QUERIDO SABARTÉS: JAUME SABARTÉS SEEN by PABLO PICASSO Elisabeth Cowling 13.03.2014 Querido Sabartés: Jaume Sabartés Seen by Pablo Picasso Elisabeth Cowling

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 studio 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 inscription 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 iconographiques 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 caricatures 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, especially 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 portrait 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 those 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 unidentified 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 likeness, 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 contemporary 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 spectacles; mop of lank black hair; long, pointed nose; prominent, rather feminine lips; narrow, jutting chin; delicate frame. And this is confirmed 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 costume 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. The caricatures Picasso made of him many years later continued that tradition, and one reason why he did not take offence must be that he understood they were Picasso’s way of perpetuating their youthful intimacy perpetuating their youth, indeed, by denying that solemn, respectful behaviour was necessary now that they were growing old.

Picasso’s next portrait of Sabartés was painted in Paris in the autumn of 1901 (see link), and he said that it commemorated a particular episode. He was waiting for Picasso and Mateu de Soto at their favourite café, La Lorraine:

“I was alone, and dreadfully bored. Before me, upon the table’s marble top, stood a glass of beer. With my myopic eyes I scrutinized the room, trying to penetrate the smoke-laden atmosphere […] I was dejected, unable to distinguish [my friends] even when they appeared. As my gaze was lost in a vain effort to define the blurred outli- nes, my mind too wandered. Ideas crossed and recrossed my brain. […] Just as my desolation was keenest, Picasso appeared. […] Unwittingly, I was serving as the model for a picture […] I fell like a fly into the trap of Picasso’s stare.”

On entering Picasso’s studio a few days later and being shown the canvas, he continued:

“I was astonished to see myself just as he had surprised me in the café, in that passing 06 moment of my journey through life. […] here is the spectre of my solitude objectively seen.” 08

And he claimed that the painting marked the beginning of Picasso’s Blue period.

08 Ibidem, p. 72-73. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

The impasto is so thick because it had to cover an earlier image of a child, and the picture —done from memory— was clearly painted at high speed. Sabartés had no doubt that it was his portrait, and Picasso pinpointed the physiognomic traits I enumerated a moment ago: the floppy hair, long nose, full lips, pointed jutting jaw. For once, he wasn’t wearing his pince-nez, so he told Brassaï, 09 and this gave Picasso the idea of depicting him as a virtual blind man, groping at the tankard anticipating the iconography of touch in The Blind Man’s Meal of 1903.

But not only a blind man: also a melancholic. For Sabartés’s pose is based loosely on that of the protagonist in Dürer’s famous engraving. Introverted, shy, a pessimist proud to share Picasso’s theory that, “art emanates from sadness and pain. […] That sadness lends itself to meditation, and that grief is at the well-springs of life,” 10 Sabartés was the perfect vehicle for the expression of Melancholy. Picasso’s much later portraits would often have this dual character: an individual who also represented a certain type.

In several slightly earlier paintings Picasso had explored this very theme in compositions where miserable, huddled prostitutes and impoverished street performers numb their exis- tential pain with alcohol (see link). So, the portrait of Sabartés is poised somewhere between a modern-life genre scene —depressed drinker in a bar— an allegory of Melancholy, and the likeness of an individual.

The next portrait was, by contrast, done from life figure .6 Sabartés had found Picasso alone in his studio, bored, distracted and —unusually for him— doing nothing.11 To drive away his depression he decided there and then to paint the portrait, put a canvas on the easel, and set straight to work. Sabartés remembered that Picasso stood to paint it, whereas usually he sat on a low chair with his canvas propped on the lowest rung of his easel, claiming to find the discomfort stimulating. In adopting a conventional standing position, with Sabartés at eye level, not far off, and facing him, Picasso set himself to produce a conventional head-and-shoulders portrait, albeit in the sombre, unnaturalistic palette of his latest work. Shortly afterwards, he painted himself in the same cold blue palette, wearing a similar, heavy coat but with the collar pulled up. In both portraits he was, I think, testing his ability to produce psy- Figure 6 MPB 70.491 chologically complex likenesses of the kind he had painted as a boy —the remarkable portrait of his Aunt Pepa figure ,7 for instance— before he deserted realism in favour of one vanguard style after another. This was a typical manoeuvre on Picasso’s part: the adoption of a “new” style or genre never involved the complete abandonment of a style or genre he had mastered in the past, and he liked to keep the old repertory in working order.

The new portrait frankly recorded the quirks of Sabartés’s physiognomy and dress, but without simplifying them for comic effect, 07 as he would in the slightly later caricatural group portrait made as a flyer for Quatre Gats.

But Picasso was not satisfied with recording his friend’s appearance: he also wanted to suggest something about the essential man, Figure 7 MPB 110.010 his tastes and personality, but without using any props or a sugges-

09 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 97. 10 Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait, p. 65. 11 Ibidem, p. 82. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

tive background. To do so, he presented Sabartés in terms of Spanish culture of the Golden Age, giving him a monkish look reminiscent of austere, intimate portraits such as these by Morales and El Greco. The connection was fully justified because Sabartés had immersed himself in the visual arts and literature of Spain and identified with that tradition.

One final word about this portrait: the disfiguring damage to its surface is the fault of the “baroque frame, gilded in the antique style”, in which Pere Romeu clad the painting when, on returning to Barcelona, Picasso left it at Quatre Gats, rather than with Sabartés’s family, as he had promised. “Then”, in Sabartés’s laconic account, “it followed Pere Romeu’s ill luck, passing from hand to hand until, finally, Picasso reacquired it.”12 No wonder the lugu- brious, languid, unworldly Romeu liked the painting: he probably saw himself in the pallid, long-haired, melancholy poet staring back at him through hooded eyes from the deep blue depths of the canvas.

There was a lapse of three years before Picasso painted his next portrait of Sabartés (see link), but the circumstances were similar in that he did so when he was in a bad temper, disgusted with his present circumstances and actively planning a decisive move. In late 1901 that had meant leaving Paris and returning to Barcelona, but this time, spring 1904, it meant leaving Barcelona to settle in Montmartre. The new portrait is also related to the earlier one in being a conventional head-and-shoulders study of the sitter, who looks straight back at the artist/spectator without expressing any transitory emotion. It too was done from life. 13 Both artist and sitter must often have seen the earlier portrait hanging in Quatre Gats and it can be no coincidence that the canvases are almost exactly the same size and share exactly the same composition. Evidently, the second was conceived with its predecessor in mind, to register the significant changes in Sabartés’s persona:

“The aesthetic page-boy hairstyle, droopy moustache and buttoned-up overcoat of the denizen of Quatre Gats have been ousted by a short back and sides haircut, an upward- combed moustache, a necktie and gold pin, and a smart jacket with a velvet collar.”

This Sabartés looks older—he hadn’t yet turned 23!— more respectable, more bourgeois, less “arty”. And this time, Sabartés agreed to pose on the understanding that he could walk away with the picture afterwards: it is dedicated to him in the top left corner, and accompanied him when he set off for a new life in Guatemala not long afterwards.

The 1904 portrait is a “public” image of Sabartés —like this contemporary photograph— an image concerned with outward appearances, rather than character, tastes or inner being. It imitates the manner of a professional portrait painter, and I suspect that it was not simply a farewell gift from Picasso —about to move to Paris— to Sabartés —planning his move to Guatemala— but also an occasion for Picasso to test his competence in objective portraiture. In 1904 taking commissions for portraits was still the surest way to make a living as a painter, and Picasso may have reckoned on supporting himself in Paris by doing so, if necessary. At all events the later portraiture of Sabartés was never as neutral or objective.

Many years would pass before Picasso and Sabartés were once again constantly in each 08 other’s company. Sabartés set sail for Guatemala in summer 1904, remaining there, apart from an extended period in New York, until 1927, when they were reunited briefly in Paris. They had kept in touch by letter, but until the ban on reading Sabartés’s private papers is lif- ted in 2018 we shan’t know what their correspondence contained. The turning-point in their relationship came in November 1935 when, at Picasso’s request, Sabartés came to live with him at Rue La Boétie as his companion, confidant, assistant and secretary. It was a period of

12 Ibidem, p. 96 13 Ibidem, p. 112-113. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

crisis for Picasso, following the birth of Maya, his daughter by Marie-Thérèse Walter and the definitive collapse of his marriage to Olga. For a time, writing replaced painting as Picasso’s principal form of creative expression, and not the least of Sabartés’s duties was to decipher and type up the chaotic manuscripts of the surrealistic texts that poured from Picasso’s pen, all the while watching over the artist like “a mother hen”.14

Drawings of Sabartés came a few years later. He described exactly the circumstances of this, the first one. On Christmas Eve 1938 he went to Rue La Boétie, where Picasso was in bed suffering from a severe attack of sciatica. To pass the time, they began discussing portraiture and Sabartés confessed that he would love “to have my portrait done with ruffs, like those gentlemen of the sixteenth century, and with a plumed hat to cover up my bald head.” 15 Amused, Picasso immediately promised to paint, “a full-size portrait, with a nude woman, and a very lean dog by your side […] a dog like Kazbek” (Picasso’s Afghan hound). Sabartés was all too familiar with Picasso’s flights of fancy, most of which came to nothing because “he never found time to carry out an idea, due to the fact that he immediately had others”,16 and so he was gratified to discover the next day that, Figure 8 MPB 70.231 in his absence, Picasso had made a drawing that corresponded to his whim. Such was Picasso’s pressure on the pencil, that in parts the cheap paper was almost torn figure .8 I compare it with the type of Spanish formal portrait they must have had in mind, although Sabartés would never have presumed to aspire to the rank of prince, rather to that of discreet, attentive chamberlain (see link).

Two further drawings followed on 26 December. In the first Sabar- tés has been transformed into a monk absorbed in pious meditation figure 9: Françoise Gilot was not alone in considering him a Trappist manqué. In the second drawing Sabartés is once again a be-ruffed gentleman figure 10. But without the plumed hat, he resembles a clown, a favourite tragi-comic character in Picasso’s repertoire of types ever since the Rose period. Sabartés’s features were indelibly etched on Picasso’s memory and he could reproduce them perfectly in Sabartés’s absence, changes in the costume constituting subtly Figure 9 MPB 70.229 altered interpretations of his character. Sabartés claimed to like all three portraits equally well:

“As far as resemblance is concerned, I have nothing to object to, particularly since the second two rather flatter me. What intri- gues me is how the original idea suggested by me was gradually transformed. From the second sketch on, Picasso seemed to have definitely abandoned it; but on looking over the last one, I sense his desire to please me by returning to my original propo- sal. Still, it is evident that he was tired of it by now, for all jokes 09 end by being fatiguing.” 17

Figure 10 MPB 70.230

14 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 42. 15 Sabartés, Picasso: An Intimate Portrait, p. 143. 16 Ibidem, p. 159. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

These comments are revealing: Sabartés did not object to being teased, partly because of the firmly established understanding and complicity between them, and partly because he detected genuine affection —a desire to please him— beneath the badinage. It was flatte- ring to be the subject of Picasso’s wit, to share jokes with him that involved play-acting and coded allusions that nobody else could fathom, and pleasant to be given these records of times spent together. And of course to Sabartés, anything Picasso made was touched with his unique genius and hence of great value. But from long experience, he knew when Picasso had lost interest in a temporary diversion —“all jokes end by being fatiguing”— and wisely expected nothing more substantial. He knew he could never be an inspiration on a par with the women who shared Picasso’s life, and who were often a thorn in his side.

In fact there was a follow-up to this episode ten months later when they were holed up in Royan, waiting in trepidation to see how the war between France and Germany would develop. It took the form of this extraordinary painting figure 11, which has exactly the same format as the two head-and-shoulders portraits painted in 1901 and 1904, but, needless to say, was not done from life. Sabartés was Figure 11 MPB 70.241 nonplussed when he first saw it:

“[Picasso] thought I disliked it because I looked at it coldly, without any exclamation or protestation. […] Like a child who has done something naughty, he said […]’ “You don’t like it?” ‘Why shouldn’t I like it? Because I don’t break forth into exclamations? You know quite well that I’m not like that. Besides, the picture gives me many ideas, and helps me to understand better what you have been doing recently.” 18

One can sympathise with Sabartés’s initial bemusement. None of the earlier portraits —including the drawing made on Christmas Day 1938— had exhibited grotesque defor- mations, and gauging the tone of the painting was bound to be more troubling for him, its subject, than for a detached observer. Sabartés knew that Picasso could be ruthless, so was he being deliberately cruel on this occasion, mocking and abusing the man on whose self-denying labours he now utterly relied?

For Sabartés, there was comfort in the knowledge that his was not the only face to be treated in this way: just the previous day, Marie-Thérèse Walter’s mother had been the subject of a caricatural portrait, and Sabartés knew Picasso was fond of the old lady and would not intentionally hurt her. More to the point, many paintings of Marie-Thérèse herself and of Dora Maar distorted their faces more or less monstrously by showing them from different angles simultaneously, as if they were turning this way and that. There was also comfort in the knowledge that Picasso found “ugliness” far more powerful and interesting than conventional beauty, for they had had conversations on this very matter in Royan. In short, Sabartés knew that Picasso had a larger aesthetic and expressive agenda, and that he ought not to take the distortions personally. 10 As he became accustomed to it, Sabartés came to the conclusion not only that, “My portrait has truly all the characteristics of my physiognomy, and only the most essential ones” —his severe myopia, the curious form of his lips that had always fascinated Picasso, his pointed nose and jutting chin, his smooth, bald, domed head— but also that it possessed a formal and colouristic harmony of “great lyricism” inspired, appropriately, by Spanish painting of

17 Ibidem, p. 174. 18 Ibidem, p. 222-223. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

the Golden Age.19 In this photograph taken at the time by Dora Maar he holds the picture in front of him, with the glimmer of a satisfied smile playing over his features.

So, when some weeks later an acquaintance described it as a “caricature”, Sabartés objected, and I’m comparing the portrait with a later, brilliant, but “minimalist” drawing he would have agreed was indeed a caricature:

“A caricature is a kind of ‘minimum’ portrait, done with the avowed purpose of ridiculing a person, whereas a portrait […] is the ‘maximum’ expression of a personality, the qua- lities of which the painter emphasizes by means of lines, colours or both, as in this case, without, however, overlooking certain features which might seem ridiculous to anyone else; for no one is perfect […]. But when we are caught upon the canvas by a real artist we are surprised to find what he discovers, and prefer to consider it a caricature.” 20

Sabartés draws a crucial distinction between the caricaturist’s intention to “ridicule” versus the artist’s intention to achieve a deeper, non-photographic kind of likeness, and suggests that catching the likeness of someone in a “maximum” portrait involves identifying the very traits of physiognomy, physique, gesture and dress that the caricaturist exaggerates for humorous or satirical purposes. This is a shrewd assessment of the fundamentals of portraiture, and Picasso himself said as much when he remarked to Roland Penrose: “all good portraits are in some degree caricatures.” 21 Nevertheless, it would be fair to say that Picasso dared to erode the boundary of decorum between the two genres in a way that few other painters have dared, in the process creating portraits that are disconcertingly unstable in their emotional impact.

I have found, for instance, that this portrait of Sabartés sometimes strikes me as purely comical, but at other times as touchingly sad and I do wonder whether Picasso had Watteau’s (see link) won- derful painting of melancholy Gilles in mind, as well as the Spanish paintings (like this El Greco [see link]) that evidently lie behind it.

Sabartés never got the full-length costume portrait Picasso promised him. But it could be argued that Picasso obliquely fulfilled that promise years later in his numerous paintings of Musketeers accompanied by the nude women he had mischievously imagined consorting with his friend. The Muskateers don’t have Sabartés’s features, but when he painted them in the 1960s Picasso was an old man haunted by memories of his past and one often hears the echo Figure 12 MPB113.143 of former preoccupations.

Sabartés completed the text of Picasso: portraits et souvenirs in 1942, but the war preven- ted immediate publication.22 For the frontispiece of the English language edition, he chose Michel Sima’s evocative photograph taken in the summer of 1946 of himself with Picasso in the Château Grimaldi, Antibes. Between them, pinned on a board, are three new portraits of Sabartés as a bespectacled faun playing panpipes figure 12. That summer was a period 11 of relaxation and joy following the trauma of the war years, and a sense of fun permeated everything Picasso created at the time: Arcadia was his constant reference point. These blithe, decorative pictures were Sabartés’s reward for his discretion and efficiency throu- ghout the Occupation, and during the immediate aftermath when Picasso was besieged by foreign journalists and a constant stream of friends, admirers and dealers, not to mention the changing corps of mistresses. One is inscribed with the pen-name, Jacobus Sabartés, he had started using when they first met in 1899.

19 Ibidem, p. 223. 20 Ibidem, p. 238-239 21 Roland Penrose, His Life and Work. Londres, Gollancz, 1958, p. 126. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

The portraits that followed have a similar fantastical aspect, but take the form of classic caricatures, immediately recognisable as Sabartés, but ironic characterisations that are often laugh-out-loud funny. On 26 November 1951 Picasso made four drawings of Sabartés as a gorgeously dressed bullfighter; in one he is accompanied by a beautiful Maja. Needless to say, Sabartés was not cut out for the heroics or glamour of the bullfight. Indeed, he was no aficionado and didn’t join the hangers-on who, in a blaze of publicity, accompanied Picasso to the corrida. The discrepancy, which only insiders could fully grasp, between the real man and his imagined reincarnation is the source of humour.

In others Picasso toyed with references to the art of the past that he knew Sabartés would appreciate: here Sabartés is a brooding, cigar-smoking Olympian god attended by a volup- tuous bacchante, in a comic spoof of a neoclassical painting (perhaps David’s Mars disarmed by Venus).

And here, at the very time he began the series of variations after Las Meninas, Picasso spoofed one of Velázquez’s most famous equestrian portraits in the Prado.

Other caricatures referred to journeys Sabartés undertook on Picasso’s behalf. Here we see him as an intrepid aviator bestriding an archaic flying machine on his return to Paris (identified by the Eiffel Tower) from Rome, where he had represented Picasso at the opening of his retrospective at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. Picasso disliked travelling, flying in particular, and hardly ever attended his own retrospectives if travelling was involved.

In the second drawing Sabartés travels on foot to Barcelona, dressed in traditional Catalan costume, bearing his suitcase on his shoulder and brandishing a fly-swot. This journey was presumably undertaken in connection with the then-secret plan to set up a Picasso museum in the city. The death of his wife in 1954 had left Sabartés so distraught that Picasso feared — so he told Roland Penrose— he might commit suicide.23 Overcoming the endless problems, not least those of political origin, in bringing the museum project to fruition helped him cope with his bereavement and surmount his depression. All these caricatures (it seems to me) are benign, not cruel, as affectionate as the dedications we saw at the beginning of the lecture.

The best known of the numerous caricatures of the 1950s are those that involved graffiti-like additions to brightly coloured pin-ups and advertisements featuring popular movie stars and models figure 13. Inscribed with friendly greetings, most were sent, folded, by post, to Sabartés, as a compensation for the fact that he saw Picasso much less frequently after the artist settled in Cannes with Jacqueline Roque in 1955 figure14.

In all of them a lustful Sabartés —sometimes fully clothed, sometimes naked, never without his spectacles— ogles and kisses the sexy woman, and each time Picasso made the scenario divertingly 12 different. This contemporary photo taken by Jacqueline shows just how acute these drawings done from memory were. Sabartés was no Don Juan himself, and issued dire warnings when Picasso became entangled with yet another woman, so once again the joke turns on the disparity between Sabartés’s real persona and the persona Figure 13 MPB 70.678 Picasso foisted on him. So, the teasing is not near the knuckle.

22 See Brigitte Léal, ‘Postface’, in Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: portraits et souvenirs. Paris: L’école des loisirs, 1996, p. 292. The first Spanish edition did not appear until 1953. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

The playful atmosphere that reigned in La Californie during the late 1950s, when Picasso’s taste for clowning and farcical disguises was at its height, is caught in photographs taken by numerous visitors, including Lee Miller. The conviviality legitimised the broad humour at Sabartés’s expense, and the caricatures themselves, however unflattering, were welcome because they were absolute proof that Sabartés was in Picasso’s thoughts, that their intimacy was as fresh and unconstrained as it had been at the turn of the century.

The complicity that united them is captured in this delightful montage, dedicated to their mutual friend Joan Gaspar. It alludes of course to Picasso’s protracted bout of identification with Veláz- quez, when he made the set of variations after Las Meninas in 1957. A grinning Picasso occupies Velázquez’s place, while Sabartés — diagonally across from his alter-ego, Philip IV’s chamberlain— acts Figure 14 MPB 70.674 the part of an enraptured visitor to the studio. The joke here is that Sabartés never went in for extravagant displays of enthusiasm: that performance was left to everyone else in the court of King Pablo.

A moment ago I suggested that Sabartés welcomed the caricatures because they proved he was in Picasso’s thoughts: so often in Picasso’s thoughts, in fact, that caricaturing him became a party-piece for Picasso, who found excuses to make yet another variation on the theme, even when the recipient was not Sabartés himself. These dedications in copies of Sabartés’s book, the first to the photographer Edward Quinn, the second to an unidentified recipient, are examples of the phenomenon. Although quickly executed, they aren’t routine repetitions for they accurately register the changes in Sabartés’s appearance. In 1962 he had suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed and the drawing on the right candidly

Photograph of Picasso with Las Meninas of Velázquez

23 Notes of Penrose’s visit to Picasso, Paris, 16 February 1955. (Elizabeth Cowling, Visiting Picasso: The Note- books and Letters of Roland Penrose. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, p. 104). 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

records the onset of old age. Yet in both drawings, especially the later of the two, Sabartés looks content, even happy. The source of his unwonted cheerfulness was, of course, this museum, which opened at last in March 1963. Not long before that, Brassaï ran into him for the first time in a long time and was astounded by the change:

“In spite of his serious illness, this Sabartés who stands before me is a man transformed, happy … This Picasso Museum in Barcelona is the result of his devotion, the official crowning of his life’s work, his apotheosis. He talks as though he were consumed by a strange fever …” 24

Acutely sensitive as ever to the mood of his intimates, in this caricature done in November 1963 (see link) Picasso encapsulated the change in the inner as well as the outer man, pro- ducing one of the most tender of all his portraits of his most faithful, most trusted friend.

Sabartésar at the Palau Aguilar’s balcony

24 Brassaï, Picasso & Co, p. 262. 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Jaume Sabartés in a little hat. Jaume Sabartés i Gual, Picasso. Les Ménines et la vie, París, Éditions Cercle d’Art, 1958. 3 January 1959. Conté Crayon on paper 32 x 24 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Dr. Joseph Jaffé, 1970. MPB 111.835 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. “Yo El Greco”. Barcelona, c. 1899. Pen and sepia and black ink on paper 31.5 x 21.8 cm (irregular). Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Pablo Picasso, 1970. MPB 110.678

Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Jaume Sabartés seated. Barcelona, 1900. Charcoal and peinture à l’essence on laid paper 48.5 x 32.4 cm (irregular). Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Jaume Sabartés, 1962. MPB 70.228 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. “Poeta decadente” [Jaume Sabartés]. Decadent poet [Jaume Sabartés]. Barcelona, 1900 Charcoal and peinture à l’essence on laid watermarked paper 48.3 x 32.2 cm (irregular) Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Jaume Sabartés, 1962. MPB 70.232 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Figure with a beard and a monocle, holding his hat in his hand, and other sketches. Barcelona, c. 1899. Conté crayon, pen and ink, and graphite pencil strokes on watermarked paper 33.6 x 15.8 cm (irregular). Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Pablo Picasso, 1970. MPB 110.680 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Jaume Sabartés with pince-nez. Paris, at the end of 1901. Oil on canvas 46 x 38 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Pablo Picasso, 1968. MPB 70.491 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

22 Pablo Picasso. Aunt Pepa. Málaga, June-July 1896. Oil on canvas 57.5 x 50.5 cm Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Pablo Picasso, 1970. MPB 110.010 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Jaume Sabartés as a gentleman in the age of Philip II. Paris, 25 December 1938. Graphite pencil on printed paper 28.7 x 20.7 cm (irregular). Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Jaume Sabartés, 1962. MPB 70.231 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Jaume Sabartés in a monk’s habit. Paris, 26 December 1938. Graphite pencil on paper 35.2 x 27.1 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Jaume Sabartés, 1962. MPB 70.229 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Jaume Sabartés with ruff. Paris, 26 December 1938. Graphite pencil on paper 35.1 x 27.1 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Jaume Sabartés, 1962. MPB 70.230 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Jaume Sabartés with ruff and bonnet. Royan, 22 October 1939. Oil on canvas 46 x 38 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Jaume Sabartés, 1962. MPB 70.241 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Jaume Sabartés as a faun playing the aulos. Antibes, 14 October 1946. Oil and charcoal on watermarked paper 65 x 50 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Acquisition, 2008. MPB 113.143 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Humorous composition. Jaume Sabartés and a pin-up. Cannes, 10 February 1957. Brush and Indian ink, and scraping on magazine printed paper 44.4 x 30.5 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Jaume Sabartés. MPB 70.678 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 01. Master Conferences Jaume Sabartés

Pablo Picasso. Humorous composition. Jaume Sabartés and Neile Adams. Cannes, 4 Desember 1957. Brush and Indian ink on cut magazine printed paper 35.6 x 26 cm (irregular). Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Gift of Jaume Sabartés. MPB 70.674 Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia © Succession Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Madrid 2016 Master Conferences Credits

01. Querido Sabartés: Jaume Sabartés seen by Pablo Picasso

Author: Elisabeth Cowling

Publisher: Fundació Museu Picasso de Barcelona

Director: Bernardo Laniado-Romero

Graphic Design: Domo-A

Coordination of this edition: Anna Guarro, Mireia Llorella

Coordination of the Master Conferences: Esther Calvo, Mercè García, Anna Guarro

Translations and corrections: Laia Pertika

Photographic credits: All photographs of works in the collection of the Museu Picasso are taken by Gasull Fotografia

“Querido Sabartés: Jaume Sabartés seen by Pablo Picasso” was imparted by Elizabeth Cowling at the Museu Picasso de Barcelona on March 13th, 2014, the first of the annual master lectures in honour of the museum’s founder, Jaume Sabartés.

The annual Master Lecture Jaume Sabartés is programmed for the Thursday following March 9th, the date of the anniversary of the museum. It presents present the result of recent studies about the work of Picasso by internationally recognized historians.

Museu Picasso Montcada 15-23 Barcelona 08003 [email protected] www.museupicasso.bcn.cat

This digital publications is also available in Catalan and Spanish.