The last dinner party of Carles Casagemas
The suicide of Carles Casagemas inadvertently changed the entire course of art history, largely because it changed the course of Pablo Picasso’s life. Casagemas was a poet and painter, and the two trailed each other across the world in search of inspiration, often finding it in each other. Casagemas was the more tortured of the two, and even at the peak of their friendship, suffered from extreme depressive episodes. Picasso supported him through these periods, whisking him off to Malaga and Paris to distract him from his troubles, but it became increasingly clear they couldn’t outrun them.
On trips to Barcelona, the two often went to brothels. Casagemas would sit outside, waiting for his friend’s fun to be over, feeling cursed that he couldn’t have any himself. His reported impotence had a devastating effect on his mental health, reinforcing a long-held belief he was a weird outsider. It was something he’d felt even as a teen after becoming an anarchist and Catalanista, which was around the time he started abusing drugs and alcohol.
Things took a more positive turn in the autumn of 1900 when Casagemas fell in love with a model named Germaine Gargallo Florentin while he and Picasso were in Paris. While he was besotted with her, there was no intimacy, and in its place seemed to be a raging drink problem. A frustrated Germaine mocked his impotence with such cruelty he threatened suicide. As it drew closer to Christmas, he and Picasso travelled to Malaga for New Year’s to keep his mind off his lost love.
The Malaga trip went so badly that Picasso ordered him to go home. Casagemas had been drinking himself to oblivion, being embarrassingly rude to Picasso’s relatives, and would only be subdued when he was writing letters to Germaine – which he did at sporadic intervals throughout the day. After spending a disastrous few weeks together, they split up – with Picasso heading to Madrid and Casagemas to Paris. It was the last time they’d ever see each other.
Little is known about Casagemas’ time in Paris other than that upon arriving, he instantly located Germaine and asked her to move in with him. When she said no, the shame drove him to downplay the gesture and say he was moving back to Spain anyway. Spiralling, he announced he wanted to host a farewell dinner at the Hippodrome Cafe in Paris, which eventually became the scene of his suicide.
On February 17th, 1901, Casagemas had his moment of romantic closure. But he’d drunk so much absinthe in apprehension of it that by 9pm, he forgot his plans to let Germaine go. In one last desperate moment, he asked her to marry him. When she refused, he shot her – but the gun didn’t go off properly. When the bullet fell limply to the floor, every neurotic thought Casagemas had about himself was confirmed. He turned the gun on himself and fired successfully.
Picasso was devastated by the death of his 20-year-old friend, and an entire artistic period was coloured, quite literally, by his mourning. During the Blue Period, Picasso grappled with his grief until he felt ready to return to the studio in Paris they’d once shared. He visited the cafe where his dearest friend had killed himself and resigned himself to painting only miserable and desolate subjects.
At some point in the aftermath, Picasso wound up having an affair with Germaine.
