastrous.
In his distress Don José found a post at La Coruña: he was to teach drawing and decoration in the Escuela Provincial de Bellas Artes. La Coruña is in Galicia, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, a great way off in the north, and obviously the whole family would have to live there. All at once Don José became aware that his son was if not wholly illiterate then something very like it. Illiteracy and a total inability to add two and two would for the time being have mattered little in his native city, where friends and connections would naturally stand by the boy; but in a remote and savage province like Galicia the rules would have to be obeyed, at least by strangers, and to get into any school Pablo would have either to pass an entrance examination or present a certificate of competence. There was no possibility of his passing an examination in any subject but drawing, no possibility at all, so Don José went to see a friend who had the power of granting certificates. “Very well,” said the friend, “but in common decency the child should at least appear to be examined.”
The child appeared, and after some fruitless questions of a general nature, the child remaining mute, the examiner presented him with a sum, three plus one plus forty plus sixty-six plus thirty-eight, telling him kindly how to write it down and begging him not to be nervous. The first attempt was not wholly successful and the sum had to be written again: this time, when he showed it up, Pablo noticed that the examiner had made the addition himself on a scrap of paper, left obviously in sight. He memorized the figure, returned to his desk, wrote down the answer, drew a line beneath it with some complacency, and received his certificate.
This valuable paper was packed, together with all the family’s portable possessions, and the home in the Plaza de la Merced fell to pieces. Dr. Salvador helped his brother to a passage by boat, and at the end of that summer of 1891 Picasso first took to the sea, at the beginning of his long voyage.
*Family trees are always difficult to follow in a narrative: these are shown diagrammatically in Appendixes 1 and 2.
LA CORUÑA: a leaden sea and a weeping sky. Don José had looked forward with misgiving to this remote little town in a backward province, but he could never have imagined the cold, sodden reality: on seeing it, he withdrew into his humid lodgings, appalled. Until a southerner has had the living experience of it, he cannot possibly conceive the difference between the Mediterranean civilization, lived largely out of doors, and that of the north, where people huddle in unsociable family groups, each in its own house, to keep out of the cold and the rain.
The voyage had been arduous in the extreme, and rather than face the equinoctial gales off Finisterre and the full horror of the Bay of Biscay the family left the ship at Vigo, although this meant taking the train to Santiago de Compostela and then the diligence on to La Coruña—eight hours of a crowded, lumbering horse-drawn vehicle, something between a coach and a covered wagon, in the pouring rain with two small children and a baby: the road in a chronic state of disrepair.
Their arrival was inauspicious; they had left Málaga with the grapes ripening in the sun and the sugar-cane standing tall, perhaps the most delightful season of the year, and they reached La Coruña in time for the onset of the prodigious autumn storms. All this ironbound north and northeastern coast of Spain is exposed to the great winds that tear in over three thousand miles of Atlantic ocean, sweeping low cloud and vast sheets of rain before them; and the north-east corner is even more exposed than the rest. Galicia’s rainfall is the highest in the Peninsula, five and a half feet a year falling upon every square inch of Santiago, as opposed to London’s twenty-three and a half inches and New York’s forty-two. When it is neither blowing nor raining it is often foggy, as though the elements were hopelessly entangled; and this fog resolves itself into a cold, penetrating drizzle that streams upon the granite cliffs and the wet granite houses. There are pleasant days in the course of the year, when the sun peers through, lighting the pure sandy beaches, and when the deep fjords take on a certain charm; but then the warmth acts upon the piles of rotting kelp that the gales and furious tides (unknown in the Mediterranean) drive up to the high-water mark, and they breed swarms of noisome flies. In any case the Ruizes saw none of these fine days for the first months of their stay: autumn, winter, and spring had to pass slowly by before there was any hope of sun, as they understood the term.
These horrors impressed the young Picasso deeply, as well they might; but perhaps even more than by the incessant rain, the wind, the coal fires, the smoke-laden fog and the cold, he was shocked by the fact that in the streets the people spoke a different language. This was his first experience of being a foreigner, cut off; and for many small children the experience of hearing another language all round them, so that they are outsiders, debarred from the incessant, involuntary communication of the crowd and surrounded with secret, incomprehensible words, is deeply disturbing. The language spoken in La Coruña and the rest of Galicia is Gallego, a somewhat archaic variety of Portuguese, and although it is of course a Romance language other Spaniards do not understand it at all. The people can speak Castilian too, but among themselves it is Gallego: even now, with generations of
