Art, friends and scissors

There are those who claim that the good hairdresser is both a psychologist and an expert in scissors, because while practicing his trade he listens, comments and reflects with the authority of a Buddhist monk. Thanks to a text by the Argentine Juan Forn I discovered surprising details about Eugenio Arias who, more than being in charge of doing Picasso’s hair, was his friend.

Forn comments that they met by chance, or rather thanks to the refusal of the painter’s then wife, Francoise Gilot, to shave him. So, with his bad mood on his back, he went to the town barber. He never imagined that they would receive him in Spanish, nor that the man who sharpened the blades was like him: a “rabid anti-Francoist.”

The least important thing was the cut, since Arias, simply a Spanish republican, as he usually presented himself, attended to him in his language and together they ranted against Franco and commented on the painter’s favorite themes: bullfighting and women.

In fact, the rest came later, such as the invitation to take him to the bullfights in Arles or visit him at his house in La Galloise to prevent the neighbors, who always used to give him their place, from bothering him while they were fixing it up. If I put myself in the shoes of those boring and curious townspeople, I would have done the same: hang around until I saw the genius appear and watched with delight as he sat in the armchair; how they passed the comb to him; how they shaved his face…

Now, the brave party, so attacked today by the furious defenders of fauna (indifferent to the suffering of their kind, let’s say children, women, the elderly. Oops! I already went the other way) was a real luxury for that pair. The bullfighter’s magical passes transported them for an instant to the distant and forbidden land. An express trip to hit the nostalgia. The excursions to the arena were so occasional during the next twenty years that the posters announced them with the following phrase: “Today Toros, with the presence of Picasso.”

In the aforementioned text, a peculiar character is revealed to us, who although history remembers him as the hairdresser of…, was, above all, a man of convictions, such as those that led him to fight on the side of the Republic in the Civil War until the end. With that same conviction he fought alongside the French in the Second War until Marshal Pétain surrendered to the Nazis. Then, he approached those of the Foreign Legion, who rejected him because of the small detail that his lung had been shot in some past fight. Without a hair of discouragement, he became part of the resistance. In the end, his path would lead him to run the hair salon in Vallauris, in the south of France, where Don Pablo had arrived fleeing the depressive and rainy Paris.

For almost thirty years he was responsible for shaving him (twice a week) and cutting the little hair that ruffled his temples (once a month). Artist and superstitious, in addition to a quick cut, he took his hair with him, afraid that they would perform witchcraft on him. You have to be fast Arias, faster than beauty, whoever is faster forces beauty to catch up, he insisted with brilliant vehemence. The hairdresser, says the Argentine, loved the advice, but of course, he never applied it. His thing was not to obey, just as it would happen with another client. The town priest reproached him on one occasion for his absence from church. At which he turned back: “I just hate listening to someone who doesn’t let me contradict him.”

On the other hand, the camaraderie only increased. Picasso gave him a decorated case to store his scissors and other gadgets and then a Renault that his son Paulo had left in ruins, so that Arias would not have to walk the three kilometers that separated him from Vallauris.

What’s more, between the 50s and 60s, if someone wanted to see Don Pablo, it was best to first consult his hairdresser, who also served the many snobs who came down from Paris to later boast that they got their hair cut there. site that the creator of Guernica…

From time to time he also gave her a watercolor or a few ceramic figurines. Of course, Arias never paid him the bill for his many years of service. He also did not sell, as many people did, eager to prosper with Picasso’s name, these treasures.

Instead, once the dictator toad died, he gathered the drawings and donated them to his hometown in Buitrago de Lozoya, the same one he missed and remembered during the bullfights, the same one he alluded to, scissors in hand, in talks with his friend. Today we can visit a museum that welcomes us with one of his phrases: “Nothing has more value in the world than what cannot be bought,” concludes Forn’s text, after specifying: “What guys those Spanish Republicans are.” They don’t make them like before, I would add…