Pablo Picasso in Montmartre in 1904, in an image from the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris.Heritage Images (Getty Images)
The basic geography of Picasso in Spain speaks of a peaceful childhood in Malaga, a short stay in A Coruña and as a teenager a hop to Barcelona where he will stay with his family until 1900 when he is 19, when he settles in Paris. His stay in the Catalan capital is interrupted by two breaks during which, at his father’s request, he tries to study drawing in Madrid. These are years in which Pablo Ruiz Picasso never stopped drawing and painting. It is also a time when his overwhelming personality begins to manifest itself amid a profound redefinition of what Spanish is with the independence of the American nations and the Annual disaster.
Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) in his studio in the 1920s Hulton Archive (Getty Images)
An international congress held at the Museo Reina Sofía on Thursday and Friday has now, for the first time, paused to examine his formative years. Titled Picasso from the cultural sciences. Dream and Lie of Spain (1898-1922), whose coordinator, Chema González, clarifies that the name of the congress alludes to the famous graphic work by the artist Sueño y Lie by Franco (1937).
Pablo Picasso was a uniquely curious and observant man, approaching all the changes that occur around him. Despite its importance, the so-called “Picasso before Picasso” has not been studied in depth. Since his stay in France and his first great masterpiece: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Anglo-Saxon scholars have paid much more attention to the study of his life and work. The appointment in Madrid should remedy the situation.
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During the congress, Picasso’s relationship to the challenges, crises and transformations that rocked Spain from the catastrophe of 1898 to the end of the war with Morocco in the 1920s was examined to study at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts. It says there that he enrolled in landscape and clothing. It is also reported that he walked very little and no record of his possible work for the institution survives. The father’s teaching salary didn’t go far and the family raised a collection among their friends to fund the boy’s journey, which would now be called micropatronage or crowdfunding.
The writer Servando Rocha has researched what Madrid was like, where Pablo Ruiz liked to get lost. He always moved through the center of the city. It is known that he lived in a boarding house on Calle de San Pedro Mártir, near Tirso de Molina and Plaza de Cascorro, the start of the Rastro closest to Barcelona’s Chinatown. In August of the same year, President Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was assassinated by Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo. The repression and the riots were brutal. According to Servando Rocha, Madrid is a frightened and depressed city where suicides and murders are the order of the day. The writer recalls that one of the most popular places for stamping was already the Segovia Viaduct, built in 1874.
“The Young Ladies of Avignon” (1907), by Pablo Picasso. © successor to Pablo Picasso; VEGAP; Madrid; 2022
Picasso spent his days in the rooms of the Prado Museum, the Botanical Gardens and the Retiro Park. At night he could be seen walking the streets of El Codo and El Biombo, dressed in cape, hat and pipe, like a normal young bohemian.
Picasso’s second (short) period in Madrid was in 1901. He arrived as artistic director and illustrator of the magazine Arte Joven, of which only four issues appeared that year. He dealt with the Baroja brothers and drew them for publication. Pío Baroja described the man from Malaga as “a strange guy”.
Living room anarchist?
At Barcelona, he doesn’t seem to have been weighed down by his Charnego origins. There was no difference between the bohemian and the intelligentsia at the time because of the artist’s rattlesnake, bullfighter and gypsy heritage, according to one of his then best friends, Ángel Fernández de Soto.
The journalist and historian Conxa Rodríguez has studied the Barcelona years of the young Pablo Ruiz in detail. He told Congress that the Ruiz family lived very modestly on Calle de la Merced. The artist’s precarious economy was sometimes alleviated by producing posters for night shows. If he had some money, he would rent a room he shared with someone else, where they would paint during the day and drink at night. In the café Els Quatre Gats he met many of his best artist friends and began to depict the heroes of the Catalan bourgeoisie on cardboard, an impulse that was not long in coming.
It was turbulent on the stage where Pablo Ruiz moved. Someone in Congress joked that Barcelona was then the world capital of the barricade. What did Picasso do before that? Historian Josep Casals recalls that Barcelona attracted the man from Malaga because it was a center of progressive ideas and because he was a restless young man eager for new experiences. “Like several Spanish intellectuals, he chose anarchism after the catastrophe of 98. But his anarchism was more artistic and individualistic, the anarchism of the avant-garde, the bourgeois dissidents looking for ideas to renew and break everything that existed and rotted. But few of these intellectuals became outspoken anarchists,” concludes Casals.
The historian reported on the hard life of the Paris bohemian, which the artists shared on Montmartre and Montparnasse after the Paris Commune. There were around 5,000 registered artists in the French capital at the beginning of the 20th century. They were so poor that they shared everything. Max Jacob and Picasso met in 1901 and from December 1902 lived together in an apartment at 87 Boulevard Voltaire, a room so small that it contained only a bed, one used during the day and the other at night.
Self-portrait by Pablo Picasso (1906).MATHIEU RABEAU/REINA SOFÍA MUSEUM (REINA SOFÍA MUSEUM / © Succession Pablo Picasso. VEGAP, Madrid, 2022)
Picasso before matriarchy
In 1906, already based in Paris, he undertook a definitive journey for his career. At the age of 24 he has already started to find his niche. His work interests and sells while continuing to challenge himself with new forms of expression. One of those challenges led to a crisis that brought him to Gòsol, a tiny town in the Catalan Pyrenees.
Picasso asks his friend Gertrude Stein for a portrait of her. The American writer and patron accepts, but the work fails as the artist tries to paint the poet’s powerful face, as detailed by Jèssica Jaques Pi, historian at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Accompanied by Fernande Olivier, his partner at the time, and his three-month-old fox terrier (he always had dogs), he climbed on muleback to Gòsol, the second highest town in Catalonia, then inhabited by about 150 inhabitants. In a city of shepherds and shearers, Picasso dealt with women exercising seamless matriarchy. They provided and organized. It seems that his hard features and skin damaged by wind and cold lit him up to portray his friend Gertrude Stein. Transplanting a proto-Cubist head onto a Rose Age body, he created one of the most transcendent and powerful images of the 20th century.
The Picassos of Cienfuegos
One of the highlights of the congress was the screening of the black and white documentary Picasso by Julia Mirabal, co-produced in 2000 by France and Spain. The film was screened at a few festivals, but what it tells is still largely unknown to the general public. It is about the Afro-Cuban family left behind in Cienfuegos by his grandfather Francisco Picasso Gardeño, father of María Picasso, the painter’s mother. When he was 43 years old and had a family with six children in Malaga, his grandfather went to Cuba to make his fortune. There he hooked up with an Afro-Cuban man with whom he had a son. When the documentary was filmed, more than 40 people with the surname Picasso were registered. There is no record that the artist had any relationship with his Caribbean relatives or that he was aware of their existence.
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