A Life of Picasso, Volume I: 1881–1906 by John Richardson

Author:John Richardson [John Richardson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

Picasso. Portrait of Angel de Soto. Barcelona, 1903. Oil on canvas, 69.7×55.2cm. Mrs Donald S. Stralem collection, New York.

The portraits that Picasso did of his closest friends, Angel de Soto and Sabartès, in the course of his last months in Barcelona delve far more deeply into character and take far greater liberties than the Soler ones. The deformations in the Soto portrait—the jug ear, skewed mouth, prognathous chin—seem caricatural, but the image transcends caricature. By this time Picasso had learned how to exploit his inherent gift for caricature in depth as a means of dramatizing psychological as well as physiognomical traits. Whereas the average caricaturist externalizes things and comes up with an image that is slick and trite—an instant cliché—Picasso internalizes things and comes up with an enhanced characterization of his subject.8 Picasso enlarges Angel’s heavy-lidded eyes out of all proportion and endows them with his own obsidian stare. Among his immediate predecessors, only van Gogh had this ability to galvanize a portrait with his own psychic energy. Even the mocking portrait of Sabartès that dates from the following spring (his last appearance in Picasso’s work for thirty years or more) takes us aback with its pitiless assessment. The pink fleshy lips, the huge myopic eyes behind pince-nez, the supercilious eyebrows, the provincial dandyism (starched collar, silk cravat, velvet-collared overcoat): what a sardonic, twistedly affectionate portrayal of provincial pretentiousness it is. Picasso subtly mocks the poetaster—Jacobus Sabartès, as he had taken to calling himself—who had given a reading of his work a year earlier (March 1903) in the large room at Els Quatre Gats—a reading that the reviewer of La Vanguardia had characterized as ‘deficient; his diction made his long-winded prose seem erratic . . . boring . . . monotonous.’

Sabartès unwittingly explains the ambivalence of this portrait. The two friends had spent an evening in a café with ‘imbecile’ companions, who had pestered Picasso for advice on their work. On the way home, the artist was bored, grumpy, monosyllabic. Back in the studio, he harnessed his ill humour to yet another portrait of the poet: little by little he sublimated his irritation into paint.

[Picasso] began to observe me from different angles. He took a piece of canvas, put it on the easel and got ready to paint.

‘I’m going to paint you,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to?’

‘All right. But at least you’ll give it to me?’

‘Of course . . .’9 Thus he found a pretext for keeping me by his side without having to talk. . . . I stood motionless not far from his easel. His eyes went from the canvas to me and from me to the canvas; when it was covered he talked to me again:

‘Say something . . . Anyone might think you were in a bad mood.’

After this he put away his brushes, because by now he felt relieved. . . .

‘Tomorrow we’ll continue,’ he said lightly.

He was no longer the man of an hour ago. Were he now to meet the ‘imbeciles’, he would converse with them .

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