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The Art of Youth 1898-1901
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Self-Portrait
1899
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Picasso's decision to abandon his academic training was a decisive
crisis in his youth. The upheaval of having to leave everything behind
produced an immediate and visible result: he fell ill. In spring 1898
in Madrid he came down with scarlet fever, and was quarantined for
forty days. We cannot say whether his psychological state was
responsible for the illness, but his bad health hardened Picasso's
resolve. He was scarcely recovered but he turned his back on Madrid.
After spending a brief while in Barcelona, he went to Horta de Ebro
with his friend Manuel Pallares. He stayed for almost nine months in
Pallares's home village in the deserted hills of Catalonia, till
February 1899. The two friends would go on long walks together, and
painted and drew.
Picasso then returned to Barcelona and embarked on his independent
career in art. The Catalan metropolis was his base till his definitive
final move to France in 1904. They were restless years, and Picasso
spent a number of longer periods in Paris as well as making a further
five-month attempt to settle in Madrid in 1901. And of course they
were unsettled years of crisis for Spain, too. In 1898, through its
colony Cuba, Spain became involved in a war with the USA. Defeat spelt
the end of what remained of Spain's colonial empire and claims to be a
world power.
It was a turning point, and brought profound political, social and
cultural insecurity with it. People were torn between loyalty to a
great past and new affiliation with Europe. Their ideas ran the entire
gamut from liberal republicanism to anarchism. Castile and Andalusia
lost their dominance, while the industrial north came into its own.
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In such a period, the seventeen-year-old Picasso had considerable
capital, albeit not of a financial kind. He was confident, talented
and young. He had contacts. And he had unlimited energy. His father's
encouragement had married a natural talent that took demands easily in
its stride, and the inevitable upshot was independence of character.
It was helpful that his father indirectly cut the umbilical cord by
renting a studio for his son during his studies in Barcelona. More
importantly, the father's strategies had already gained Picasso a
certain professional recognition.
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The Embrace
1900
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In 1896 "First Communion" was exhibited in Barcelona. This
was the third arts and crafts exhibition to be held there (after 1891
and 1894), a major event intended to showcase contemporary Catalan
culture. Some thirteen hundred works were on show, by important
artists of every aesthetic persuasion. The press response was also a
major one. To be exhibited in that show was a triumph for a
fifteen-year-old, even if his father's contacts had helped; to be
praised in a leading newspaper, even if he won no prizes, was even
better.
A year later he painted the grand "Science and Charity". Anecdotal realism was a popular variety of historical painting
at the time. Picasso's picture had thematic links with various other
paintings that had been successfully exhibited, some of them in the
Barcelona show. Again his father's prompting and influence were
decisive. Picasso submitted the work to the Madrid General Art
Exhibition, and it was taken by a jury that included the painter
Antonio Munoz Degrain, a friend and colleague of his father's to whom
the youth had already given a portrait study." "Science and Charity"
received an honourable mention at the exhibition, and subsequently a
gold medal in Malaga.
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The Brutal Embrace
1900
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So Picasso was known to those who followed contemporary art when he
set out on his own way. And Barcelona was a good place for it, a
progressive city compared with traditionalist, academic Madrid.
Spanish art nouveau was based in Barcelona, in the form of a
group of artists known as the modernists, and in Barcelona too were
their successors and antagonists, the post-modernists. An architect of
global importance, Antoni Gaudi, was changing the face of the city.
The current aesthetic concerns of Europe were hotly debated, and
adapted to local needs. Barcelona was the centre for avant-garde
Spanish art, and at the nearby seaside resort of Sitges the Festa
Modernista was held, an art nouveau event to which special
trains were run.
In June 1897 the Barcelona cafe "Els Quatre Gats" (The Four Cats)
opened its doors. It was an artists' cafe and hosted changing
exhibitions in the spirit of "Le Chat Noir", the "Ambassadeur" or "Le
Mirliton" in Paris. True, "Els Quatre Gats" survived only till 1903;
but in its short life it was the hub of Catalonian artistic life.
Leading "Modernistas" helped establish it: the painter Ramon Casas
(who won an award at the exhibition of 1896), painter and writer
Santiago Rusinol, and the journalist Miguel Utrillo. And leading
post-modernists were among its clientele, including Isidre Nonell,
Joaquim Mir and Ricardo Canals.
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The Embrace in the Street
1900
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It cannot have been too difficult for Picasso to join these
circles, since they would have heard his name; and belonging to them
was a good start for his career. In the art world as in any other,
talent and energy need personal contacts to help them on their way.
And it was contacts that helped decide Picasso for Paris. Though he
was impressed by what he had heard about Munich, it was to Paris that
he made his move. Munich art was seen in Barcelona, and indeed at the
1896 exhibition painters and sculptors from Munich constituted the
largest foreign contingent. But Paris was closer in various senses. It
had an established Catalan community, including a number of artists
temporarily living and working in the city. So Picasso did not have to
conquer the great metropolis single-handed.
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Gypsy Outside "La Musciera"
1900
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He first visited Paris in autumn 1900, for the World Fair, where
his painting "Last Moments" had been chosen for the show of Spanish
art. Friends from "Els Quatre Gats" smoothed his way in Paris. He was
able to use their studios when they were visiting Spain, and he was
introduced to the industrialist and art dealer Pedro Manach, who
afforded him a first secure foothold. Manach signed a contract with
Picasso guaranteeing to take his pictures for two years and to pay 150
francs per month by way of fixed income. He also floated the idea of a
first Paris Picasso exhibition at the Galerie Vollard in 1901.
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The Montmartre Fair
1900
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To Picasso, this was no more than an entree into the art market.
For the moment, Spain seemed the better territory for his ambitions.
In early 1901 he went to Madrid and started an art magazine together
with a young writer, Francesc de Asis Soler. It was meant as a
platform for Spanish art nouveau and was tellingly titled "
Arte Joven" (Young Art). Benet Soler Vidal, whose family put up the
money for the project, was the editor, while Picasso was the art
director. It was not a particularly successful magazine and folded
after five issues; but it was eloquent of Picasso's views on art at
that period. Contributions were squarely in line with the "Modernista"
spirit, though they had a distinctly satirical and even nihilist
flavour to them. Picasso did the majority of the illustrations. The
magazine was modelled on the Barcelona modernist organ "Pel y Ploma"
(Brush and Pen), the presiding artist of which was Ramon Casas. The
aim was plainly to take contemporary art to Madrid, the conservative
heart of Spain. When failure became inevitable, Picasso returned to
Barcelona, and subsequently devoted his attention to Paris.
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Montmartre Braserie: The Flower Vendor
1900
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At that time his work took its bearings from what the Spanish
avant-garde approved. He put his academic leanings aside and adopted
the new creative approaches of the period in the way he had learnt: by
copying. The works shown in his first exhibition at "Els Quatre Gats",
for instance, consisted mainly of portraits done after the
example of Casas' famous pictures of prominent people. The people
Picasso portrayed were not as well known, but he used the same
approach, drawing them from the knees up against a colourful
background, using a mixture of charcoal and watercolour.
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The Barcelona Bullring
1900
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Stylistically, these works are strongly contoured with heavy
outlines, and the facial features are highlighted with a few
economical strokes. Picasso works in polarities. The overall shape is
briskly established, but within it the face and body are differently
treated. The long vertical lines or broad-area charcoal smudges are
broken up with thick, obvious details. It is all done with great
panache, but it is clearly simpler and even more schematic than
pictures by Casas, where formal contrasts are far more subtly
deployed. Picasso is out for rapid, foreground impact, and has reduced
the structure of the models he is following to a principle, leaving
the background a large bare space.
To reduce the given to a principle, and to define form in terms of
linear contour and outline, were things that Picasso had learnt in his
training; so the line-based art of art nouveau presented no
problem to him. The menu he designed for "Els Quatre Gats" in
1899 is a good example. Every shape is rendered in clear line. Figures
and background details work in plain zones of monochrome colour, or
else are offset from each other by minor, stylized details. The
illustration shows the speed and assurance with which Picasso had
adopted a "Modernista" approach. There would be no real point in
suggesting a specific influence on such a work."'' Far too many of his
works are much the same; Picasso was almost into serial production,
and the tendency stayed with him later and repeatedly demonstrated the
intensity with which he would pursue a subject or form. Themes such as
an embrace or a kiss were to be repeated many times over, often varied
only in some minor detail. He sketched poses and groupings over and
over, deploying the results in various changing compositions.
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Menu of "Els Quatre Gats"
1899
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Interior of "Els Quatre Gats"
1900
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The Divan
1899
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But Picasso at that time did not confine himself to the repertoire
of art nouveau. He was omnivorous in his taste for new
aesthetic trends. Some of his drawings and paintings show him reworking the formal idiom of El Greco. The Greek-born
painter had evolved his own distinctive style of elongated proportions
and powerful colours in the late 16th and early 17th century in Spain.
From El Greco Picasso borrowed the expressive elongation and the
restless brushwork. He had seen original El Grecos in the Prado, of
course; but his interest was also very much a product of the period.
For centuries El Greco had been forgotten, and it was not till the
19th century that avant-garde artists rediscovered him. Charles
Baudelaire was an admirer, Eugene Delacroix and Edgar Degas collected
his work - though as late as 1881 a director of the Prado felt able to
dismiss El Greco's paintings as "absurd caricatures". It was not till
the "Modernistas" that this Spanish attitude really changed; Utrillo,
above all, was instrumental in the revival of El Greco's fortunes.
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The Blue Dancer
1900
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But it was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec who made the most powerful
impression on the youthful Picasso. His posters and paintings,
draughtsmanlike in manner, economical, precise, often on the verge of
being caricatures, held a particular appeal for Picasso.
Toulouse-Lautrec was well known in Barcelona, but it was not till he
visited Paris that Picasso saw originals and even bought posters to
hang in his own studio. As well as formal considerations , what
interested him was the Frenchman's subject matter, the world of the
cabaret and night club, the world of dancers and conviviality. Soon
Picasso was producing his own pictures on these themes. In 1900, Picasso's interest in Toulouse-Lautrec peaked in his
painting "Le Moulin de la Galette". Inside, there is a crowd;
further on, beyond a diagonally cropped group of women seated at a
table to the left, we see dancing couples as in a frieze. The subject
and the treatment are reminiscent of a Toulouse-Lautrec done in 1889,
which in turn was a reworking of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1876 painting
of the merriment at the famous Moulin, transposing the colourful fun
from the garden to the interior and to night. Picasso follows
Toulouse-Lautrec, and intensifies the effect by using the gas lighting
to establish an atmosphere of half-light, a uniform duskiness in which
the figures appear as patches of colour against a dark background.
Correspondingly, the style of brush-work is more summary, working in
large blocks and pinpointing only a few characteristics of the people
shown. The people have in fact been stripped of their individuality
and are merely props to illustrate social amusement.
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Le Moulin de la Galette
1900
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So Picasso was not merely imitating. He also tried to reconceive
the originals he copied. Very soon he was trying to rework diverse
influences in a single work. A good example painted on cardboard in
1901 is "Pierreuse". A young woman wearing a red top and a
decorative hat is seated at a blue table, leaning on both elbows, her
right arm crooked to clasp her left shoulder. Her attitude is one of
protective barring and signals that she is withdrawn within herself.
Dreamily she gazes away into an undefined and indistinct distance.
A sense of transported absence is conveyed not only by the woman's
pose but also by Picasso's compositional subtlety. The woman is
leaning across to the left side of the picture, establishing a falling
diagonal and thus introducing a quality of movement into the work. But
it is movement that is meticulously counterbalanced and neutralized by
the composition as a whole. The use of spatial areas is richly
ambivalent. Inclining across the table, the woman seems to be coming
nearer to us, and with her hat cropped more than once by the picture
edge it is as if she were on the point of stepping out towards us. At
the same time, though, her position on the other side of the table
emphasizes inaccessibility. It is a painting of mood, and the
contrastive use of colour, with the dichotomy of flat areas and
broken-up form, serve to underline its mood. While the face and body
are strongly outlined and colourfully painted in monochrome, the
background is an iridescent tapestry of colour dabs. It is a restless
patchwork of yellow, red, blue and green, and the pastose painting
disturbs our eye and establishes productive unclarities. Picasso was
using techniques borrowed from the pointillists, Vincent van Gogh,
Paul Gauguin and the Nabis all in one, to make a style of his own.
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Pierreuse
1901
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The Dwarf
1901
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The same applies to his portrait of Pedro Manach. It is an
uncompromising frontal view. Manach's right hand is on his hip, his
left arm almost straight. The figure is a well-nigh pure study in
outline, set against an ochre yellow and almost entirely
undifferen-tiated background. Background and figure alike are done as
large areas lacking finish, and the face too has been established with
only a few lines and colours. It is a picture of contrasts, the yellow
background offsetting the white and dark brown of the clothing; but
the signal red of the tie, striking the sole aggressive note, has the
effect of resolving polarities and bringing the whole work together.
The influence of van Gogh's Provence work done late in life, and of
the Pont-Aven school, is palpable.
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Portrait of Pedro Manach
1901
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Portrait of Josep Cardona
1899
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The Closed Window
1899
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Of course contemporary critics were quick to notice Picasso's
adoption of current avant-garde artistic styles. Reviewing the work
shown in 1901 at the Galerie Vollard, Felicien Fagus wrote that
Picasso had plainly been influenced by "Delacroix, Manet, Monet, van
Gogh, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Forain, perhaps even Rops".
The only thing wrong with this assessment is that it misses out an
important name or two, such as that of Gauguin.
But the sheer number of influences on Picasso at that time need not
only be seen in a negative light. It is normal for young artists to be
influenced as they try to find their own style. And Picasso wasn't
merely copying; he was quickly able to harmonize various influences
into new wholes. If this had not been so, it would be hard to
understand his early success on the art market. He had an excellent
memory for formal qualities, one which stored them so deeply that they
became part of his own way of thinking. He was imitating, yes - but he
did so in order to find a style entirely his own.
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1900 - 1901
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La Corrida
1900
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Corrida
1900
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Corrida
1900
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Bullfighting Scene
1901
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La Corrida
1901
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Head of a Woman
1901
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Portrait of a Woman
1901
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The Plumed Hat
1901
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French Cancan
1901
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Woman Leaning on a Table. Three Female Profiles
1901
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