Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has been called “the most worked-on picture in the history of art,” and in its initial stage, all the figures had Iberian features. Under the spell of the ancient sculptures from his native Spain, Picasso painted feverishly, creating the huge brothel scene. Sometime later he would say that the asymmetrical faces of the central figures with their angular planes were copied directly from the stolen art. The dominant features were the Iberian eyes, much larger than in life, bulging under “lids like the rim of a cup,”∗14 and the ears, equally oversize and disproportionate, curling like scrolls. Years later, when it was safe to do so, Picasso admitted that he had used the stolen figures, but even then he blamed Apollinaire for their theft:

  Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was the first picture to bear the mark of cubism; it is true. You will recall the affair in which I was involved when Apollinaire stole some statuettes from the Louvre? They were Iberian statuettes.… Well, if you look at the ears of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, you will recognize the ears of those pieces of sculpture! … From this point of view it is true that cubism is Spanish in origin and that it was I who invented cubism.

  After their courtroom encounter, the appearance of friendship between Picasso and Apollinaire continued, but its soul was lost, its heart bled dry. Fernande pinpointed the fatal flaw at the core of la bande de Picasso:

  There was hardly anyone in our group who would rush to defend someone who wasn't there. In fact, although they all seemed to be united by strong affection, the minute someone left, the others would start running him down. There can never have been an artistic circle where mockery, spite and deliberately wounding words were more prevalent. There was often a common spirit about art and ideas, but rarely any common affection or generosity, and many of the protestations of admiration or friendship were almost wholly insincere. The worst offenders were Picasso and Max Jacob, who could never resist an opportunity for a witticism, which could often be malicious—even at the expense of their greatest friends. Max pretty much spared Picasso—there seemed to be no limits either to his admiration or to his deeply affectionate friendship—but he did not feel the same way about the others. Yet in spite of all this, it was an extremely tight-knit little clique that was hard for newcomers to penetrate.

  Mona Lisa's theft and Apollinaire's arrest marked the end of a friendship, the end of Fernande and Picasso, the end of Marie and Apollinaire, the end of the rare bonhomie that produced one of the most exuberant, enchanted, creative collaborations in art history. If, as many have said, Apollinaire's greatest talents were for poetry and for friendship, then in the latter, he was badly served. If he thought he had finally found a firm foundation in the poets and artists whose future he championed and shaped, he was disillusioned. His friends divided. While some demanded his release, many others turned away. The closest to him, Picasso and Marie Laurencin, denied him.

  A languid gamin with a complexion the color of antique lace, Marie affected an air of naiveté. Apollinaire described her as having “the somber and childlike face of those destined to make men suffer.”∗15 Picasso had introduced them, and Marie, who went to art school with Braque, brought him into their gang, but she was an observer, never a full participant. Myopic and neurotic, she peered at people and paintings through a lorgnette and seemed to approach life obliquely, in this world but not of it. Apollinaire was smitten. Marie's feelings seemed more complex.

  She remained silent through his ordeal, refusing to visit him in jail or even to write, and she shunned him when he was released.

  Some time after, in a version of his poem Zone, Apollinaire would write that, like Jesus on the cross, he had lived in Auteuil between two thieves. The good thief was a criminal, and the bad thief was a woman. And because he lived between these two thieves, he was arrested one day for receiving stolen goods.

  Apollinaire's sudden notoriety appalled Marie. He had appeared disheveled and handcuffed in newspapers all over the world. The work that he had done to survive, translating and writing erotica, was used to denounce and demean him. The Paris newspapers were highly politicized, and in the conservative press, he was pilloried as a pornographer, sexual predator, reprobate, and rabble-rouser.

  Honor was not a grand, empty sentiment to Apollinaire. He had been humiliated publicly, and his loyalty to France questioned. Less than two years later, when war was declared, he enlisted in the French army, joining the Thirty-eighth Artillery. “I so love art that I have joined the artillery,” he joked.

  Apollinaire wrote his most beautiful poetry in the army.

  On the 31st day of August in the year 1914

  I left Deauville shortly before midnight

  in Rouveyre's little car

  Including his chauffeur there were three of us

  We said goodbye to a whole epoch

  Furious giants were looming over Europe

  The eagles were leaving their eyries expecting the sun

  Voracious fishes were swimming up from the abysses

  Nations were rushing together to know each other through

  and through

  The dead were trembling with fear in their dark dwellings

  In 1916, on the front line in Champagne, he was injured in the head by shrapnel. He never recovered fully from the physical or the psychological wound. André Billy, a writer and close friend, said:

  Apollinaire's stay in prison left him for a long time with a feeling of terror, and we did our best as friends to help him get over it. He had become a public figure, but he had reached that position via the door that bears the inscription, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” He was marked for life, and even the war, his courage, and his wound would never succeed in silencing certain persons who, out of ignorance, envy, stupidity, or self-interest, banded against him and continually attacked him as an artist and as a man. He was harassed by slanders to the end of his days, but was too proud to complain.

  Apollinaire died on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice of World War I. He was thirty-eight. Outside his window, jubilant Parisians danced in the street, cheering the end of war and the end of Guillaume. It was a final irony. The Guillaume whose downfall the French were cheering was the German kaiser Wilhelm (Guillaume) II who had abdicated that day.

  In an eerie coda to the Apollinaire-Picasso-Géry saga, on the day Apollinaire died, a mutual friend received a note from Géry who claimed to be serving on the Western Front as an officer in the Belgian army. A raven had flown in his open window, and Géry wrote, “I felt I was getting a message from Guillaume Apollinaire. I am very worried about him and beg you to tell me whether he is still alive.”∗16

  For years, Picasso never spoke of Apollinaire and the Mona Lisa arrest. He continued becoming Picasso, the most extraordinary, the wealthiest, and ironically, the most stolen artist of the twentieth century. Perhaps he saw the old gang as youthful folly or embarrassing history. He would sue unsuccessfully to prevent Fernande from publishing her memoir, and he would abandon Max Jacob. In their bateau-lavoir years, Max had converted to Catholicism after experiencing two apparitions of the Virgin Mary, his second one in the aisle of a movie theater. Picasso was his godfather. But in the end, neither Max's adopted religion nor his illustrious sponsor saved him. When France fell to the Nazis in World War II, he was arrested by the Gestapo and interned in Drancy Although mutual friends pleaded, Picasso failed to petition for his release. Max Jacob—Jew, homosexual, poet, artist, most loyal friend, and yearning spirit—died on March 5, 1944, awaiting deportation to a concentration camp in Germany.

  On June 20, 1959, almost fifty years after L'Affaire des Statuettes, Picasso made a confession of sorts. He spoke to Gilbert Prouteau, a film director who had made a documentary about Apollinaire.∗17

  “I know you,” Picasso said when he met Prouteau. “You are the one who taught me that there is such a thing as remorse, when I saw your film on Apollinaire last year. During the hour I spent watching it, I was thirty years old again. And I think I shed a tear or two.�
�

  “Memories, Maitre?” the director asked.

  “Yes, but not the kind you are thinking. I can admit it now. I did not behave very well with ‘Apo’ on one occasion. It was after the affair of the theft of the Mona Lisa. Guillaume had returned the picture in care of a newspaper, but despite that precaution, our little group was being watched rather carefully.… We were at the age of the gratuitous act. Such childishness amused us, and the idea of owning a series of little statues for a few days delighted me. It wasn't robbery, just a good joke. No sooner said than done. But this time the police were ready. I took fright and wanted to throw the package into the Seine. ‘Apo’ was against it.

  “‘They don't belong to us,’ he said.

  “And he got himself arrested. Naturally, they confronted us. I can see him there now, with his handcuffs and his look of a big, placid boy. He smiled at me as I came in, but I made no sign.

  “When the judge asked me: ‘Do you know this gentleman?’ I was suddenly terribly frightened, and without knowing what I was saying, I answered: ‘I have never seen this man.’

  “I saw Guillaume's expression change. The blood ebbed from his face. I am still ashamed.”

  It is a strange confession. In his earlier remarks, Picasso blamed Apollinaire for stealing the Iberian statues from the Louvre exhibit. In this interview, while expressing remorse, in an offhand way he accuses Apollinaire of stealing Mona Lisa. Perhaps Picasso's memory was playing games with him, perhaps he meant to say statue not picture, or perhaps he was still protecting himself.

  II

  THE APOLLINAIRE-PICASSO SPECTACLE was a diversion—intriguing, all-absorbing, but ultimately, a fanciful invention, a case of overzealous police work born of frustration and fervid imagination. Although he grudgingly allowed that the Picasso gang leaders were more enfants terribles than clever criminals, Prefect Lépine continued to believe an international ring of thieves was behind Mona Lisa's disappearance. The robbery had been too slick to be the work of a lovesick psychotic, a common crook, or any gang of amateurs, and beyond the newspaper headlines, there was no concrete evidence pointing to an American millionaire-collector.

  The new director of the Louvre acted quickly to fill the security chasm. He hired more guards, brought in attack dogs, and established new rules. Effective immediately, visiting hours were curtailed to allow for closer supervision. Written permission was required before a work of art could be touched. Several exits were sealed permanently, and the other doors were closely monitored.

  Leonardos of one kind or another were making news. In the ongoing arms race in Europe, Italy launched its third dreadnought, the Leonardo da Vinci, and one of the best three-year-old thoroughbreds in Europe was named Leonardo. But there was no Mona Lisa. At the traditional Mardi Gras parade in Paris, a huge float showed her taking off in an airplane from the roof of the Louvre.

  As the investigation stumbled on, Mona Lisa became the phantom of the Louvre. Her presence had bewitched. Now her absence haunted. When Apollinaire was released from jail, Mona Lisa had been missing for twenty-three days, and each day the public waited to learn if the woman with the shady past had come to a tragic end. Wrapped in the mystery of her baffling disappearance was the enigma of Mona Lisa herself.

  ∗1 “The Wild Men of Paris,” Architectural Review, May 1910.

  †2 Jean Cocteau.

  ∗3 Picasso wrote to Apollinaire on the 24th about an article he had read that same morning in Le Matin. The story ran in the August 22 paper.

  ∗4 The church was completed in 1917.

  ∗5 Fernande Olivier describes Picasso et al. in her memoir, Picasso and His Friends.

  †6 The Steins supplied the American funnies.

  ∗7 Le Figaro wrote in a profile of Apollinaire: “He talks with such precise detail about the landscape and inhabitants of so many countries that nobody knows exactly where he comes from, nor where he has been.”

  ∗8 Fernande said that Apollinaire turned in the statues. Apollinaire said that Picasso did. The Paris-Journal called the person “an amateur painter.”

  ∗9 As described by Fernande Olivier in Picasso and His Friends.

  ∗10 Picasso dubbed him.

  ∗11 It should be noted that Kahnweiler was speaking many years later when the painting was widely recognized as a revolutionary work.

  †12 Apollinaire.

  ∗13 John Golding: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Exhibit of 1988.

  ∗14 Ibid.

  ∗15 Poet Assassinated.

  ∗16 John Richardson tells the story in the third volume of his masterly biography of Picasso, The Triumphant Years, IQIJ-IQ32.

  ∗17 The interview was published in the Paris Presse.

  THE MYSTERY WOMAN

  LEONARDO DRIVING MONA LISA Dating from the time of the theft, this amusing postcard of Leonardo driving Mona Lisa reflects the popular belief that the creator had fallen in love with his creation. (Courtesy of Musée de la Carte Postale, Antibes, France)

  I

  LEONARDO WROTE THAT a woman should be painted in a demure position, her head lowered and inclined to one side, her eyes cast down modestly so that her gaze never meets the viewer. Then he painted Mona Lisa.

  Like a Prometheus, he seemed to breathe life into panel and pigment. While the criminal act was shocking, it seemed almost inevitable. Mona Lisa's presence is so real, her gaze so personal, that no frames could contain her indefinitely. She is too much a woman, too sensual, too vibrant, and it seemed only a matter of time, albeit 109 years, before she moved on.

  Who was Mona Lisa, and what was in Leonardo's mind when he painted her? Was she an actual woman who sat for her portrait or a fiction of the painter's imagination? We know from his pupil and secretary Francesco Melzi that Leonardo never threw away a drawing or a page of writing, and he filled thousands of pages with sketches and notes. Yet there is no trace of Mona Lisa in his notebooks—no preliminary studies of her, not a mention, not a jotting. No contracts or bills in the records of the period mention a commission.

  Like most Renaissance works, the painting is unsigned, undated, and untitled, and what historical details we have are contradictory. Leonardo, who relished puns and puzzles, left no clue to her identity except her smile. Art historians have been trying to read her body language for centuries. Without props to explain her, she becomes her own narrative, a psychological study as much as an oil painting.

  In 1550 the Florentine artist and author Giorgio Vasari christened the painting “Monna Lisa,” which in English translation became Mona Lisa. It may be the most famous misspelling in history. Vasari is the richest but not always the most reliable contemporary source on the Renaissance art world. In his book Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, he identified the sitter as Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy silk merchant in Florence.

  According to Vasari, Mona Lisa's story began in the wine country of Tuscany, the year after the young Leonardo da Vinci received his first commission. In 1478 the Signoria, the governing authority of Florence, advanced the twenty-six-year-old artist twenty-five gold florins to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of San Bernardo in Palazzo Vecchio. Leonardo never delivered the work, establishing a precedent that would dog his reputation, but the following year, a successful delivery was made that in retrospect was momentous.

  On the fifteenth of June 1479, in the vineyards of Chianti, purple grapes fattening on the vine, in a picturesque farmhouse that is now a picturesque tourist inn called Vignamaggio, a daughter was born to Antonmaria di Noldo Gherardini and his third wife. Since the first two Signore Gherardinis had died in childbirth, the successful delivery of a healthy child was a cause for rejoicing. Antonmaria, a farmer of modest means, named the baby Lisa. Even in Chianti-soaked moments, he could never have dreamed that a young painter from a neighboring town would make her immortal.

  Born on April 15, 1452, near the village of Vinci, Leonardo was the product of a romp in the hay between Piero da Vinci and a peasant girl on his father's es
tate. Like all of Chianti, Vinci belonged to the city-state of Florence, ruled by the Medici, a banking family that had become a political dynasty. Eventually, Ser Piero would settle down in Florence and become a prominent notary, roughly equivalent to an attorney today.

  The Ten Commandments notwithstanding, contemporary society attached no stigma to illegitimacy. Among the eminent bastards of the age were princes, cardinals, and at least one pope, the Medici Clement VII. Raised in his father's house, Leonardo grew up to be a Renaissance Adonis, tall and broad-shouldered with a lithe, athletic build. According to an anonymous contemporary biographer known as Anonimo Gaddiano,∗1 he had “a beautiful head of hair, curled and carefully combed in golden ringlets that fell to the middle of his chest.” “At a time when long mantles were fashionable,” he dressed in knee-length rose-colored velvet tunics that showed off his legs. Gifted in every art and possessed of an eclectic, endlessly curious mind, Leonardo did not blend into the landscape.

  Renaissance artists were traveling salesmen, brushes and chisels for hire, traveling from city-state to city-state, competing for commissions. No longer bound to a specific guild as they had been in the Middle Ages, artists were independent contractors. Packing their pigments and saddling their horses, they shuttled from prince to prelate. Painting on canvas was just coming into vogue. (Michelangelo dismissed it as a pastime for dilettantes.) Most paintings were murals, and artists went wherever the work was, moving from town to town, from Florence to Mantua, Perugia to Milan, Urbino to Rome, and beyond. The best were sought after and liberally paid. Their reputation was spread by envoys, ambassadors, and warring princes who came to Italy for conquest and found culture and a new art.