08/01/2014 ArtTop10 - Blog View - Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Bibi la Purée

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Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Bibi la Purée

Posted by Harrison Drury September 30, 2013 - Filed in Arts & Culture - #National Gallery #Picasso #portrait #Bibi la Purée - 1,577 views

An early Picasso, the audaciously ugly portrait of the last king of the Latin Quarter, Bibi la Purée, long-lost in a private collection, is now on display at the National Gallery(pictured immediately below).

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08/01/2014 ArtTop10 - Blog View - Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Bibi la Purée

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André-Joseph Salis de Saglia, as Picasso's subject was formerly known, was probably born in 1847. A drunk, a tramp, and a thief; he was not long for this world but

was given immortality through the writing of James Joyce and Paul Verlaine, and the painting of Théophile Steinlen and Picasso. They called him Bibi la Purée, a nickname

based on the French slang dans la purée, meaning to be in dire straits.

You look at him and his wicked little eyes look at you from their dark blue sockets, they are glazed; he is under the spell of la fée verte, the green fairy of the absinthe

bottle. He is pallid skinned, dark blue lines in his face cut a pointy nose, and there is something of the Joker, from Batman, in his smiling mouth. His cheeks are ruddy,alcoholic. He is bald on top and the wings of blue are swept back. He is the ugly side of La Belle Époque, dressed in the clothes people gave him; he wears his collar

upturned and tied badly in a red cravat which flops into his waistcoat, then a loose fitting jacket, a clown's flower stuffed through a button-hole.

He was a flâneur, Bibi, a wondering dandy greeting all he encountered with extravagant musketeer gestures. He had once been an actor and there remains something ofthe thespian in Picasso's portrait; he is theatrical in his pose and dress, and a comedic figure with his flower. Yet he was also a tragic figure, a figure of fun, who was likelydying of alcoholism.

He had been factotum to the poet Verlaine since their meeting in 1886. The poet supported Bibi and Bibi in turn supported the poet, in the literal sense, helping him home

from heavy drinking binges. Although some say it was the other way round and others that they could not tell who was helping who.

In Au temps du quartier Louis Roseyre gives an account of the pair, during Verlaine's final days, entering a cafe in the rue Soufflot:

"Bibi-la-Puree came first, clearing a way through the crowd, so that the reeling poet . . . could find a seat. Verlaine followed, painfully, dragging his leg, and leaning on a

stout stick. . . . He collapsed on to a chair. . . . Suddenly my heart, the heart of a boy of eighteen, bled with grief and fear at the sight of this old man, whining and infirm,demanding another absinthe. I knew the legend; but really Verlaine, this man who was trembling all over, this man with a dirty beard, his face half hidden by a filthy

muffler, . . . Verlaine collapsing on Bibi-la-Puree, with that horrible, grinning face, and a mouth slit to the ears, Bibi smelling of rat, old rotten rat! . . . I have never beenable to forget that sinister and pitiful vision."

Verlaine died in 1896. Without his poet Bibi got by shining shoes, selling flowers and stealing things; he especially liked other people's umbrellas.

Picasso returned to Paris in 1901, from a trip round Spain, he was 20-years-old. The Spaniard would likely have met Bibi where the two of them drank in the cafes ofMontmartre and the Latin Quarter. He painted him in preparation for his first exhibition in the city, at Galerie Vollard, which would comprise down and out drunks,

tramps, prostitutes, and all that bohemian street life.

Blue is the dominant colour of the portrait. Picasso started painting in blue after he learned of the suicide of his friend, Carlow Casagemas, who shot himself inL'Hippodrome Café, Paris, 1901. Picasso sunk into a deeper and deeper depression and by the end of that year blue tones dominated his paintings. One can read thebeginnings of the Blue Period in Portrait of Bibi la Purée, not only in the colour but the subject who likely died for his vices, at no age at all, only a couple of years later.

Bibi stands or stood should I say, or staggered I suppose, yes staggered; he staggered as a drunkenly wobbling monument to bohemia. He is straight out of a painting by

Picasso's hero, Toulouse Lautrec, who was likely an influence, but there is less paint, to put it simply: Picasso used thick rough marks like Van Gogh but they are looserthan those of the Dutch post-impressionist; the portrait is loosely drawn, which I suppose one could also say of the subject. The loose brushwork suggests Bibi's mad

energy, gives him movement, lets you imagine him wondering around like an old drunk musketeer.

08/01/2014 ArtTop10 - Blog View - Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Bibi la Purée

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Yet Picasso has not celebrated his subject like those who came before him: Bibi does not appear as Verlaine's biographer Pierre Petitfils anointed him, “The last king of

the Latin Quarter." He is the "sinister and pitiful vision" of Roseyre's description. Picasso's portrait is ugly, difficult to look at, and it is original in its ugliness. The coloursare ugly too; they are unnatural, and they are not paired nicely; reds and greens, as in the Cézanne's hanging to Bibi's left, nor blues and yellows, as in the Van Gogh's to

his right. And so, in its ugliness, it is unlike the beautiful, sorrowful Blue Period and more in the spirit, or the early ancestry, of the revolutionary, the menacing paintingbelow this text, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, (1907).

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