A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Olga had considerable talent. Despite starting late and studying briefly at a St. Petersburg ballet school,7 she managed to get auditioned by Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes was having difficulty prying dancers loose from the state-run theaters and was desperate for recruits. A committee consisting of Nijinsky and the greatest of classical ballet masters, Enrico Cecchetti, as well as Diaghilev—a trio described by another dancer as more terrifying than any first-night audience—put Olga through her paces and accepted her. Intelligence and diligence compensated for lack of experience. Nijinsky was sufficiently impressed to pick her out of the corps de ballet.

  Léonide Massine, who had taken Nijinsky’s place in Diaghilev’s company as well as in his heart, had chosen Olga to play the role of Dorotea in Les Femmes de bonne humeur, an adaptation of a comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Goldoni, with sets by Léon Bakst and a heavily arranged score after Scarlatti. It was at a rehearsal for this ballet, which would have its premiere in Rome the following month, that Picasso spotted Olga and immediately set about courting her. To familiarize himself with the techniques of theatrical décor as well as watch his new love dance, he helped Carlo Socrate (the scene painter who would work on Parade) execute Bakst’s scenery. So that he could join Olga backstage, Picasso even helped the stagehands at the ballet’s premiere.8 Fifteen months later he would marry her.

  Compared to her predecessors—Bohemian models Picasso had lived with in Montmartre or Montparnasse—Olga was very much a lady, not, however, the noblewoman biographers have assumed her to be.9 She came from much the same professional class as Picasso’s family. Don José, Picasso’s father, may have been a very unsuccessful painter, but his brothers included a diplomat, a revered prelate, and a successful doctor, who had married the daughter of a Malagueño marquis. One of Picasso’s mother’s first cousins was a general—more celebrated than Olga’s parent, also the real thing. Indeed, it may have been Olga’s lack of blue blood that made her so anxious to become a grande dame and bring up her son like a little prince. Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, who had met Olga in 1916 when the ballet visited San Sebastián, remembered her as “a stupid Russian who liked to brag about her father, who she pretended was a colonel in the Tsar’s own regiment. The other dancers assured me that he was only a sergeant.”10 This was an exaggeration, but Olga’s pretensions were resented by other members of the company.

  Ten years younger than Picasso, Olga had fine regular features, dark reddish hair, green eyes, a small, lithe, dancer’s body, and a look of wistful, Slavic melancholy that accorded with the romanticism of classic Russian ballet. Formal photographs reveal Olga to have been a beauty—usually an unsmiling one—although in early snapshots of her with Picasso and Cocteau in Rome, she is actually grinning. Later, she plays up to him, dances for him, takes on different personalities, which might explain the widely varying reactions to her. The celebrated ballerina Alexandra Danilova declared that Olga “was nothing—nice but nothing. We couldn’t discover what Picasso saw in her.”11 A Soviet ballet historian, the late Genya Smakov, found references to her in an unpublished memoir by someone working for Diaghilev, where she is said to have been “neurotic.”12 On the other hand, Lydia Lopokova—the most intelligent of Diaghilev’s ballerinas—was Olga’s best friend in the company.

  Picasso fell for Olga’s vulnerability. He sensed the victim within. She would have appealed to his possessiveness and protectiveness especially when the Russian Revolution cut her off from her family. Her vulnerability would likewise have appealed to Picasso’s sadistic side. (The women in his life were expected to read the Marquis de Sade.) In the past year rejection by the two women he had hoped to marry had left him uncharacteristically desperate. Picasso’s residual bourgeois streak should also be taken into account. He was thirty-five and wanted to settle down with a presentable wife and have a son. None of his father’s three brothers had had any issue, and there was pressure from his mother to produce an heir.

  Sexual abstinence was something Picasso had seldom if ever had to face. His two previous mistresses may have shied away from marrying him, but they had been easy enough to seduce. Olga was as unbeddable as the “nice” Malagueña girls that his family had tried to foist on him. “Don’t forget Olga who cares for you very much,” she wrote on the back of a dramatic photograph of herself in Firebird. “Who neglects me, loses me.”13 (Cocteau could not resist using the phrase qui me néglige me perd as a caption to a caricature of Bakst he subsequently sent to Olga.)14 Picasso must have been very much in love to put up with this ukase. Ernest Ansermet, Diaghilev’s principal conductor, describes walking back to the Hotel Minerva, where he and the dancers were staying. Olga had the room next to Ansermet’s. “I heard Picasso in the passage knocking at her door and Olga on the other side of it saying ‘No, no, Monsieur Picasso, I’m not going to let you in.’ ”15 Clearly, marriage was his only option.

  Diaghilev, who felt responsible for the genteel Russian girls in his company, advised Picasso against marrying Olga. Foreseeing problems with her parents, who were averse to their daughter marrying a mere painter, the impresario told Picasso that he had a much more suitable girl set aside for him. She was currently dancing in South America and would soon be returning to Europe. Picasso would not listen; he was obsessed by Olga. Not that this kept him away from the local brothels, to judge by an address noted down in his Roman sketchbook.16 “In Rome of an evening,” Picasso told Apollinaire, “whores ply their trade in automobiles—at walking pace— they accost their clients with smiles and gestures and stop the car to negotiate the price.”17 From Naples he would send Apollinaire a postcard: “In Naples all the women are beautiful. Everything is easy here,”18 and, sure enough, the sketchbook he took with him records the address of a Neapolitan brothel. For an Andalusian, regular visits to a whorehouse would have been an obligatory response to a fiancée’s virtuous stand. Another option was an affair with a less virtuous member of the company. Picasso did that too.19

  Cut off by the war from Russia, Diaghilev and his company led a nomadic life. Their principal wartime base was Rome. Officially the impresario stayed in the Grand Hotel, but he spent most of his time in an apartment in the Marchese Theodoli’s palazzo on the Corso that he had rented for Léonide Massine, the handsome twenty-one-year-old dancer, who had been his lover for the previous three years. So as not to compromise himself publicly, Massine had insisted that he and his employer live under separate roofs. That this hot-blooded heterosexual, who was also a cold-blooded operator, should have allowed himself to be captured and caged by the notoriously jealous and possessive Diaghilev is not surprising. In Russia it had been a standard career move for a dancer of either sex to have a rich, influential protector. To negotiate these arrangements, one of the company’s dancers, Alexandrov, acted as pimp. Massine’s predecessor in Diaghilev’s life, the legendary Nijinsky, who was likewise heterosexual, had started off—with his mother’s blessing—as the protégé of the rich, young Prince Lvov. The Prince had then handed him on to the Polish Count Tishkievitch, who gave him a piano.20 Like Diaghilev’s previous lover, Dimitri Filosofov, Nijinsky would leave the impresario for a woman; as would Massine.

  Exceedingly parsimonious and very ambitious, Massine had everything to gain from this arrangement. Diaghilev had already turned him into a star dancer, a choreographer of near genius and a major collector of modern paintings, including many Picassos and Braques. Sex with Diaghilev was part of the job—“like going to bed with a nice fat old lady,”21 as he told one of his mistresses, when she asked how he could possibly have done it with Diaghilev.

  That Massine was a passionate Hispanophile would prove to be a lasting bond with Picasso. The previous summer in Madrid, the dancer had agreed to choreograph two ballets with Spanish themes, Las meninas, which would be put on later in 1917, and Tricorne, which would not appear until 1919. A small, driven, Spanish-looking Russian with enormous eyes—in some respects a younger version of Picasso—Massine expected the artist to teach him
about modern art. He proved so perceptive and imaginative and such a quick learner that over the next ten years he and Picasso would collaborate on four great ballets.

  Another bond between Picasso and Massine was a passion for women—a passion that differentiated them from Diaghilev’s largely homosexual entourage. Cocteau’s presence in Rome made for more pique and intrigue than usual. In the face of Diaghilev’s jealousy, Picasso was delighted to provide his fellow womanizer with an alibi for his amorous escapades. After failing to persuade Picasso to spy for him, Diaghilev hired a couple of detectives to take on this job.22 At the slightest suspicion of infidelity on Massine’s part, Diaghilev would have a temper tantrum, attack the furniture with his stick, tear the telephone out of the wall and smash it.

  Massine’s biographer, Vicente García-Márquez, has explained the dynamics of this relationship:

  Massine’s reaction to such raving was to immerse himself in work. Not only were his spirit and intellect being sorely tested, but his appreciation of Diaghilev as a great man—brilliant, often magnanimous, capable of… self-sacrifice in the pursuit of artistic ideals—had to be set against the … merciless, mistrustful… self-centered tyrant he now faced…. Since Massine … sacrifice[d] himself to art as to a religion, any distress … was justified in his mind by the work that grew out of their affiliation. In the creative process he could … sublimate his private needs to his work…. the dark side of his bargain was that… art increasingly became for Massine a substitute for and a refuge from real intimacy.23

  Diaghilev was too much in awe of Picasso to lose his temper with him, so everything went smoothly; but after prolonged exposure to his controlling ways, the artist said that, like Gulliver, he “felt a desperate need to travel back to the land of human beings.”24 Cocteau fared less well. If he described the impresario as “an ogre of kindness and criminality,” this was because Diaghilev had made a great fuss over him in Rome, and then taken against his meddling. After returning to Paris, Cocteau made the fatal mistake of claiming that he rather than Massine was the principal begetter of Parade.

  To promote the company’s upcoming season and lure backers for new productions, Diaghilev gave frequent dinners in “Massine’s apartment,” which had already filled up with balletic clutter. Michel Georges-Michel—the journalist who had recently arrived from Paris with some Picasso paintings that Diaghilev had bought for Massine25—described the place. Besides these newly acquired paintings, which Diaghilev planned to exhibit at the company’s gala opening in April, the salon contained “lengths of muslin, fabrics, silks, sheets of cardboard, ballet shoes, costume designs on tracing paper, picture frames, musical scores, dolls.”26 Over the sofa hung an eighteenth-century portrait which intrigued Picasso. “Why are you so fascinated by that picture?” Diaghilev asked. “I am studying it carefully,” Picasso replied, “in order to learn how not to paint.”27 There was a constant coming and going of friends and associates chattering away in Russian, French, English, Italian, Spanish. Diaghilev’s dinners were shunned by most of the “black” aristocracy of Rome, who disapproved of his pro-Bolshevik stance, but immensely popular with cultivated diplomats and fashionable people from war-torn countries, who had settled in the city for the duration of the hostilities and were desperate for distraction.

  Diaghilev had taken a liking to a young, prematurely bald, prematurely stout diplomat called Gerald Tyrwhitt (soon to be better known as Lord Berners). Ber-ners’s whimsical wit and passion for modern music made up for a lack of physical charm (he looked like nothing so much as an oyster, Lord Sackville declared). So did the considerable fortune he was about to inherit. Berners was an amateur in the eighteenth-century sense of the word: an amateurish painter and writer and a collector of everything from needlework carpets to the early Corots Picasso valued so highly, and (later) Salvador Dalís. The only thing Berners was not amateurish about was his music.

  Stravinsky, whom Berners hero-worshipped, regarded his fan as the best of the young English composers—his Valse brillante, Stravinsky said, includes “one of the most impudent passages in modern music [a view more likely to reflect Stravinsky’s poor opinion of English composers rather than his esteem for Berners’s slim oeu-vre].”28 Stravinsky had introduced him to Diaghilev, who would eventually commission him to do scores for an opera and a ballet.29 Diaghilev passed on this famously funny, ironical man to Picasso. And just as he made himself useful to Stravinsky as a go-between in the composer’s complicated financial dealings with Diaghilev, Berners made himself useful to Picasso by helping to paint the set of Parade. He also shipped one of Picasso’s portrait drawings of Stravinsky out of Italy in the diplomatic bag— probably the one of the composer seemingly wearing a monocle (in fact a broken pair of glasses).30 More to the point, Berners took the Parade team to a spectacle which would duplicate the scenario of the ballet. As Berners wrote Stravinsky (March 13, 1917), “near my house I have discovered a tiny, dirty little theater music-hall, which I want you to see when you come. They have a variety program and an orchestra à tout crever. I took Picasso and Cocteau there the other night and they were thrilled.”31

  Igor Stravinsky, Picasso, and Gerald Thyrwitt (later Lord Berners) in front of Picasso’s Harlequin and Woman with a Necklace, Rome, 1917. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  They were indeed thrilled. The atmosphere of the seedy vaudeville theater that Berners had discovered corresponded exactly to what Picasso and Cocteau hoped to evoke in Parade—the corny Barnum and Bailey look of the drop curtain, with its vaguely Vesuvian view, stems at least in part from the décor that Picasso and Cocteau would have seen in Berners’s “tiny, dirty little theater.” The reference to Naples, like the references to New York in the Manager’s skyscraper outfits, as well as to Spain (the torero in the drop curtain) and China (the Conjuror’s mandarin costume), was supposed to reflect the ballet’s cosmopolitan nature and the loosening of its ties to mother Russia. This was the message that Diaghilev hoped to project. He wanted to live down his mandarin past and be recognized as an honorary member of the avant-garde, the better to distance himself from the essentially Tsarist tradition of classical ballet founded by Marius Petipa. As that sharpest of dance critics, André Levinson, would write, “Personne n’a servi etper-sonne n’a trahi le ballet russe comme l’a fait Serge de Diaghilev” (No one has supported the Russian ballet or betrayed it as Serge de Diaghilev has done).32

  Inspiration for Parade came from yet another traditional form of popular entertainment: the Teatro dei Piccoli, a marionette theater that Picasso and Cocteau visited soon after their arrival, as we know from postcards of the marionettes that Picasso sent to Apollinaire (“I am writing to you from my bed having refused to go to the Forum this morning”)33 and to Juan Gris, who thanked him: “You must send me others in the same series or buy me several more which you can give me on your return.”34 Cocteau mailed one of these postcards to his mother.35 The puppets, he said, made fairyland far more convincing than human performers ever could.36 After the performance, Picasso, Cocteau, and Massine, and presumably Diaghilev, were invited to meet the “actresses” backstage, where the puppeteers manipulated their puppets into ceremoniously receiving their guests from the world of ballet.

  Puppets had intrigued Picasso ever since 1899, when he had done a poster for a marionette show at Els Quatre Gats.37 Now they intrigued him even more. As he had no previous experience of the stage, he constructed a model theater out of a cardboard box in which to try out his Parade sets. His memories of the Teatro dei Pic-coli’s miniature stage would be reflected in the puppet-theater look of his décor. Cocteau raved to his mother about the spell cast by the Teatro dei Piccoli. Massine was delighted to have had another opportunity to study puppetry. Three years earlier, while on holiday with Diaghilev at Viareggio in 1914, he had been fascinated by the resort’s open-air marionette theater with its commedia dell’arte characters.38 Les Femmes de bonne humeur—the ballet Massine was currently rehearsing—also testifies to this obsession with marionettes.


  One of the most important things a stage designer has to learn, Picasso said, was how to modify, magnify, or intensify a line or color or pattern for it to register at this or that distance from the stage. No one was better at demonstrating this than puppeteers, who needed their little figures to be identifiable and distinguishable from afar. Hence the startling boldness and brightness of Picasso’s costumes, which sometimes made for confusion on the stage. By comparison, the costumes Diaghilev’s former favorite, Léon Bakst, did for Schéhérazade looked flamboyant and démodé. Much as he deplored Bakst’s taste, Picasso told Françoise Gilot that he learned a lot about stagecraft from him, for instance the way certain “colors look very nice in a maquette but amount to nothing transferred to the stage.”39 Years after the Ballets Russes period, Boris Taslitsky, a French Communist Party official, recalled how impressed he had been by Picasso’s exactitude when they worked together in the 1950s on backcloths for the party’s conventions.40 To make his blacks look blacker than black, Picasso added silver powder. The weight of the lines had to be just so.

  In Rome, Picasso’s interest in puppets was shared by the young futurist painter, sculptor, and puppet maker Fortunato Depero. Diaghilev had momentarily hailed him as a genius and commissioned him to do the décor and costumes for Massine’s Hans Christian Andersen ballet, Le Chant du rossignol. Stravinsky’s score was not ready in time, so Depero’s set—a fantastic futurist garden with huge plastic flowers41—was sold to pay his rent. A mistake, the composer said; Matisse’s 1919 décor for this ballet was nothing like as good. Instead, Depero was hired to help construct the papier-mâché giants, which Picasso had contrived for the Managers and the Horse in Parade, and which turned out to be one of the ballet’s most memorable features. Picasso enjoyed working with Depero. Although the man’s style was facile and flashy—a decorative blend of futurist dynamism and synthetic cubism—Picasso could not resist helping himself to Depero-like effects in the two principal easel paintings he did in Rome. Depero had apparently assimilated enough from Picasso to pass off one of his own derivative drawings for the Parade Horse as an original by the master.42