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Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés QUERIDO SABARTÉS: JAUME SABARTÉS SEEN BY PABLO PICASSO Elisabeth Cowling 13.03.2014 Querido Sabartés: Jaume Sabartés seen by Pablo Picasso Elisabeth Cowling 13.03.2014 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés Museo Picasso Barcelona, 13 March 2014 Sabartés’s devotion to Picasso is legendary. According to the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnwei- ler, who had known the artist for almost as long: “To Sabartés, there is not now, there never has been, and there never will be any painter but Picasso: this is not the greatest painter of all time, but the only one, the unique.” 01 Sabartés himself never pretended otherwise. Commiserating with Roland Penrose, Picasso’s equally besotted English biographer, he remarked ruefully: “Ah! I see you too have caught the virus. I personally had no choice. I have suffered from it with pleasure all my life.” 02 In her score-settling memoirs, Françoise Gilot paints a tragi-comic picture of Sabartés’s sufferings in Picasso’s service: the “totally disinterested”, but obstructive, jealous and baleful fixer of the stu- dio in Rue des Grands-Augustins, was, she says, as devoted to Picasso as a Trappist monk to his God. The pair shared a love of mystery and cloak-and-dagger secrecy, and had devised their own cryptic language and arcane rituals. But Sabartés was, according to Gilot, a masochist, who embraced the role of scapegoat, and was repaid for all his efforts by constant ribbing, humiliating practical jokes, and a tiny stipend. 03 In this evening’s lecture I hope to throw light on this extraordinary, lopsided relationship by examining Picasso’s images of Sabartés figure 1. But I will begin by looking briefly at these inscriptions in two books belonging to Sabartés: on the left, the cover and flyle- Figure 1 MPB 111.835 af of Picasso’s play, Le Désir attrapé par la queue, published in Paris in 1945;04 and the dedication in Sabartés’s Picasso: documents iconographiques, published in Geneva in 1954. Their affectionate warmth leads us to question Gilot’s picture of a sadistic Picasso, for it is typical of his messages to Sabartés. Notice too how thoughtfully each ins- cription has been composed, despite the appearance of careless haste. Thus the red chalk monogram JS in the centre of the cover of Le Désir attrapé par la queue picks up the colour and typography of NRF, and the dated inscription in ink at top left balances the publishing details at bottom right. On the flyleaf, Picasso rhymed the tallsAs of the repeated word Ami to symbolise the bond between them. Ten years later, he gave the touching message inscribed in ink on Picasso: documents icono- graphiques a poetic structure, while also taking pains to contrast the idiosyncratic flourish of his signature with the neat capital letters of his printed name. When it came to commu- 03 nicating with Sabartés, Picasso did not dream of relaxing his aesthetic instincts. On the other hand, Gilot’s assessment might seem to be confirmed by Picasso’s many carica- tures of Sabartés, which unremittingly and unsparingly focused on his short stature, myopia and lack of conventional good looks. Sabartés is on record as saying, in Picasso’s hearing: 01 Brassaï, Picasso & Co (trans. Francis Price). London: Thames & Hudson, 1967, p. 266. Kahnweiler to Brassaï on 17 October 1962. 02 Roland Penrose, Scrap Book 1900–1981. London: Thames & Hudson, 1981, p. 216. 03 Françoise Gilot, Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso. Harmondsworth (Mddx): Penguin Books, 1966, pp. 165-69. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés “I don’t like my face. I detest looking at myself in a mirror. And I have a horror of seeing myself in a photograph.” 05 Since he was mortified by his looks, are caricatures like these acts of deliberate cruelty, espe- cially coming as they do from the irresistibly seductive Picasso? The nature of Picasso’s caricatures will be a central theme of my talk. Picture of Jaume Sabartés Sabartés was exactly the same age as Picasso. When they first met in Barcelona in 1899 they were just eighteen years old, and Sabartés was training to be a sculptor at La Llotja, while also composing poetry and prose. In his book of memoirs, Picasso: portraits et souvenirs, he described the dramatic impact on him of that first, life-changing meeting in the artist’s tiny top-floor studio: 04 “I still remember my leave-taking. […] It was noon. My eyes were still dazzled by what they had seen among his papers and sketchbooks. Picasso […] intensified my confu- sion with his fixed stare. On passing before him to go, I sketched a kind of obeisance, stunned as I was by his magical power, the power of a Magi, possessing gifts so asto- nishingly full of hope and promise.” 06 04 The manuscript of Le Désir attrapé par la queue is dated 17 January 1941; it was first performed privately in Michel and Zette Leiris’s apartment, Quai des Grands-Augustins, Paris on 19 March 1944. 05 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 109. The only photograph of himself Sabartés claimed to like was taken by Brassaï in December 1943. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés This mesmerising self-portrait gives some sense of the charisma that transfixed Sabartés. From that moment on, his belief in Picas- so’s genius was absolute, his fidelity absolute. Little by little a friendship that accommodated their differences as well as their affinities developed between the bashful, awestruck young poet-sculptor and his idol. On the left is Picasso’s first por- trait of him figure 3, but in the torn sheet of sketches figure 2 I think he is the figure next to the imitation El Greco heads and the famous inscription “Yo El Greco”. Keen to gain Picasso’s trust and regard, Sabartés was among tho- se who helped him prepare and install an exhibition of his portrait drawings in the Quatre Gats tavern in early February 1900. The pur- Figure 2 MPB 110.678 pose was not only to launch Picasso’s career but also to rival the sell-out exhibition of portraits by Ramón Casas held the previous October at the Sala Parés, Barcelona’s leading art gallery. Because nobody involved had any money, and because in any case the point was to mock the affluent bourgeoisie who patronised Casas, the drawings were crudely tacked —unmounted, unframed, and in no particular order— onto the tavern walls. Among them was the portrait of Sabartés. Compared to these drawings of an unidenti- fied man and Santiago Rusiñol it seems especially casual, with bold charcoal lines scrawled across the knee to show the intended limits of the composition, and only the most rudimentary indications of a farmhouse and shrubbery in the background. There is nothing intrinsically caricatural about it: it was a good like- ness, if anything, a touch idealised. But the intention to show up the glib suavity of Casas’s portraits confirms that its parade of insou- ciance had a larger satirical motive. Figure 3 MPB 70.228 The other early portrait Picasso made of Sabartés is, by contrast, a deliberate caricature figure 4, and one that works on two levels. Sabartés described how it came about: “Picasso handed me a brush and asked me to serve as a model: —Hold this with two fingers, as if it were a flower; lift it up a bit … like that – hold it. That’s fine. […] I looked over his shoulder and understood: it was his commentary on the mania for effe- teness which pervaded the atmosphere. The brush had become a lily.” 07 The general target of Picasso’s satirical humour was, as Sabartés realised, the Art Nouveau style fashionable in avant-garde circles 05 at the turn of the century, the vogue for “decadent” themes in con- temporary literature, and the pervasive cult of mysticism, dreamy otherworldliness and nature-worship. Although he was affected by these currents himself, Picasso delighted in poking fun at Catalan Modernisme and the Decadent poets, as these exactly contemporary Figure 4 MPB 70.232 06 Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait (trans. Ángel Flores). London: WH Allen, 1949, p. 18. 07 Ibidem, p. 56-57. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés caricatures of the Aesthete-type figure 5 and Pere Romeu absurdly communing with nature reveal. The portrait of Sabartés is a more elaborate spoof, but of the same order. Picasso’s second target was, of course, Sabartés himself, garbed in the black cloak and floppy bow-tie of fellow bohemian poets and aesthetes, garlanded like a bridesmaid, and crowned with the bur- ning lamp of enlightenment. However, the mockery is more gentle than in these two contemporary sketches, where the protagonists are pure grotesques. Comparison with the “straight” portrait that preceded it reveals that Picasso was true to Sabartés’s distinctive features: his specta- cles; mop of lank black hair; long, pointed nose; prominent, rather feminine lips; narrow, jutting chin; delicate frame. And this is con- firmed by the unflattering but surely accurate portrait of Sabartés Figure 5 MPB 110.680 that Carlos Valenti painted in Guatemala a decade later. Picasso stressed these physical traits to reinforce the satirical message conveyed by the absurd cos- tume and garland, the iris (not lily), the symbolic lakeside background, and the floating crosses. The result is a caricature both of an individual and of a type. These contemporary drawings remind us that caricature was endemic in the Quatre Gats circle. Indeed, it was extremely popular more generally at the turn of the century, with whole magazines devoted to satire. Sabartés would have expected to be the subject of humorous drawings like Casagemas, Mir, Pallarès, and the rest.

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