[Curiosities] The destroyer Picasso

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The Paris art critic for The Christian Science Monitor recounts a visit with Pablo Picasso at his home. By Carlton LakeThe year 1895, when Pablo Picasso was thirteen, brought his initiation into two mysteries—the mystery of power and the mystery of death. On January 10 his seven-year-old sister, Conchita, died of diptheria. Picasso watched her deteriorate from the smiling little girl with the blonde curls whom he had so tenderly drawn to the ghost of herself that he drew just before death snatched her away. He watched the desperate comings and goings of Dr. Ramon Perez Costales, a friend of his father's. He watched his parents' struggle to save his sister; and he watched bewildered as they celebrated Christmas and Epiphany and gave presents to the children, trying to shield Conchita from any knowledge of approaching death. In his anguish Picasso made a terrible pact with God. He offered to sacrifice his gift to Him and never pick up a brush again if He would save Conchita. And then he was torn between wanting her saved and wanting her dead so that his gift would be saved. When she died, he decided that God was evil and destiny an enemy. At the same time, he was convinced that it was his ambivalence that had made it possible for God to kill Conchita. His guilt was enormous—the other side of his belief in his powers to affect the world around him. And it was compounded by his almost magical conviction that his little sister's death had released him to be a painter and follow the call of the powers he had been given, whatever the consequences.This article appears in the June 1988 issue.Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.See MoreAfter Conchita’s death the family moved from Corunna, in the northwest corner of Spain, to Barcelona. During his early days there Picasso did a revealing drawing, Christ Blessing the Devil, which was evidence of the deep conflict raging within him. Christ, with a shining aura around his head, is blessing with his left hand an overwhelmed Devil. At the same time he painted The Holy Family in Egypt and Altar to the Blessed Virgin. In 1896 came an abundance of religious pictures: Christ appearing to a nun, Christ being adorned by the angels, the Annunciation, the Last Supper, the Resurrection.A year after he drew Christ Blessing the Devil, he gave tender expression to some of the most powerful symbols of religious worship, but he also did a picture of Christ with no face—impersonal, unreal, and with no answers. Catholicism, with its emphasis on ethical rules and the rewards of heaven, held no answers for Picasso, with his growing passion for freedom and this world. He would reject the Church, but he could not stop himself from returning throughout his life to the figure of Christ, as a symbol of his own suffering, in the same way that he would bury his transcendent longings but could not extinguish them.Talk of nihilism, catalanism, anarchism, and modernism filled the smoky air of Els Quatre Gats, Picasso's main haunt in Barcelona. Els Quatre Gats was from the beginning a huge success, "a Gothic tavern for those in love with the North," where Uerillo staged puppet shows, where Rusinol, Casas, and Nonell, among other painters, showed their work, and where anyone with an apocalyptic gleam in his eye would gravitate to discuss the new ideas. Enthusiasm contended with a sense of futility, and the urge to create with the compulsion to destroy. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was one of the imported heroes of Els Quatre Gats: "Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge."Such was the intellectual milk that nourished Picasso in Barcelona at the turn of the century. Uneducated but quick to learn, he devoured ideas and philosophies through his friends who had read and absorbed them. Nietzsche's Will to Power struck an especially powerful chord in Picasso's heart. Power was the only value set up by Nietzsche to take the place of the transcendent values that had lost their meaning for modern man. And Picasso, for whom transcendent values were associated with Spain's repressive Church, found that Nietzsche's philosophy admirably suited his own needs and dreams of power.Picasso arrived in Paris just a few days before his nineteenth birthday, speaking no French and having no place to stay. At the beginning it did not seem to matter where he lived. Most of his time was spent on the streets, at cafés, in the Louvre, at the Universal Exhibition, at the Grand and Petit Palais, in the odd whorehouse.In the Summer of 1901 Ambrose Vollard, the dealer of Cezanne and Gauguin, put on a Picasso exhibition. There were prostitutes and society ladies, portraits and landscapes, interiors and street scenes. The exhibition was a success, but even more significant for Picasso's life, it led to his meeting the man who for the next few years would fulfill two of his three most constant and urgent needs. Max Jacob would become his caretaker and his worshipper. As for Picasso's third need, for constantly and effortlessly available sex, he would no doubt have been eager to meet that too, if only Picasso had been willing. Max Jacob went to see the Vollard show and soon after, struck by Picasso's "fire" and "real brilliance," arrived at the boulevard de Clichy, where Picasso was living, to pay his respects to the young master.Jacob was twenty-five years old when he met Picasso. He had come to Paris from Brittany three years earlier, determined to become an "artist"—a poet and a painter. "Stick to poetry" was Picasso's advice, and to a very large extent Jacob took it. He called Picasso "my little boy" but listened carefully to what the little boy had to say. This short, prematurely balding intellectual, who wore a monocle with the sensuality of a woman wearing a garter belt, had already gained considerable influence in the demimonde of poets and painters which he had made his home. He would launch some and help the careers of others already launched, but none would he love as deeply and as unconditionally as he loved Picasso.The summer of 1901 was a demonically creative one for Picasso. The art critic Francois Charles cautioned him "for his own good no longer to do a painting a day," but Paris had unleashed a surge of experimentation in him. It was a summer of reveling in the city, of celebrating his freedom from Spanish conventional morality, of flower still-lifes, cancan dancers, the races, pretty children, and fashionable ladies. Yet a noticeable change was beginning to take place in both his mood and his work. "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green," Van Gogh wrote in 1888, and in 1901 Picasso, spurred by his inner turmoil, switched his focus to the solitude and pain of humanity and tried to express them by means of blue. So began the procession of beggars, lonely harlequins, tormented mothers, the sick, the hungry, and the lame. And in their midst was Picasso himself, his own suffering on display in a blue self-portrait.In January of 1902 he returned for a time to Barcelona, where the sometimes despairing, sometimes bitterly tender expressionism of the Blue Period became still more intense. The destitute women of Paris appeared in their Barcelona incarnation utterly crushed by life and a hostile world. In Two Sisters, his painting of a whore and a nun, Picasso expressed for all time his starkly divided vision of women as madonnas or whores. And in his life, having idealized his mother to the point where he could not even bear to talk to the real, imperfect Dona Maria, he spent his time watching, sleeping with, and painting women who in his mind occupied the space reserved for whores. Two of the smaller nude drawings he would keep for his Private collection. On one of them he had written, "Cuando tengas ganas de joder, jode"—"When you are in the mood to screw, screw." In his struggle to define himself as a man, lust seemed the most appropriate emotion toward women.In October Picasso returned to Paris. All his hopes were now pinned on a new show organized by Berthe Weill. The other artists in the show were Lauriay, Pichot, and Girieud, and the catalogue praised Picasso's "indefatigable ardor to see and show everything" and the "wild light" that permeated his work. But nothing was sold, and Picasso's mood became even more nihilistic.His despair was there for all to see in his work. Charles Morice focused on it in an essay he wrote for the Mercure de France while the Weill show was still on.It is extraordinary, this sterile sadness which weighs down the entire work of this very young man. His works are already numberless. … He seems a young god trying to remake the world. But a dark god. Most of the faces he paints grimace; not a smile. His world is no more habitable than lepers' houses. And his painting itself is sick. Is this frighteningly precocious child not fated to bestow the consecration of a masterpiece on the negative sense of living, the illness from which he more than anyone else seems to be suffering