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Gay Life. The first private buyer Picassos was the Moscow tea importer, Sergei Stchoukine, who began about 1904 to select the Blue canvases that, later, formed the basis of the great Soviet collection in the Moscow Museum of Modern Western Art. The sandaled Stein family (Gertrude, Leo and Michel) became occasional buyers by 1905.
When in the money, the entire Picasso gang" often came home very late, drunk as bedbugs, singing, declaiming poetry and shouting such slogans as "A bas Laforgue!
Conspuez Laforgue!* (Down with Laforgue! To hell with Laforgue). Picasso on these occasions used to fire a revolver to wake the bourgeois neighbors.
When he had painted all the blue pictures he wanted to paint, Picasso immersed himself in the life of Paris, went to the circus once a week and to prize fights with two new, tall, stalwart friends: Painter Andre Derain and Poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Working more during the day, in 1905 and 1906 Picasso poured out the pictures of the Rose Period: —robats, harlequins, companies of jugglers and players all painted with a wistful delicacy and long-boned grace. By 1907 he had been sufficiently housebroken to go to the Stein "at homes."
Cubism was an invention of the same mind nind that put roller skates on the Máagan tortoise. In 1909, in the village of Horta, near Saragossa, in Aragon, Spain, Picasso painted a series of pictures of jumbled roofs and houses which suggested to him a whole new method. Liking nothing so Puch as new methods, on his return to Paris he went to work on it. Cezanne had patiently toiled for years to realize on canvas the solidity of air and landscape by means of delicately placed little patches and planes of color. Cubism put roller skates on this technique.
In the hands of Georges Braque, who took it up almost simultaneously, of Juan Gris, a young Spaniard who took it in 1911 and made it charming, and of Picasso, cubism made cunning use of all that painters know about form and color in themselves—from such elementary facts that a red patch seems to advance and a Violet patch to recede, to the most ingenious refinements All paintings, as painters see them, are merely areas of certain colors on flat canvas. Cubism made pictures which everybody could see that way.
In 1911, Picasso finally left the Bateau lavoir and the straight bohemian life. He now had money stowed away in his "strong box"—a large wallet kept in an inner pocket and fastened with a safety pin. He also had liver and stomach trouble that has persisted ever since. Moving into i studio apartment on the Boulevard de Clichy with at last some actual comfort, he worked furiously, with less gaiety, with a beginning of the bitter, abstracted air which characterized him later. In 1912 he moved to Montparnasse. In 1914, saddened by the departure of most of his riends for the War, he left Paris to live in the suburb of Montrouge.