That summer, Picasso travelled with Fernande to Spain; with his two thousand gold francs from Vollard he could finally afford to take her to visit his native country. They were heading for the remote village of Gosol, above the Val d’Andorre in the Pyrenees. Fernande had never before travelled beyond France. She found the three-day journey by rail exhausting; she lay sleepless all night in their third-class compartment waiting for daybreak, rattled by the jolts of their carriage, which seemed to have no suspension. Picasso, a more seasoned traveller, passed the time reading Miquel Utrillo’s just published monograph on El Greco.
Their arrival in Barcelona on 21 May coincided with a noisy and tumultuous Catalan demonstration: the anarchists were protesting about political issues largely to do with their antipathy to the Church. Fernande found the crowds and noise overwhelming and begged Picasso to take her home. Had there been a train about to leave, she might have succeeded in persuading him. Instead, they spent the next fortnight visiting family and friends, including Ricard and Benedetta Canals; she discovered that social life in Barcelona took place mainly at night, when the city became gay and animated. Then they resumed their travels. The journey to Gosol meant several hours on the back of a mule, Fernande’s hands and knees scraped as they trotted for miles along the edge of a sheer drop.
Gosol itself she found enchanting. After Paris and Barcelona, the air was pure and the local people, most of them smugglers, were entertaining and hospitable. She sat with them, making out what they said through their gestures, while Picasso worked. He was painting a local man, Josep Fontdevila, aged at least ninety, his teeth wasted up to his gums, every single one either missing or decayed, giving his face a carved, primitive appearance. The sun gilded the houses ochre, turning the stony ground white beneath a sky so blue she had never seen anything like it. Everything delighted her. In the village, old customs prevailed. The women rarely dined with their menfolk; they ate by themselves, standing in the kitchen, while the men talked, completely ignoring them. The saints, on the other hand, were greatly revered; the locals seemed to take a day off to celebrate once, sometimes even twice a week, when there was dancing in the square and an atmosphere of festivity and celebration.
On 27 June, Picasso wrote to his friend Casanovas, back in Paris, asking him to send some chisels so he could work the wood he had been given by the villagers. In July, he wrote again: ‘I want you to buy or send me by mail a roll of twenty sheets of papier Ingres and as quickly as you can because I have finished the small stock of paper I bought in Barcelona . . . Could you send me in the same package two or three small eines [chisels] to work in wood?’
In Paris, the impact on everyone (not least Picasso) of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife and Picasso’s own experience of painting Gertrude’s portrait had presented him with new formal problems. Now, in summer 1906, he began to approach his work in new ways. Perhaps taking his cue from Modigliani, he started to work on several woodblocks, making sculptures, including a boxwood figure which became known as the Bois de Gosol. In his paintings, he depicted carved-looking, sculpted figures which clearly showed the influence of ethnic figure carvings – his own, and those he had seen earlier in Paris, the statuettes Vlaminck had found in Argenteuil as well as the Iberian sculptures that went on display at around that time in the Louvre. Already, the delicate, elongated figures of the Rose Period had given way to a quite different treatment of the human form. His new painted figures were chunky, sturdy, the volumes clearly delineated. As his way of modelling forms changed, the surface of the paint became increasingly tactile and raw, his earlier rose palette replaced by brick and earth tones. And the proportions of his figures were changing, as he moved away from the classical ideal of beauty, creating instead larger heads, heavy shoulders and narrow hips, in keeping with the forms and features of Iberian sculpture.
Sometime in 1906, perhaps also in Gosol, he painted another self-portrait, a small, simple oil painting on canvas mounted on wood, which, though modest in size (26.7 x 19.7 cms) was radical in its treatment of self-portraiture. The figure of Picasso in a white, open-necked shirt, palette in hand, has a sculpted appearance, influenced perhaps by his own and Gauguin’s rudimentary woodcuts. The face, mask-like, with one eye completely blanked out, recalled Cézanne’s treatment of his wife’s face in The Artist’s Wife. In Picasso’s self-portrait, the face and figure are stripped, pure, elemental, as if something is being pared down to the essence. In Gosol, his paintings of Fernande began to change, too. He depicted her without facial expression, treating her like a statue, breaking up the form of the face into facets and creating strange, sombre angles. He continued to work in this way throughout the summer. For three months, as one commentator put it, il prépare sa révolution. The summer wore on, neither Picasso nor Fernande showing any sign of being ready to leave, until, in mid-August, their stay came to an abrupt end. On the 13th, Picasso suddenly wrote again to Casanovas, telling him to forget the errands he had asked him to run; within a few days, he and Fernande would be returning to Paris. The landlady’s daughter had contracted typhoid fever, and Picasso was always frightened of illness; he lived in mortal fear of contagious disease.
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Back in the Bateau-Lavoir, it was stiflingly hot. They had a cat now, so at least the stench of mice was no longer overpowering, but the place was still airless. Picasso reverted to his habit of painting all night and sleeping all morning, though sometimes he was not allowed to sleep on undisturbed. Visitors unfamiliar with his timetable, including any potential purchasers, tended to come in the morning. ‘M’sieur Picasso! M’sieur Picasso!’ the concierge would shout up at his window. ‘Get up at once, it’s a serious visitor come to see you!’ A young German dealer William Uhde, who had bought Picasso’s painting The Tub back in 1901, had begun to mingle with the Picasso bande, often joining them in the Lapin Agile. Now, in 1906, he bought the painting that seemed to signify the end of Picasso’s concern with the acrobats and itinerant performers who had peopled a whole era of his work. The painting, Death of a Harlequin, shows a harlequin lifeless in his coffin. The Rose Period was almost over.
Gertrude Stein bought Picasso’s self-portrait in a white vest, just for herself, she said; she thought it too intime for public display. Sergei Shchukin had also begun to take an interest in the painter. From now on, the pattern of sales of Picasso’s work was set: his purchasers would always be friends or private collectors who exhibited his work in their own salons rather than in public exhibitions. He disliked negotiating, hated selling works he was not satisfied with and always said a painting was never finished, he was simply forced to part with it to buy painting materials for the next work. Even in the early days, he sold discreetly. After a visit from one such individual, Olivier Saincerre, who loved modern art and regularly bought a small piece, Fernande could again buy shoes, hats and perfume.
Despite the heat, on their return from Spain, Picasso got straight back to work. To Fernande’s despair, he began to paint over some of his old canvases. She felt she was witnessing the passing of an era; she had loved the old melancholy Blue and delicate, early Rose Period works. Picasso embarked on various works, including Nude Combing Her Hair (1906), a carved-looking figure of a girl, and Two Nudes (1906), in which two squat, carved figures stand face to face – both resembling the works he had produced in Gosol. He was also working on ceramic sculptures, including a Bust of Josep Fontdevila, the all but toothless nonagenarian of Gosol; and a sculpture of Fernande, probably inspired by Gauguin’s wood carvings, Fernande Combing Her Hair. Then he got out his unfinished portrait of Gertrude Stein.
Before leaving for Gosol, he had wiped out the head, telling Gertrude, ‘I can’t see you any more when I look.’ He now repainted it, from memory. Perhaps, having read Noa Noa, he had also somewhere read Gauguin’s words, ‘It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting. It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own.’ The new face was almost expressionless; like a mask, or the mask-like side of Madame Cézanne’s face in Cézanne’s painting. And the portrait of Gertrude Stein was finished. ‘But it doesn’t look like me,’ said Gertrude when he showed it to her. ‘It will,’ he replied. The Picasso bande had all read Oscar Wilde. But perhaps the remark referred not backwards to the Decadents but forwards to the art of the modern age. In its striking formal resemblance to Cézanne’s The Artist’s Wife, the portrait suggested more profoundly than any photographic likeness the concerns and principles that characterized Gertrude as she was that winter; and (to borrow Gertrude Stein’s idiom) it exactly reflected what it actually depicted – Gertrude Stein, posing for Picasso.
When her friends saw the painting they were horrified, as was Leo. Gertrude herself came to recognize in it the principles of abstraction and reduction to essentials she had herself been seeking to express in her work. She also appreciated the sense in which, in its monolithic simplicity, it did succeed as a likeness. ‘I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait,’ she later inimitably wrote. ‘For me it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me.’ When Picasso showed her the work he had done in Gosol, she noticed immediately the change in his palette: ‘still a little rose but mostly an earth colour’. She recognized the influences, not only of the African carvings which by now were beginning to fascinate everyone, but also of Cézanne and Gauguin. Yet she saw, too, that Picasso’s work was unique. As she put it, ‘Picasso was the only one in painting who saw the twentieth century with his eyes and saw its reality and consequently his struggle was terrifying, terrifying for himself and for others, because he had nothing to help him, the past did not help him, nor the present, he had to do it all alone.’
That autumn, Picasso began to work alone in his studio, uninterrupted for many hours at a time. The business of socializing, even at the Steins’, had begun to distract and irritate him. He had a new idea, which he wanted to develop in solitude. As Gertrude Stein later noted, ‘The rose period ended with my portrait, the quality of drawing had changed and his pictures had already commenced to be less light, less joyous.’ She qualified this; the subjects of the Rose Period had of course not all been joyful; in his paintings of the circus performers, he had incorporated a note of sadness and acknowledged the hardship and wretchedness of their lives. But his Rose Period had also been a time of light-heartedness, when ‘he contented himself with seeing things as everybody did. And then in 1906 this period was over.’
The year 1906 had marked a period of considerable turbulence and change throughout France. There were over 1,300 strikes, most notably on 1 May, when the workers went out to demand an eight-hour working day. Confrontations between strikers and government were ubiquitously covered by the French press, which was then in its heyday. In all the major cities, there were up to a dozen newspapers and every city had at least four or five, all competing for circulation with the increasing numbers of gimmick papers, comic strips and supplements of photo engravings. Le Matin ran a daily column of domestic news by Félix Fénéon, a brilliant, somewhat shady figure who, though he kept a low profile, was known as a literary and art critic. He founded several magazines and edited several more, including La Revue blanche. A thin, dessicated-looking man with a sharply hooked nose, he was part anarchist, part aesthete. He had more or less discovered Paul Seurat, founded literary journals, worked for thirteen years as a clerk in the War Office, supported strikers and had allegedly thrown a bomb into the Café Terminus which caused a blast in which poet Laurent Tailhade lost an eye. After working for La Revue blanche until it folded in 1903, he had been a journalist for Le Figaro until early in 1906, when he joined the staff of Le Matin, where, after a few months, he was assigned the faits-divers column on page three, which he kept until November. In his daily column, he managed, partly through sheer brevity, to ginger the domestic events of the day with a mildly satirical edge. His stories, which he called ‘novels in three lines’, reflected with great economy the tenor of French life in 1906, revealing the growing importance and menace of the automobile; the medieval conditions that still prevailed in rural areas; the inefficiency of firearms; the arrogance of the military; the unchangingly brutal state of factory labour; and the continuing rumbling threat of anarchist violence. Life in the middle of the Third Republic was tumultuous, with the prospect of German invasion again on the horizon and the previous year’s separation of Church and State still a contentious issue, since it had reduced the power and income of the Church as well as its monopoly over primary education. Taken together, practically any random selection of Fénéon’s stories conveys the flavour of daily domestic life that year.
There were reports of abject poverty, gunpowder plots and of the 300-year-old cannon which, ‘while thundering for the Republic’, exploded in Chatou. No one was hurt. There were stories of women killing newborns and of children smothered when their parents could not afford to feed them. Cab drivers were demanding excessive tips, resulting in ‘27 violations’. The corpse of a man named Dorlay, aged about sixty, hung from a tree in Arcueil with a sign reading, ‘Too old to work’. The court at Nancy jailed a parish priest for insulting a tax collector. Swindlers coloured the new maroon ten-centime stamps and sold them as rareties to unsuspecting punters. People died drawing water, trampled by their own cows or run over by their own hay carts. Prostitutes were slaughtered on the pavement; a poacher from Ivry, shopped to the police by a pedlar, stuck a file in the pedlar’s back. On separate occasions 2,700 feet of telephone cable were stolen in Gargan, 4,500 between Épinay and Argenteuil, another seven miles’ worth between Paris and Arpajan; and it was still going on. A travelling freak show, with its ‘horrible monsters and efflorescent skin diseases’ had been burned down in the park at Saint-Cloud. Forty gypsies, with their camels and bears, were forced by police to leave Fontenay-aux-Roses, and, for that matter, the entire region of the Seine. In Montmartre, still clearly the enclave of the poor, a Monsieur Fraire (a labourer known as Cruddy) was informed by a lawyer of his inheritance, whereupon he died of shock.
The most significant social changes regarded labour laws and education. On 1 May, schooling for girls was made legal; on 13 July, following a wave of strikes, a bill was passed granting a compulsory day of rest, Monday. In the Moulin de la Galette, Monday became ‘cheveux’ day, with dress codes so relaxed that dancers were permitted to dance hatless. Proceedings in the dance hall became less formal that day and things sometimes became rowdier than usual on the workers’ new day off. As for Fénéon, he was multi-talented: he could spot not only a good story but also a good painting. Bernheim-Jeune now brought him into their employ, to introduce promising young artists into their stable. For, as the twentieth century unfolded, as Gertrude Stein later observed, ‘More and more the struggle to express it intensified.’