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9 2 the spanish gaze Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in the coastal town of Málaga, Spain, which, at the end of the nineteenth century , lived in the past. Málaga sat at the very bottom of Spain, baking in the Mediterranean heat and cherishing its old Andalusian traditions. For the family of Pablo, however, the future lay to the north in Barcelona. The city was Spain’s bridge with Europe, its gateway to the new century. Like a magnet, it would gradually draw Picasso’s family north, into the future. Pablo was the only son of the painter José Ruiz Blasco and his young bride, María Picasso López, and was the only male heir for their entire clan. He lived in Málaga until he was nearly ten, after which José Ruiz Blasco uprooted his family to pursue job opportunities, taking them first to La Coruña on the northwest tip of Spain, and then to Barcelona in 1895. As a toddler, Pablo was known for his dark eyes, which were not shy at all, and for an ability to draw that seemed to go along with his intense stare. He was naturally curious about his father’s art utensils, which lay about the house, and he had four doting women at home—his mother, aunt, and two sisters—who rewarded him for making pictures. Pablo found a way to draw and stuck with it his whole life: he would begin at any point (the front or back of a donkey, for example), and draw with a continuous line, much as he and other children of Málaga did, “with a single stroke,” with sticks in the sand.1 This knack for lyrical line drawing seemed to be in his genes. As the family moved, Pablo’s father focused on his son’s artistic training . While living in La Coruña, where his father got a teaching job at an art school, Pablo developed his artistic identity, attending the same institution .2 Pablo missed the bullfights of Málaga, but that was not his greatest experience of loss. In La Coruña his little sister, Concepción, died of diphtheria. The story goes that Pablo made a pact with God to save her, but to no avail, and this may be the start of his dislike of religion, which increased over time. Another legend has been passed down that once his father realized Pablo’s superior talent, he, too, suffered a final 10 || picasso and the chess player disillusionment—in his own artistic calling. He “gave me his paints and brushes,” Picasso claimed. “He never painted again.”3 At the La Coruña school, Picasso received his first academic training. Later in life, while admiring the free-form drawings of children, he lamented (in humor) that he already “drew like Raphael” in La Coruña.4 He also began to sign his work, first with “Pablo Ruiz Picasso,” then with “P. Ruiz,” and still later “Pablo Picasso,” dropping his father’s name (Ruiz was very common) and adopting his mother’s. From early on, people remarked on the piercing look of Picasso’s dark eyes. This seemed poetically natural for someone with an artistic gift. In Málaga, it was also called a mirada fuerte (strong gaze), a stare used by men that seemed to possess, even violate, women. Knowing this gaze well enough, the men of Andalusia required women to wear black coverings. According to custom, Andalusian men did not fight, getting enough vicarious violence in bullfights. So they channeled their machismo into womanizing. Later in life, Picasso’s friends would justify his remarkable promiscuity by saying, simply, he was “an Andalusian born in the nineteenth century.”5 Picasso’s eyes seemed to seize every kind of imagery. From age ten onward , he was forced to use images to communicate, since his family’s mobility put him in the midst of strange new languages. His native tongue was Andalusian, but in La Coruña they spoke Galician tinted by Portuguese , and in Barcelona the Catalonian accent was linked to the region’s separatist pride. When words failed, he realized, he could always turn to images to express himself. Pablo had nearly reached age fourteen in La Coruña when his father got a better job in Barcelona. So en route, the family detoured back to Málaga for a vacation, stopping in Madrid to see the Prado, Spain’s national museum. Picasso...

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