A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Another of the younger futurists Picasso saw in Rome was Enrico Prampolini, who described the visit of Picasso, Cocteau, and Bakst to his studio—a space so small that Cocteau compared it to a conjuror’s box.

  Picasso remained standing by the door like a sentry; he looked about him in astonished delight, like a child at a play, his expression at once questioning and affirming as he scrutinized each object in turn with the joy of one experiencing a revelation. … It was an exploratory meeting rather than a mere visit…. Picasso asked me about Boccioni, the great friend who was no more, and the traîtres [whoever they were]. We all went out… to the Caffé Greco, where [the Florentine painter] Armando Spadini and Léonide Massine were waiting; Cocteau, who never forgot his friends, made us sign a post card to Erik Satie, on which he had drawn a heart… pierced by all our signatures.43

  Prampolini went on to claim that Picasso had invited him to his hotel room to view a Raphaelesque drawing of Three Women, which “expressed his passionate adherence to the world of humanistic reality.” No such drawing existed at the time.

  The culture shock of Diaghilev’s sybaritic little world, the stress of an unconsum-mated love affair, and the silly squabbles with Cocteau over Parade kept Picasso from doing what he most wanted to do—paint. As soon as he could, he embarked on two major works in which he set out to reconcile the demands of rep-resentationalism with the ongoing demands of modernism. Difficult enough in his Paris studio, this task proved to be even more daunting in the Eternal City, in the overpowering shadows of Raphael and Michelangelo. Sensitive as always to the genius loci, Picasso sought inspiration in his surroundings: not in classical monuments or Renaissance masterpieces, but in their antithesis—tourist kitsch.

  A couple of gaudy chromo-colored postcards of flower sellers in traditional peasant dress44—a perennial feature of the Spanish Steps, which were very close to his studio—were the starting point for a large painting in the flat, decorative idiom of later synthetic cubism. Italian Woman45 harks back to the great analytical cubist paintings of women holding guitars or mandolins, inspired by Corot’s Italianate models, clutching musical instruments but never playing them. To establish this painting’s Roman provenance, Picasso provides a glimpse through a window of the dome of Saint Peter’s, behind the flower seller’s head. This emphasizes the Italian Woman’s posterlike look—a disappointment after the large, luminous watercolor study for it, which shimmers with pointillistic light.

  The considerable size and majestic counterpoint of his other big Roman painting, Harlequin and Woman with a Necklace,46 indicate that Picasso was out to squeeze one more masterpiece from the residue of synthetic cubism. That he went to the trouble of photographing himself—very much le maître—posed formally with Stravinsky and Gerald Berners in front of this painting, suggests that Picasso regarded it as a major statement—a response to the impact of Rome.47

  Picasso. Italian Woman (L’Italienne), 1917. Oil on canvas, 149.5 x 101.5 cm. Foundation E. G. Bührle, Zurich.

  Picasso must have realized that, compared to the cubist masterpieces of the previous year, Harlequin and Woman with a Necklace looks flimsy. On his return to Paris a few months later, he would unroll this vast canvas for Severini—the Italian futurist who lived in Paris—and announce that it had been “inspired by Ingres’s purity of form and contour.”48 He had chosen Ingres, Picasso said, as a shield against the might of Renaissance art, just as he had used this artist’s sharply focused classicism in 1914–15 to wean himself off the fragmentation and illegibility of cubism. Picasso’s comments on his debts to other artists are often misleading, so we have to tread carefully. The citation of Ingres in this context is at best a half-truth possibly intended to divert Severini’s attention from Picasso’s indebtedness to Severini as well as to Gris and Depero.

  The commedia dell’arte theme and scale of the Harlequin and Woman with a Necklace imply that Picasso may have envisaged it as a modernist alternative for the Parade drop curtain, which also features a Harlequin and a long-haired woman wearing a necklace, both of them seated. In the Harlequin and Woman painting, the figures are dancing their heads off, as is the homunculus (lower left) who emerges from a tiny proscenium within the huge proscenium formed by a succession of decorative frames. The disproportion makes the large dancers look even larger; at the same time it evokes recession without recourse to perspective. Dance had evidently seeped into Picasso’s vision. This is the most balletic and rhythmic of all Picasso’s paintings. Might Massine have helped him with the pictorial choreography? The only problem with this unwonted movement: it works against the heft that makes Picasso’s work so palpable.

  The eruption of pointillism in this painting, as well as in the sketch for the Italian Woman449 and the watercolors of the Villa Medici, derives from the Seurat retrospective that Picasso had visited the previous summer at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. He had no time for Seurat’s scientific theories of color, but this did not diminish his admiration for this artist’s paintings or the drawings, which he would later collect. Picasso had originally resorted to pointillism as an alternative to using faux marbre and faux bois to enrich, vary, and enliven cubist paint surfaces (1913); later (1915-16) he had used it as camouflage to transform his Seated Man into the protagonist of Balzac’s Chef-d’œuvre inconnu.50

  In Rome Picasso had a different, more Seurat-like objective. By fracturing color, much as he and Braque had fractured form, he hoped to breathe new life and new light into his synthetic cubist paintings. Pointillism would have a permanent place in his arsenal of techniques, but he was apt to use it for decorative effects. The Rome paintings also include elements taken from Juan Gris, whose show at Léonce Rosenberg’s had so impressed him the year before. The interlocking silhouettes and hard-edged cubist architecture of Picasso’s Harlequin and Woman with a Necklace and Italian Woman derive from his one and only pupil. Ironically, Gris felt so unsure when dealing with Picasso that he concluded a letter to him “Accept, friend and master, an embrace from your old [friend] who aggravates you,”51 and yet it was this self-effacing man who had managed to steer cubism out of an impasse that was partly of Picasso’s making.

  Besides introducing Picasso and Cocteau to the monuments of Rome, Diaghilev insisted on introducing them to some of the pillars of Roman society. Cocteau was eager to make use of the social clout of the impresario as well as that of Philippe Berthelot, the French ambassador and a family friend. He would also follow up on the letters of introduction he had brought from Paris to various principessas. Picasso, on the other hand, tended to be antisocial when working and became even more so after his first experience of Roman high life. Diaghilev had dragged Picasso and Cocteau off to dine at an ostentatious villa on the Via Piemonte, belonging to his old friend and potential backer, the excessively rich, prodigiously extravagant, perversely exhibitionistic Marchesa Casati—a woman whose declared ambition was to be “a living work of art.” She also saw herself as a Maecenas and had recently commissioned Massine to choreograph Satie’s Gymnopédies—in the hope, one can only imagine, that Diaghilev and Massine would put it on.

  Luisa Casati was the daughter of a Milanese textile tycoon of Viennese origins, who had died young, leaving Luisa and her sister to share his vast fortune.52 To make up for being unfashionably tall and skinny, she dramatized herself by ringing her huge mesmerizing eyes with kohl and dilating the pupils with belladonna. To reinforce the Medusa look, she dressed her hair in serpentine coils dyed the color of a blood orange. The Marchesa’s clothes were either of utmost fantasy—see-through dresses of gold or silver lamé sewn with diamonds, spike-heeled sandals encrusted with jewels, hats of leopard skin or peacock’s tails—or conspicuously minimal. In Venice, where she lived in the palazzo that is now the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, La Casati liked to exercise her borzois or ocelots late at night in the piazza, naked except for ropes of pearls, a sable wrap, and a mass of makeup. The Marchesa’s jewelry was notoriously outré: enamel skulls, lots of “unlucky” black pea
rls, a tiny functioning incense burner dangling from her little finger. On occasion, rivières of diamonds and pearls would give way to a necklace of love bites inflicted by her lover, Gabriele D’Annunzio. A guest who admired a finely chased gold serpent around her neck was taken aback to discover that it wriggled: the Marchesa had drugged and gilded a live snake and tied it in a becoming knot. “She emerges from between the flagstones,” Cocteau told Stravinsky, “like the serpent in the terrestial paradise with an apple in her big mouth.”53

  The Marchesa Luisa Casati, 1912. Photograph by Baron Adolph de Meyer. First published in Camera Work, no. 40 1912.

  Picasso was astounded by La Casati as well as by her dinner party. Forty years later, he could still recall details: footmen tossing copper filings onto fireplaces at either end of the dining room to turn the flames blue and green; the massive gilded coil of a boa constrictor on a polar-bearskin rug; Luisa’s parrot, Abracadabra, on the shoulder of a black Hercules, wearing nothing but a cache-sexe; the pair of borzois, one black, one white, that she trailed behind her on jeweled leashes. Picasso described Luisa’s pearl-embroidered dress with its huge ruff as something out of an Elizabethan portrait, except that the neckline plunged below her navel. The other guests included Cocteau, Diaghilev, Massine, a couple of ballerinas, and, to Picasso’s delight, the pigtailed Chinese ambassador in mandarin robes. The ambassador’s colorful robes inspired the celebrated costume design for the Chinese Conjurer in Parade, which Diaghilev would henceforth use as a cover design for the ballet company’s programs.

  The Marchesa followed up the dinner with invitations to lunch on March 17 and April 2. Contessa Raggi had advised Picasso to avoid such louche company, which would have encouraged him to do the reverse, if he had not had such a prodigious amount of work to do on Parade. Whenever possible, he preferred to keep to his studio and have pasta and local cheeses sent in. When he dined out, it was with Olga, if she was not dancing, or musicians and painters associated with the company—Russians like Stravinsky and Bakst, Larionov and Gontcharova; Italians like Balla and Depero. “Roman grandees are art snobs and make a great fuss of Picasso,” Cocteau told his mother, “but [Picasso] courteously refuses their advances and shuts himself away in the solitude to which a great master is entitled. I admire him and I despise myself. I try to be better, to destroy everything in me that’s demeaning and paltry.”54 This chastened mood was the consequence of a tiff over the poet’s failure to hail a cab in the rain. The artist had had enough of Cocteau’s self-promotion and frivolity. A good slap from Picasso brought him to his senses.55

  Cocteau had also infuriated Picasso by deciding that he, too, was going to have “a romance” with one of the dancers. He had picked on Maria Shabelska, who would dance the Little American Girl in Parade, and who looked, Cocteau wrote Misia Sert, “like Buster Brown’s dog.” Shabelska was not fooled—given all the makeup Cocteau wore, there was no way she could be—but “she was willing to continue the ‘affair’ as a game for the pleasure of her ‘lover’s’ company…. The two of them made the joke rather elaborate. Discovery in ‘compromising’ situations, rumpled sheets, bedaubment of the ‘lover’s’ face and shoulders with ballerina’s make-up, as Picasso’s were bedaubed by Olga’s.”56 In a poem called “Rome” (in which Cocteau fantasizes about stealing a lemon from the Vatican garden and being pursued by the Pope), he sighs over the films—“Cinéma la dixième muse se lève dans toutes les rues”—that he and Maria had seen. Nevertheless, Cocteau was finally obliged to confess that the love affair with Shabelska was an act: “My dear little Marie, your hotel room is a month of Marie [the month of May] and a box at the theater.”57 Thirty years would pass before he confessed that the only person he had eyes for in Rome in 1917 was his collaborator, Picasso.58 His passion for Picasso would last a lifetime.

  Massine was delighted with Cocteau’s offer to help with Parade’s choreography. The poet claimed that he had even learned to dance. And, indeed, Shabelska’s solo included many of his suggestions, some of them inspired by Mary Pickford and Pearl White’s films. This solo had originally been called Titanic Rag, but, for reasons of taste, its title was changed to Steamboat Rag, which Satie had adapted from Irving Berlin. To believe Serge Lifar, who succeeded Massine as Diaghilev’s lover, “Mas-sine’s felicitous touches in Parade and subsequent ballets stem directly from Cocteau, with their literary flavor and circus-like stylization. Everything that is now current in ballet was invented by Cocteau for Parade, which he knew by heart, and every step of which he had suggested.”596061 Lifar’s dismissal of Massine contains a tiny nugget of truth.

  Olga, Picasso, and Jean Cocteau in Rome, 1917. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Picasso’s slap had worked. Cocteau claimed that although Roman society was bombarding him with invitations, he was refusing all of them “out of self-discipline and a need to concentrate on work.” “The duchesses and princes take me for a savage,” he wrote. He had adopted Picasso’s excuse—what he called le ruse du smoking (the “sorry, no dinner jacket” dodge) —for refusing invitations. The improvement came about too late. Diaghilev had lost patience with Cocteau’s avant-garde pretensions and sent him back to Paris, where he was a press officer in the War Ministry. He was told to drum up publicity for Parade. Cocteau should have taken Diaghilev’s dictum—“In the theater there are no friends”62—more seriously. By whining, he forfeited the respect of the impresario, who would not use him for another seven years, and then for his musical contacts rather than his own mercurial flair.63

  The mystery as to whether Picasso visited the Sistine Chapel and Raphael’s Stanze in the Vatican while he was in Rome was largely of his own making. According to Stravinsky, Cocteau, and Massine, they did, above all Picasso, who was an inveterate museumgoer. (He was particularly struck by Bernini’s Daphne in the Villa Borghese.) And yet, on his second visit to Rome in 1949, Picasso, whose memory failed him only when he wanted it to, would deny ever having seen the Sistine Chapel.

  Of course Picasso had been to the Sistine Chapel.64 Michel Georges-Michel claimed to have visited the Vatican museums with him the very day he arrived from Paris. The journalist was specific. In the Sistine Chapel they ran into Cocteau’s friends, Philippe Berthelot and his wife. They then went on to Raphael’s Stanze, where Picasso is supposed to have said, indicating the frescoes with the stem of his pipe, “whatever pleasure I derive from Michelangelo’s tormented contours, it is with serenity that I let myself be blown away by Raphael’s lines—pure, pure, sure…. This sententious rubbish does not sound like Picasso. Much later he told Kahn-weiler: “The Sistine Chapel looks like an enormous drawing by Daumier. Cocteau likewise confirms this visit to the Vatican with Picasso. The poet compared Raphael to Picasso—unfavorably, on the grounds that Raphael had not revolutionized people’s perceptions as radically as Picasso had. As for Michelangelo, Cocteau dismissed him as “the futurist of his day … an erotomaniac architect,” and, in a more Picas-sian mode, “a marvelous draughtsman but a bad painter.”65666768 Ansermet, Diaghilev’s conductor, claims to have overheard Picasso and Stravinsky discussing the paintings in the Sistine Chapel very enthusiastically.69

  Picasso’s pretense that he had never seen the Sistine Chapel was probably intended to distract attention from his uncharacteristic choice of Raphael as a source—a choice that was embarrassingly academic as well as predictable. As someone who would always see himself as the rebel leader of modern art—a rebel who had overturned everything the Renaissance tradition stood for—Picasso would not have wanted to acknowledge any debt to the founders of this tradition. Two years later, he would paint a response to Raphael’s La donna velata, presumably to demonstrate that he could do a Raphael as well as Raphael. Whether or not he did so to his own satisfaction is unclear, for he never put the Italian Woman, as this painting is known, on the market and apparently never exhibited it.

  Much later, in 1968, Picasso would execute a series of wish-fulfilling engravings in which he depicts a lusty, young Raphael (a surrogate
for his lusty, young self) having his way with La Fornarina, palette in one hand, penis in the other, while an elderly pope (a surrogate for his elderly self) gets his kicks by peeping at the lovers from his seat on a chamber pot or his hiding place behind the arras. By 1968 Picasso no longer needed to prove that he was stronger than any other artist.

  Farnese Hercules, colossal statue from the Baths of Caracalla, Roman copy of a statue by Lysippus, second half of fourth century B.C., ht. 317 cm. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

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  Naples

  Picasso was not especially interested in an audience with the Pope, but Cocteau had pulled every available string, at his pious mother’s insistence, to obtain one. He was turned down. Pope Benedict XV had already blessed Diaghilev’s company; also, according to Cocteau, he had better things to do: his bridge game.1 To make up for this disappointment, Diaghilev took Cocteau, Picasso, and Massine to Naples to stay (March 9-13, 1917) at the Hotel Vesuvio on the waterfront. They spent their days sightseeing. “The Pope is in Rome, God is in Naples,” Cocteau told Paul Morand, a worldly, witty writer from the same elegant background as himself.2 And to his mother he wrote that he could not imagine any other city in the world pleasing him more than Naples. “Antiquity swarms afresh in this Arab Montmartre, this enormous chaotic fairground which never closes. God, food and fornication are the preoccupations of these fantastical people. Vesuvius manufactures the world’s clouds…. Hyacinths push up through the paving stones…. Pompeii did not surprise me at all. I went straight to my house. I had waited a thousand years, before daring to return to this wretched rubble.”3 Cocteau also wrote a little ode to Vesuvius: “an eye-fooler belching smoke / the largest cloud factory in the world / Pompeii closes at four / Naples never closes / NON-STOP PERFORMANCE.