Food
Bee Wilson on Picasso's love of sausages and beans
Published 26 August 2002
Like his women, Picasso's apples are splayed open, chopped around
Picasso was such a voracious artist, and such a terrible show-off, that he made art even when relaxing at his favourite Paris restaurant, Le Catalan. All he needed was a paper tablecloth and some wine, mustard or coffee. "With these," he said, "I have yellow, brown and black."
In later life, he often boasted that as a child, his native ability matched that of Raphael. He wanted everyone to be sure that he chose cubism not because he had failed at figurative art - he was a craftsman as well as an inventor and a revolutionary. It was true. The teenage Picasso was indeed a craftsman - an olive presser in Spain, to be precise, doing back-breaking work and watching green nectar ooze out of black fruit. This oil was the basis of all his childhood foods, whether rice with saffron, golden tortillas or babas, the doughnuts his mother made for him on special occasions from a dough of eau-de-vie, flour, anise, sugar and oil, fried in more oil and soaked in warm honey.
The food Picasso enjoyed all his long life was the cuisine of Spain and Catalonia, pungent and hearty (though he ate it in disciplined quantities). In the Pyrenees, he loved hunting for partridge, thrush and hare to throw in to a traditional cocido, a cassoulet-like stew made with chickpeas and piquant chorizo. With Fernande Olivier, his mistress during his "blue" era, he ate garlicky Catalan tripe and "rata" with cabbage, beans and bacon. When asked to sum up the failure of his marriage to Olga Khokhlova, a fastidious Russian ballerina from a good family, he replied, "Olga loves tea, cakes and caviar. And me? I love Catalan sausages and beans."
Catalan dining left its mark on Picasso's art, too, notably in his many early pictures of the porron, or wine jug with a long pointed spout, whose contents should be poured in macho fashion direct from spout to mouth. Hams with forks and Catalonian bread would also creep into his distinctive still lifes, along with the more conventional apples, jam jars, oranges and lemons, painted in anything but the conventional style. Picasso's fruit never looks as serene as that of Matisse. Like his women, his apples are splayed open and chopped around. He excelled at depicting animated and disquieting foods: long blue and bulbous cuttlefish, sculpted wriggling fishes on a ceramic plate, menacing lobster claws. Eating seldom appears innocent in Picasso's art. Who but he would have recognised the hidden sexual aggression in men licking ice-cream cones?
Richard Dorment has recently observed that one difference between Picasso and Matisse was that Picasso had a sense of humour. If so, he certainly liked to show it at the dinner table. A hostess once made an opulent paella in his honour. At the end of the meal, she said to him: "Sir, you have not eaten much. Was it not to your liking?" Picasso replied: "Yes, yes, Madame, there was everything. The rice, crayfish, chicken, string beans, garlic, saffron . . ." She pressed him, "But then what was missing?" to which Picasso answered: "The cook, my dear Madame."
On another famous occasion, Alice B Toklas, the lover of Gertrude Stein, designed an artistic sea bass specially to "amuse" Picasso one lunchtime. The story is told in the wonderful Alice B Toklas Cookbook (Serif, £8.99). Once the fish was poached and cooled, Toklas covered it in "ordinary mayonnaise and, using a pastry tube, decorated it with a red mayonnaise, not coloured with catsup - horror of horrors - but with tomato paste". To complete the ensemble, she made a design with sieved, separated, hard-boiled egg, truffles and very finely chopped fines herbes. When he was shown this striped and colourful extravaganza, Picasso exclaimed at its beauty. "But," said he, "should it not have been made in honour of Matisse rather than me?"
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