'Work, meals, and sex': the untold story of Picasso's early years

In doing so, it fleshes out a period of Picasso’s life that is more usually glossed over. But while the story of what happened after 1907, as Picasso set about dismantling and reassembling the traditions of Western painting, is probably one of the most well-told of all time, the steps which led to that radical rupture – the mutations his painting had already gone through, the decisions Picasso had already made – can be enormously revealing.

If Picasso’s triumph, then, was a case of many threads coming propitiously together, there is one year among his formative ones which seems to stand out: 1900, the beginning of the century that he would come to embody, was pivotal to his development. 

It had a promising start. First Picasso, then 18 and living in Barcelona, finally secured himself a proper studio in which to paint. Before that, as the artist’s biographer John Richardson observes, he had been something of a “cuckoo”, hurtling from one temporary make-do premises (a corner here, a cramped room there) to the next, relying on the goodwill of friends and family.

His new place, which he shared with the artist Carlos Casagemas (who was a year older than Picasso) was on the top floor of a rundown building at 17 Riera Sant Joan, in the old town. Between them, they hadn’t two pesetas to rub together, and had to make-do with minimal furniture. As a salve, Picasso playfully drew grand-looking tables, seemingly stuffed bookcases and an embellished bed on the walls in trompe l’oeil, along with two servant figures to meet their every whim.  

Earlier that year, Picasso had also staged his first serious exhibition, in the sala gran of Els Quatre Gats, a cafe on the Carrer de Montsió. He had begun frequenting the cafe in 1899, and had been taken under the wing of a group of Spanish artists who met and drank there – Pere Romeu, Ramon Casas, Miquel Utrillo (father of the more famous Maurice) and Santiago Rusiñol.

The cafe, which was really more of a tavern, was a hotspot for Spain’s avant garde and quickly became was the focal point of Picasso’s life, priming him in the literature, philosophy, music and politics of his day.

Picasso wasn’t the only artist to stage an exhibition there – his Catalan cronies had already put on a group show in the back room in 1897 (their ‘modernisme’, as they called it, was more a provincial offshoot of symbolism and art nouveau than the radical movement the name suggests). The group had their own magazine, too. Mostly a vehicle for politics, but it also contained articles on artists they admired, such as Toulouse Lautrec and Gauguin, even Whistler.

The pictures Picasso exhibited in January 1900 were mostly portraits in charcoal, Conté crayon and oil wash. His friends helped him hang them:  unmounted and without frames, pinned to the wall in makeshift style. Reviews were mixed. One critic said Picasso had “talent and intuition and knowledge of the expressive power of colour.” But also that he had “a lamentable derangement of the artistic sense...an obsession with the most extreme form of modernisme”. Another, though, said that “Picazzo [sic] is a young man, a boy [who displays extraordinary ease in his handling of pencil and brush...master, too, of gracefulness of execution.”

The Quatre Gats “marked a turning point in Picasso’s approach,” writes Richardson. “Hitherto, he had gone along with paternal strategy and envisaged his career in terms of successive set pieces that would make successive splashes at major exhibitions.” Here, though, he began to work serially – a habit that would come to dominate his later work, as he decided on a theme and then proceeded to abandon himself to its development, however long that took.

Included in the Quatre Gats show was a painting called Last Moments (now lost) of a priest visiting the bedside of a dying woman. Not long after, it was accepted to represent Spain at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, whereupon an excited Picasso and his studio-mate Casagemas made the decision to attend alongside.

Picasso spent much of the summer raising funds for the trip, mostly by taking commissions for magazine illustrations and posters, which he hated. He tried to rally his parents to his cause, but locked horns with his father, who wanted him to return to his schooling. All that did was make Picasso more determined to leave.

Picasso and Casagemas arrived in Paris in October, dressed in new, identical black corduroy suits. From the Gare d’Orsay (now the famous museum), they headed for Montmartre, where a friend offered them the use of his studio while he went away for a few days.

Casagemas wrote home: “Tomorrow we are going to light the stove and work furiously for we are already thinking about the painting we’re going to send to the next Salon...Here everything is fanfare...tinsel...papier mâché stuffed with sawdust...We got drunk. Utrillo wrote nursery rhymes, Peio sang songs in Latin, Picasso made sketches.”

The friend whose studio they were borrowing had three regular models, Germaine, Antoinette and Odette, who seemed not to mind the change in artist. Casagemas immediately fell for Germaine, and persuaded her and her friends to move in.  Another Catalan named Pallares joined the group, and soon there were three couples living on top of each other. Picasso later described how, to ease the situation, Pallares hung a schedule on the wall encompassing work, meals, and sex.

By November, the resourceful Picasso had already managed to find a dealer for his work – Pere Mañach, who showed work by Spanish painters. Not only that, but within a matter of days, Mañach had already sold the three pastels he had taken on to the Frenchwoman Berthe Weill, known for her infallible eye when confronted with ‘la jeune peinture’. It inspired Mañach to give Picasso a contract. From then on, he could paint freely. He had crossed over the divide and into the rare world inhabited by Parisian artists and their dealers.

Casagemas and Picasso left Paris just before the end of the year. But where Picasso was buoyed up by his success, and full of new ideas, Casagemas was in a terrible state. Germaine had tired of their relationship, and had taken to taunting him about their lack of sex life (Casagemas was supposedly impotent).

On their way home to Barcelona, Picasso took him to Malaga for a short holiday. Ostensibly this was to divert his friend, but, Picasso later said, following his time in Paris he felt the need to come to terms with his roots; to decide who he was and where he was headed. It would be the last time he saw the city he was born in, and the last time he signed his paintings with his family name Ruiz – PR Picasso. From then on, he was simply Picasso.

Young Picasso is in cinemas nationwide. Details exhibitiononscreen.com/find-a- screening