-

Who was Sabartés? by Carol
Sutton
-
- [Jaume
Sabartés i Gual}
- or correct as:
- [Jaime Sabatés]
(note: without the letter 'r')
-
- NEW NAME
INFORMATION DIRECT FROM A RELATIVE,
- the great nephew of Jaime
Sabatés, Fabien Sabatés:
 August
22, 2005
-
- QUOTE:
- "July 7, 2005
- Sir,
- I went to your site and found the
very intersting article about my great-uncle Jaime Sabartès. Somethings
you might not know : his name was a knikname, his real name was jaime
sabatès without the "r". His you leave me a phone number where to
contact you I will explain you why...
- Amicalement
- Fabien Sabatès"
- ____
- Fabien Sabatès
- Editeur
- 77484 Provins cedex
- France
- ____
- and
- QUOTE:
- "July 15, 2005
- Hello,
- You said in your article that you
don't have Sabartés's bithday date, this is because
Sabartès was not is real name.
- His name was Jaime Sabatès, without the R. He was my late mother's
uncle. She did say to me years ago she had his birthday officials
papers and could proove his name.
- Jaime took this nickname to be
different from his brother, my grand-father, who was an artist. He
designed some spanish stamps and the banknotes.
- It is famous in our familie that
one day some people came home to ask him to make false money ! Off
course he refused. He also made some gigantic portay of Franco to be
hanged on some Madrid building from an identity photo. I knew my
grand-mother but the poor woman had all a children (excepted two, my
mother and one uncle) killed by the franquists during the spanish war.
- When I was 20 (I am 54) I looked
exactly like Jaime in the Picassos's portait...
- Amicalement
- Fabien Sabatès" end quote.
-
- I thank Fabien Sabatés for this new
and insightful information on Jaime Sabatés true name. Carol Sutton,
august 22, 2005
-
-
- ( Jaime Sabartés birth date-
1880 to1890's apx., born in Barcelona, Spain and death date- February
13, 1968)
-
- Sabartés was no
marmoreal* man bespectacled in heavy glasses. Jaime Sabartés, (Jaime is
also spelled alternatively Jaume in some books.) was a proud man of
integrity and devoted a great part of his life to serving one of the
giants of art, Pablo Picasso, who was eighteen years old when they
first meet in Barcelona, Spain. Both Sabartés and Picasso were regular
customers of the famous bar of The 4 Cats in Paris, France.
Picasso won a contest and beat out other artists for the design of the
menu of Els Quatre Gats in 1900. Below follows a short study of
Sabartés and a gathering of information on him. Sabartés - poet
, author, husband, twice married, father,journalist; loyal friend,
chief secretary, writer, exhibition organizer for Picasso; collector,
and museum benefactor.
-
- "The intimate of
Picasso longer than any one else." page 8 Wilhelm Boech.A Catalan, and
a well known poet in Barcelona, and a very close friend of Picasso
since the early days in Barcelona. Said by Gilot ( Life with Picasso by Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake) to be a distant cousin of Miró. (page 165,166)"Their point of encounter was
Sabartés grandfather. The grandfather was completely illiterate but he
had made a fortune, Pablo told me, first as a scrap-metal dealer and
then later on , in some more respectable business. He could neither
read nor write nor even count beyond the most rudimentary level, but no
one could ever cheat him. If he was to receive one hundred iron pots
and only ninety-nine showed up, he knew it, even without being able to
count that high. He took an interest in Sabartés form his very early
childhood and decided to educate him, with the idea that when Sabartés
knew how to read and write and especially to count, he would take him
in to the business and from then on have no worries about being robbed
by wily competitors. By the time Sabartés was nine years old he was
handling all his grandfather's correspondence. Soon after, though, he
had a very serious eye illness which resulted in his becoming nearly
blind. That ended his usefulness to his grandfather. &" In 1899 he met Picasso,who also was living in
Barcelona, as his father had become
professor of painting at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts.--From the
beginning he (Sabartés) was a kind of scapegoat for Pablo"."end quote. Sabartés wore very heavy glass spectacles
as a result.
-
- Portrait de Jaume Sabartés,
Seated - 1899-1900, by Pablo Picasso
- Charcoal and watercolour on paper
- 50.5cm : 33cms
- Picasso
Museum, Barcelona, Sabartés Collection

- http://www.museupicasso.bcn.es/index.htm
- or in ENGLISH:
- http://www.museupicasso.bcn.es/eng/index_eng.htm
-
- image credit:[no longer valid URL link]
- Museo Picasso Virtual
- http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/sabartes.html
- ----------------------
-
-
- Claustre Rafart i Planas writes
in an essay titled "Els Quatre Gats seen through the Metamorphosis of
the Blue Period", ( on page 190 of the book, Picasso and els 4 CATS- The Early Years in
Turn-of-the-Century Barcelona'. Under the
direction of María Teresa Ocana; ) of 'Decadent Poet', another portrait of Jaume Sabartés painted by Picasso
in his 1900
studio on the Riera de Sant Joan. This book also illustrates an x-ray
of that oil which reveals the bust of a woman wearing the cap like the
prisoners at Saint Lazare, a prison Picasso visited that year.
Blue Portrait of Jaume Sabartés, Paris 1901, 46 x 38 cms, Picasso Museum , Barcelona. which bears
the marks of having once been put in an oval frame, his arching
eyebrows echo the eyeglasses ovals, shows a down turned moustache over
prominent well drawn and shadowed lips. This portrait has a genuine
staunch demeanor.
-
- Picasso painted in 1904 another
portrait of Jaume Sabartés called Portrait
of Sabartés, Private collection.. This
one shows Sabartés with short hair wearing a velvet collared overcoat.
-
- Sabartés married his
distant cousin and they had a child. He worked in Guatemala as a
journalist for twenty-five years and then returned to live in Spain.
Sabartés married a second time to a childhood sweetheart and they lived
in Paris with Picasso at the Rue La Boétie.In 1935, the year of
his separation from Olga Koklova and of the the birth of his daughter
Maya, by Marie-Thérése Walter; Picasso ask Sabartés to become his
secretary. "The wife supervised the
household and Sabartés began his long service as Pablo's secretary,
front man, errand boy, and not least , scapegoat. (edited notes from
page 166 and quote from page 167)
-
- Sabartés was in charge
of arranging all the details of Picasso's exhibitions, needless to say
a huge job in itself and one which now whole committees would do.The
first exhibition to be arranged by Sabartés opened on March 3, 1936,
at the Paul Rosenberg & Co. in New York City and was the called
"oeuvres récentes"(recent works). He also arranged appointments with
Picasso and kept at bay those whom Picasso did not want to see.
- ---
- "He is one of those young men
with fine hands, elegant gestures, a thin face, deep in a brown study
of the "blue" period." page 110 from
- A related book
- Picasso related, '
Picasso, in collaboration with Edward Quinn'.
Introduction by John Russell , text by Pierre Descarques- translated by
Roland Balay.
- Publisher- Felicie, New York,
copyright
1974
ISBN 0-9600692-2-4 Clothbound
- Library of Congress - 74-77627
- --------
- During the "blue
period" in Paris, Picasso painted a portrait of Jaime Sabartés who had
recently arrived on his first journey to France in the autumn of 1899
(or 1900).
- The Glass of Beer- Portrait of
Jamie Sabartés, by Pablo Picasso, 81.5
x 66cm, oil on canvas, 1901, Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
- from page 124, Wilhelm
Boech/Jamie Sabartés book. "Sabartés has
told us how the portrait came to be painted. One evening, while waiting
for his friends in the Café La Lorraine near the Musée Cluny, Sabartés
fell into a reverie, from which he was suddenly aroused by the voices
of Picasso and his companions. It is that moment when he surprised his
friend in the café that the painter later recorded in a canvas, which
Sabartés describes as "the specter of his solitude".
-
- This portrait, The Glass of
Beer- Portrait of Jamie Sabartés, Picasso amazingly used
the head of Casas Casagemas who had recently committed suicide in the
Café L'Hippodrome, over a love affair, imposed on the body of his
friend Jaime Sabartés. Marilyn McCully writes about this superimpose
head in her essay, Picasso's Portraits of his Barcelona Friend,
begins on page 175 of the book, Picasso and
els 4 CATS- The Early Years in Turn-of-the-Century Barcelona'. Under the direction of María Teresa Ocana, which was
originally written for her essay, 'To Fall like a fly in the trap
of Picasso's stare: Portraiture and the early work", to appear in
The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition catalogue, Picasso and Portraits,
New York, 1996.
- McCully * writes on page 180: "Casagemas's suicide left a deep impression on
Picasso, who later claimed that contemplating the event had triggered
the Blue period. He even went so far as to superimpose the dead
Casagemas's profile - which he had emphasized in a particularly graphic
way in the largest of the three death-heads - onto that of his
poet-friend Sabartés in the painting Le Bock ( or The Poet Sabartés, as
it is also known, see fig. 31), which was done in Paris in 1910.
(footnote 10- by John
Richardson. 'A Life of Picasso', New York, 1991, 216) Sabartés (who liked to see himself as "the
progenitor of Blue period 'blueness' ") has left a description of how
this painting came about. He was sitting alone and bored at the Café La
Lorraine, when Picasso appeared with their friends.
- "Unwittingly, I was serving as
the model for a picture, a portrait about which I retain two distinct
memories: the memory of my unpremeditated pose, in the café... when
thinking I was alone, I fell like a fly into the trap of Picasso's
stare. And the other is the impression I received a few days later in
(his studio)... when Picasso put it up on the easel, I was astonished
to see myself (and) the specter of my solitude."- as Picasso saw it. (
footnote 11.- from ' Picasso: An Intimate
Portrait'. by Jamie Sabartés) end quote.
- *A related Marilyn McCully book
- Picasso related, 'A
Picasso Anthology- Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences' by Marilyn
McCully, a new paperback, 288 pages, 55 halftones, includes Catalan
and Spanish Criticism, also English and Russian criticism. $16.95 US
- Published by Princeton University
Press, New Jersey, USA
copyright 1997
- ISBN - 0-691-00348-3
- can
be ordered at princeton.edu
- http://pup.princeton.edu
- or by email order to
orders@cpfs.pupress.princeton.edu
-
- From page 113, Wilhelm
Boech/Jamie Sabartés book:
- "More lasting than his
associations with these painters was his friendship with the writer
Jaime Sabartés who, decades later, published a valuable book containing
a vivid account of those early days. He tells us for instance about the
tremendous passion for work which distinguished Picasso even then. He
covered the walls of his and his friend's rooms with paintings,and
produced drawings in such quantities that he could use them as fuel for
his stove. Only a small fraction is preserved; among these, Promenade,
a chalk drawing dating from 1897 (page 357), clearly reflects French
influences: the subject matter is elegant and fashionable; the vigorous
black-and-white, flat treatment combined with an illusion of depth
suggest Manet, and the loose composition is reminiscent of Degas and
Toulouse-Lautrec."
- From page 314, Wilhelm Boech/Jamie
Sabartés book: Other lost works include a
thought provoking mural painted by Picasso to decorate Sabartés room.--
"Sabartés mentions a number
of graceful pencil drawings done in 1902 and long since lost of La
bella Chelito, a dancer and singer who greatly impressed the
twenty-year old painter in Barcelona. He also mentions female nudes
roughly drawn with the brush dipped in blue on the walls of the Zut,
a dilapidated café in Paris which Picasso and his friend frequented in
1904; and more important , a mural in Sabartés room in Barcelona,
representing a half-naked Negro hanging form a tree, with a pair of
lovers on the ground beneath him."
-
- Portrait of Jamie Sabartés , by Pablo Picasso, 49.5cm :38 cm, or 19 1/2" x 15"
oil on canvas, 1904, (Cat. 247)
-
-
-
- In 1939, the
same year as the death of Picasso's mother; Picasso paints
another
portrait of Sabartés , this time inspired by his love of Spanish
themes as :
- Portrait of Jamie Sabartés as
a Spanish Grandee,(dressed in the
habit of a Dominican of the time of Philip II), by Pablo Picasso
- , oil on canvas,
- 45.7cm :38cm, or 18
1/2" x 15" 22-10-1939, (October 22, 1939)
- Zervos IX, 366
- Picasso Museum,
Barcelona.
Signed Picasso. Dated Royan/22-10-39 on the lower
right-hand corner
Sabartés Collection
MPB 70.241
From the Museo Picasso web site thie quote on Portrait of Jamie Sabartés as a Spanish Grandee,
http://www.museupicasso.bcn.es/eng/collection/index_collec.htm
QUOTE: :
Picasso used to dress up his friends in the most unlikely
ways. He also made a caricature of his friend Jaume Sabartés. He
subjected the figure to distortions that completely fracture the centre
line of his head, giving him a totally ambiguous appearance. By using
soft, fluid and contrasting lines to outline the face, he maintained
the peculiar personality of the man, in spite of the dislocation of his
facial features.
His staring eyes are concealed behind thick glasses, which
instead of resting on his nose are resting on one of his cheeks, which
emphasises the sharp line of his slightly turned-up nose, and plainly
depicts his left profile. In this painting, subtle flesh colours and
the pompon on the hat, ambiguity is again obvious in the uneasy, almost
distressing realism, despite the marked facial distortions.
Portrait of Jaume Sabartés as a Spanish Grandee
image credit:
- Club-Internet France- Picasso
- http://www.club-internet.fr/picasso/tableaux/
- friends/379,html
- -------------------
-
- Sabartés had a complete
understanding of Picasso working habits and methods, no doubt honed
from years of careful observation of Picasso making art. From page 344, Wilhelm Boech/Jamie Sabartés book: "What saves me is that
every day I do worse". (Picasso) Sabartés adds that the public always
accepts Picasso's next-to-last pictures when it is allowed to see his
most recent creations."
- Sabartés wrote books
about Picasso, which are used as superb reference tools. '
Picasso: An Intimate Portrait'
included observations that only Sabartés could make and understandings
only Sabartés had learned over his long relationship and close
friendship with Picasso. Picasso trusted Sabartés who was his life long
friend.
-
- Below is a listing of
some of these books:
- A related book
- Picasso related, '
Picasso: portraits & souvenirs',by Jamie Sabartés
- Published :Louis Carré-Mazimilien Vox
éditeurs, Paris, France,
1946.
-
- A related book
- Picasso related, '
Picasso: An Intimate Portrait'. by Jamie Sabartés
- Published in New York, USA
, and London, England, copyright
1948
- is now out of print but can be ordered at amazon.com
- http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0404202233/002-4166183-8422220
-
- A related book
- Picasso related, '
Picasso: retratos y recuerdos, . by Jamie Sabartés
- Published in Madrid, Spain,
Afrondisio
Aguado, copyright 1953
-
- A related book
- Picasso related, '
Picasso: document icongraphiques, . by Jamie Sabartés
- Published in Geneva, Switzerland,
Pierre Cailler, copyright 1954
-
-
-
- Sabartés was short in
height, enough to keep his head from heading the letters hung up by
clothes-pins on a clothes-line in Picasso Antibes studio.Francoise
Gilot describes the morning ritual of getting Picasso out of bed and
how Sabartés played his role in this litany.
Life with
Picasso by Francoise
Gilot and Carlton Lake Quote page 145:"The so-called more
important letters, which he didn't answer either but kept before him as
a permanent reminder and reproach, were pinned up, also with
clothespins, onto wires that stretched fro the electric-light wire to
the stovepipe. The stove, a little wood-burning Mirus, stood in the
center of the room. Even when the central heating was working , Pablo
always made a wood fire because at that period he used to enjoy making
drawings of the flames. The stovepipe was so long and took up so much
space, it was the most important decorative element in the room. With
its letters waving in the draft it was a hazard to almost everyone but
Pablo, Sabartés and Inés, who were short enough to find their way
through the maze without getting caught in the wires".&--"Inés, the
chambermaid, went in first, carrying Pablo's breakfast tray----café au
lait and two pieces of salt-free dried toast---followed by Sabartés
with the papers and mail. I brought up the rear. Pablo would always
start to grumble, first about the way his breakfast was laid out on the
tray."
-
- Gilot reports many more
aspects of Sabartés personality on pages 166-182, including saying
"Sabartés devotion for Pablo that a Trappist has for his God. ", that
he dressed in black, "at least metaphorically", and "affecting
sadness", she uses these adjectives and comments to describe
Sabartés---- fussy, cautious, discreet, watchdog, full of pride,
self-aggregation, "mournful, almost tragic expression", gloom, that he
loved mystery and had a "cloak-and-dagger imagination and mentally
shadowed everyone who came near him", that he loved secrets, was a man
of few words which he would occasionally be found "sadly dropping a
word".
- Sabartés classify every
object and packed seventy wooden cases when Picasso was evicted out of
his Rue La Boétie apartment in 1951. Gilot writes that Sabartés
was paid with the skimpiest monetary wages as Picasso paid his workers
very poorly in cash. Therefore Sabartés and his wife could only afford
to live in a tiny walk up apartment in the working quarter of the 15th
arrondissement in Paris.But what Picasso failed to pay in cash he made
up for in spades* (* I use the expression
"in spades" rather than say the expression "treated royally"; as it
reminds me of cubist works that used playing cards as motifs, the spade
as a shape (also clubs, hearts, diamonds), and playing cards as
physical objects in collages.) by
giving to Sabartés his most valuable currency, that of his own artwork.
History was made in 1963 when Sabartés generously passed on to
the city of Barcelona all his entire collection of the art work that
Picasso had given him; all 400 of them, thereby forming the core of the
new Picasso Museum in Barcelona, Spain* on Montcada Street
housed within the Palacio Aguilar. During the same year,1963, that Sabartés
donates his art works by Picasso to the city of Barcelona; he also
donates to the Museo de Málaga his library of books on Picasso.
Ultimately through donations by Sabartés, Picasso himself, and other
bequests, the Barcelona Picasso Museum houses the world's
largest collection of Picasso's. Differently formed is The Picasso
Museum in Paris, which was formed after Picasso death as a result
of tax gifts known as the legal principle of the dation en paiement
, (which allows settlement by transfer of a single valuable work
of art or a percentage of art), to the government of France by
Picasso's heirs.
-
- [*Note:Sabartes role as a
benefactor is now listed on the Museu Picasso website:
- http://www.museupicasso.bcn.es/eng/museum/index_museu.htm
-
- "THE MUSEUM
- Introduction
-
- The Picasso Museum in Barcelona
is indispensable for understanding the formative years of Pablo Ruiz
Picasso. The genius of the young artist is revealed through the more
than 3,500 works that make up the permanent collection. However, the
Picasso Museum also reveals his relationship with Barcelona: an
intimate, solid relationship that was shaped in his adolescence and
youth, and continued until his death.
-
- Thanks to the wishes of
Picasso and his friend Jaume Sabartés, Barcelona now has the youthful
work of one of the twentieth century's most significant artists."]
-
- I have been unable to
find an exact birth date for Sabartés, but it would have been around
the 1880's-or 1890's as he was close to the age of Picasso who was born
in 1881. Death date for Sabartés is February 13, 1968,
at which time Picasso donates some 900 of his finest early works and
Las Menias series to the Barcelona Picasso Museum in Sabartés
memory.
Carol L. Sutton,© copyright June, July 1998 August
22, 2005
- footnote:
- *marmoreal (mahr-MOHR-ee-uhl) also marmorean
(-ee-uhn) adjective
-
- Resembling marble, as in smoothness, whiteness, or
hardness.
-
- [From Latin marmoreus, from marmor, marble.]
-
- From: Wordsmith, wsmith@wordsmith.org
-
- "...desperate to devise anything, any
- sadness or happiness, only
- to escape the clasped coffinworm
- truth of eternal art or marmoreal"
- From "Sadness and Happiness")
- Robert Pinsky, 39th U.S. Poet Laureate,
is deeply in love with words -- be
- they technical terms of a trade,
foreign borrowings, dusty antiques, or
- proper nouns. The interplay of sounds
and images derived from his rich English
- vocabulary -- as well as foreign terms,
slang, and invented words, is one of
- the charms of the poems in Pinsky's
"The Figured Wheel", from which I picked
- these words. -Celia A. Hooper
(hooperc@nih.gov)
-
- (This week's Guest Wordsmith, Celia, is
an editor and writer at the National
- Institutes of Health. You can find more
information about Pinsky on the Web
- at
http://fyodor.cwa.nwu.edu/pinsky.html . -Anu)
- ...........................................................................
- A great many people mistake opinions
for thoughts. -Herbert V. Prochnow
-
- A related
site.
- Send your comments about words to
anu@wordsmith.org. To subscribe or
- unsubscribe A.Word.A.Day, send a
message to wsmith@wordsmith.org with
- "Subject:" line as "subscribe <Your
Name>" or "unsubscribe". Archives,
- FAQ, gift subscription form, and more
at: http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/
- A related book
- Picasso related, '
Picasso and els 4 CATS- The Early Years in Turn-of-the-Century Barcelona'. Under the direction of María Teresa Ocana
- 222 color plates and 12 black and
whitle illustrations
- Publisher-A Bulfinch Press Book,
Little, Brown and Company, Boston, New York, Toronto, London, copyright
1996
ISBN 0-8212-2339-9 Clothbound
- Printed in Spain,
Copyright
by Museu Picasso of Barcelona
-
-
- A related book
- Gilot related, 'Life
with Picasso'. by Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake
- Published by:
McGraw-Hill Book Company,
- New York, Toronto,
London, 1964
- Library of Congress
Card Number: 64-23276
-
- A related article -
'In
Barcelona, Picasso is the home-town boy- A former palace, now a
world-class museum- And the city's
impressive Picasso Museum houses the world's largest collection of his
work'. by Ron Butler
- Special toThe Globe and Mail (Canadian
newspaper), from Barcelona, Spain , in Travel section, Saturday,
February 21, 1998
-
-
- A related
site.
- Picasso
Museum, Barcelona, Sabartés Collection

- http://www.museupicasso.bcn.es/index.htm
- or in ENGLISH:
- http://www.museupicasso.bcn.es/eng/index_eng.htm
-
- http://www.museupicasso.bcn.es/eng/collection/index_collec.htm
- QUOTE: "PICASSO ENGRAVER
- The Picasso Museum in Barcelona possesses a relevant
collection of engravings and lithographs by the artist, consisting of
some 1,500 prints.
- Some are from a donation by Jaume Sabartés
[click here for a brief biography], one of the people responsible for
the existence of our museum. Picasso himself donated an important part
of the collection when he paid tribute to Sabartés at the time of the
latter's death, and promised to donate a print of every engraving he
made from then to the end of his life. The rest of the engravings are
donations from other benefactors and work that the museum has acquired
over the years. "END QUOTE:
-
- QUOTE: "Biography
-
- Jaume Sabartés i Gual
- Barcelona , 1881 - París, 1968
-
- Sculptor and writer. He was a student at La Llotja and
an apprentice of Manuel Fuxà. Under the pseudonym Jacobus Sabartés,
he wrote prose and poems, and collaborated in the magazine Joventut.
In 1901, he exhibited modelled heads of children at the Sala Parés
gallery. A regular at Els Quatre Gats, he formed part of Picasso's
circle in Barcelona and in Paris. He had met Picasso in 1899, and was
an enthusiastic promoter of his work. In 1935, he moved to Paris and
became his private secretary. He published a biography and other
writings on the artist's life and work. He was also an effective link
between Picasso and Catalonia; in particular, he donated his collection
of the artist's work to the Barcelona City Council in order to create
the Barcelona Picasso Museum. "
 |