A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Naples would have a more profound effect on Picasso than Rome. Since he had been raised in two of the Mediterranean’s busiest ports, Málaga and Barcelona, he felt very much at home there—more at home than in Rome. There were also historical links to Spain. And then, like Cocteau, he was fascinated by Pompeii; he even inscribed a laurel leaf he had picked up in the ruins: “To my friend Apollinaire, Pompeii, Picasso, 1917,”45 and mailed it to Paris. Ever the mimic, Cocteau sent his mother a laurel leaf—“from this sad little city”6 The formal attire—stiff collars, Homburg hats, spats—expected of the men in Diaghilev’s entourage did not prevent painter, poet, and dancer from scrambling over the broken columns and rubble of antiquity. Diaghilev had seen it all before and preferred to take his ease in the shade. Massine reported that Cocteau “had brought a camera and took … photographs of us all leaning against statues and broken blocks of marble.”7

  Léonide Massine and Picasso at Pompeii, 1917.

  Besides Pompeii, they visited Herculaneum and, to Picasso’s delight, the celebrated Naples aquarium. While the others took siestas, Massine would wander off on his own to escape Diaghilev’s attentions and explore the narrow streets behind the Piazza Garibaldi. He liked to watch “craftsmen at their work or street sellers displaying their fish and fruit, [performing] their tasks with such high-spirited style … and bravura.”8 Previous visits had infected Massine with a passion for Neapolitan culture that would often flavor his work. After breaking with Diaghilev, he even choreographed a ballet called Pompeii à la Massine for the British impresario C. B. Cochran’s revue Still Dancing (1926).

  Back in Rome, Diaghilev had to leave for Monte Carlo and Paris to arrange bookings for the company—a logistical nightmare in wartime Europe. Meanwhile, Picasso pursued his courtship of Olga, a rite he had never bothered with in the past. She was busy rehearsing Massine’s Les Femmes de bonne humeur, a ballet based on an eighteenth-century Venetian play, with a set by Bakst. Massine had looked to futurism and films for inspiration, as well as to the “jerky, flickering movements of the marionettes”9 he had seen at the Teatro dei Piccoli. Olga had no trouble learning these unfamiliar new movements, which included ideas prompted by Massine’s newfound passion for Picasso’s cubism.

  At the beginning of April, the company returned from a tour of South America. To celebrate this reunion, Diaghilev organized a short season at the Teatro Costanzi, including a couple of charity galas, at the first of which (April 12) Les Femmes de bonne humeur would have its premiere. Diaghilev, who sided with the revolutionaries in Russia, found himself in a quandary. Since the Tsar had abdicated and he and his family were under house arrest in Tsarskoe Selo, the impresario felt that the Tsarist national anthem would be inappropriate for his gala. But what to play instead? After reviewing numerous possibilities, Diaghilev and Stravinsky decided on “The Volga Boat Song,”10 in those days little known outside Russia. Since no orchestration was available, Stravinsky agreed to do one. Time was short. Stravinsky stayed up all night and, with the help of Berners, dictated the orchestration as he composed it to Ansermet. On the title page of Stravinsky’s “Volga Boat Song” arrangement, “Picasso painted a red circle as a symbol of the revolution.”11 Until the early 1930s, this seems to have been the one and only inkling of a gesture to the left.

  Meeting Stravinsky, who arrived in Rome on April 5, was one of the most lasting consequences of Picasso’s Italian trip. They took an instant liking to one another and would remain friends for life. Picasso told Stravinsky that he had little ear for music but an inherent sense of rhythm, and this enabled him to appreciate the achievements of “the greatest rhythmic thinker since Beethoven.”12 Since both artist and composer were recognized in their respective fields and were both in the process of using modernism to regenerate classicism, they found themselves confronting similar problems. The fact that neither Spain nor Russia had undergone a renaissance made their mutual understanding all the more instinctive. Eugenia Errázuriz, most discriminating of women, had instantly spotted these two men as twin peaks of twentieth-century culture. “What a genius,” she said of Picasso, when she first met Stravinsky in 1916, “as great as you, cher maître”13

  Diaghilev’s galas were an enormous success in a Rome bereft of foreign entertainment. Eleanora Duse, the most celebrated actress of the day, watched Les Femmes de bonne humeur from the wings and came onstage to congratulate the company. Extra performances had to be scheduled. To boost his acquisition of Picasso as a designer and promote his image as a patron of modernism, Diaghilev arranged for the contemporary art collection he was putting together for Massine—it consisted largely of Picassos—to be shown in the foyer of the Teatro Costanzi. This was the first time that Picasso’s work had been exhibited in Rome, and it exerted a powerful influence—not all of it good—on local artists.

  Sometime in April, Picasso wrote an undated letter to Gertrude Stein, saying that he had begun work on the two canvases (Harlequin and Woman with a Necklace and Italian Woman), in which he responded—somewhat disappointingly—to the impact of Rome. Both paintings have a high finish redolent of both Ingres and Gris, which made their execution lengthier than usual. Picasso also told Gertrude that he was working “all day at my décors and the construction of the costumes,” and that the set was to be painted in Rome.14

  Picasso. Maquette for the set of Parade (destroyed), 1917. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  In his libretto Cocteau had initially wanted the set for the little vaudeville theater to be set in Paris, but later decided that it could be any city, “where the choreography of perspectives is inspired not by what moves but by immobile objects, around which one moves, especially by the way buildings turn, combine, stoop, get up again and buckle according to one’s walk down a street.”15 The only trouble was that Picasso had never shown much interest in the urban scene. So he set about checking how other artists had portrayed the city, particularly Léger, whose prewar cityscapes and Contrastes de formes had so impressed Apollinaire. Picasso’s arrangement of diagonally raked buildings against bubble-shaped treetops recalls Léger’s urban compositions as well as the text of his celebrated 1913 lecture, “Les Origines de la peinture”: “I take the visual effect of trees, the curves and circles moving skyward between the houses…. Concentrate your curves with all possible variety but without disconnecting them. Surround them with the hard, dry surfaces of the houses.”16 Picasso also turned to his own previous work for guidance and recycled some of the skyscraperish elements from his great Seated Man of the year before.17

  To prepare the set for Massine as well as the scene painters, Picasso had made a rough-and-ready model theater in which to try out variants on his original idea, some of which incorporate the façade of the Villa Medici. The effect must have been too static, for Picasso went to the opposite extreme and set off a whoosh of futurist movement. He also tried embellishing the proscenium arch with a row of decorative gas lamps borrowed from Seurat’s Parade. Meanwhile, Cocteau, who was ever anxious to show how protean he was, came up with his own skyscraperish designs, which added nothing to Picasso’s maquettes. The artist simply waited for Cocteau to go back to Paris and then had Carlo Socrate, Diaghilev’s Roman scene painter, work from his final maquette.

  Fernand Léger. Rooftops of Paris, 1912. Oil on canvas, 90 x 64 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

  Around April 16, Diaghilev, Massine, and Picasso returned for a slightly longer trip to Naples. This time they were accompanied by Stravinsky and Ansermet instead of bothersome Cocteau. As before, they traveled by train. En route, Picasso accepted a wager: as to whether the wobbling of the train would allow him to do a portrait of Massine in under five minutes. He won the wager and gave the drawing to the sitter.18 This time, they traveled with the company, which had been engaged for a short season (April 21-23) at Naples’s great opera house, the Teatro di San Carlo. The season would be a disaster. The ballets, particularly Les Femmes de bonne humeur, received such terrible reviews that the
last three of the five scheduled performances had to be canceled.19

  Once again, the principals stayed at the Hotel Vesuvio. Olga was lodged at the nearby Hotel Victoria with the other dancers, but Picasso did not let that discourage him from whoring, according to notations in one of his sketchbooks: “bordello—via Tomacelli 140” and “the girls of Naples have four arms.”20 Cocteau’s biographer describes the interiors of the brothels glittering with candelabras, statues of the Virgin, and gold-plated gramophones.21 That the brothels were in the Spanish quarter and the whores mostly Spanish delighted Picasso. Ansermet, who was conducting the ballets, rhapsodized about “Napoli the insane. Yellow on a blue sea, mechanical pianos. Balconied bordellos on the street with girls taking footbaths. A cow in the courtyard. Odor of Spain. Smoke in the sky and burning lava in the body.”22 Stravinsky recounted how he and Picasso were arrested one night for urinating in the Galle-ria. Stravinsky asked the policeman to take them over to the San Carlo Opera House so that they could be vouched for. When the offenders were addressed as maestri, they were let go.23

  In Naples, as in Rome, the Parade trio delighted in popular entertainment, above all the traditional commedia dell’arte performances in the Forcella quarter of the city. These street performances have long been obsolete. However, there are still folk dancing troupes in Naples that keep the tradition alive. Anyone lucky enough to have seen them perform will be astonished by the knockabout violence of the action, the in-your-face obscenity of the clowning, the noise of the yelling, and the down-and-dirty physicality of it all. This is a far cry from the playful harlequinades that Domenico Tiepolo’s charming drawings lead one to expect. Picasso and Massine would have felt as if they had been transported back, as I certainly did, to the bawdi-ness and maenadic mayhem of antiquity—back to the Old Comedy associated with Aristophanes, in which social, sexual, and political satire was presented in the form of farce.24

  Stravinsky has left a vivid description of an evening “in a crowded little room reeking of garlic. The Pulcinella was a great drunken lout, whose every gesture, and probably every word if I had understood, was obscene.”25 Massine remembered these performances taking place out of doors rather than indoors, in the streets against a backdrop of blue skies and laundry-laden clotheslines hanging between the houses.26 He persuaded one of the actors to sell him his antique leather mask, which he would always wear for his Pulcinella roles. Massine suggested that they collaborate on a real commedia dell’arte ballet, as opposed to a traditional harlequinade, something that had seldom if ever been tried in a legitimate theater. Diaghilev liked the idea, so did Picasso and Stravinsky. While they were in Naples, they worked on a scenario and did the necessary research in the San Martino Museum.

  Today the San Martino Museum, handsomely situated in a seventeenth-century monastery high above the city, is celebrated for its spectacular collection of presepios, crèche figures, beloved by tourists. These were of very little interest to Picasso and Massine. What they had come to study was the commedia dell’arte material—Pulcinella masks, marionettes, and other such items of Neapolitan popular culture— which had been assembled by a curator obsessed by the subject. Nowadays, the San Martino Museum displays virtually none of this bygone treasure. Upstaged by the presepios, the more humble artifacts have been thrown into bins and left to rot in dusty storerooms. (When I visited the museum in 2000, restorers had just started work on the life-size Pulcinella figures depicted on a postcard that Picasso bought at the museum.27 As I watched, the restorers undressed Tartaglia the Stammerer and found that his straw shoulder had been eaten by a rat, which turned up mummified in the stuffing.)

  On his visit to the San Martino Museum, Picasso bought photographs of watercolor scenes of Neapolitan life by the nineteenth-century illustrator Achille Vianelli. After Picasso’s death, they were discovered tucked into an Italian sketchbook.28 Vianelli’s tavern scene with Vesuvius in the background bears such a striking resemblance to the central section of Parade’s rideau rouge that it is often cited as the inspiration of Picasso’s composition. However, the artist had settled on his design months before he left for Italy. He presumably bought the photographs because one of Vianelli’s watercolors was similar to his backstage scene.

  Picasso. Portrait of Massine, 1917. Graphite on cream wove paper, 17 x 11.4 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. Given in memory of Charles Barnett Goodspeed by Mrs. Charles B. Goodspeed.

  Other souvenirs of Picasso’s Neapolitan trip were an antique Pulcinella mask (like Massine’s) and a couple of commedia dell’arte puppets, which would end up on top of Olga’s piano. These items would be of help in 1920, when Picasso started work on Pulcinella, the commedia dell’arte ballet that Naples had inspired. According to Stravinsky, he and Picasso also bought some of the stylized gouaches of the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius, which local hacks had been churning out for tourists ever since the eighteenth century. None of them has surfaced in the artist’s estate, but their formulaic style— so formulaic they look stenciled—left its mark on the crisp, stencil-like gouaches of Harlequins that Picasso would do over the next few years.

  Phallic doodles in his Neapolitan sketchbook and a letter to Gertrude Stein about his “Pompeiian drawings, which are a bit improper,”29 reveal that Picasso visited the Museo Nazionale’s Gabinetto Segreto, where most of the erotic items from Pompeii and Herculaneum are stored. To view these items, visitors required special permission easily obtainable from venal guides. In the mid-1950s, when Picasso gave Barbara Bagenal, the British critic Clive Bell’s mistress, one of these “improper” drawings for Christmas, he confirmed that the subjects had been suggested by the erotic frescoes in Naples. By comparison with the ithyphallic fantasies Picasso would do in 1927, these drawings are anything but shocking. They are inspired by wall paintings of Apollonian couplings, Bacchic revels, and the like, which were a standard feature of Roman villas, much as Tiepolo’s frescoes would be in ottocento Venetian villas. Their purpose was primarily decorative or numinous; and their subjects, erotic or not, were mostly taken from Ovid. Besides prompting Picasso and Cocteau to come up with conceptual drawings of their friends’ penises—inspired by a dream, Picasso attributed a curlicue pistolet to André Lhote30—the Gabinetto’s phallic pendants, embellished with wings and bells and arms and legs, would have little effect on his work.31

  Left: Hercules and Telephos, c. A.D. 75. Fresco from Herculaneum, 202 x 171 cm. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

  Right: Pan and Olympus, second half of third century B.C. Hellenistic sculpture, ht. 158 cm. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

  For Picasso, far and away the greatest revelation of Naples was the incomparable Farnese collection of monumental Greek and Roman sculptures, which are the principal glory of the Museo Nazionale. The influence of these marbles would take three years or more to percolate fully into Picasso’s work. Signs that their three-dimensional monumentality would alternate with the flatness of synthetic cubism first occur in his 1920 figure paintings. From then on the gigantism of the Farnese marbles will make itself felt in the increasingly sculptural look of his paintings as well as in his actual sculptures. Indeed, one might say that Picasso’s rebirth as a great sculptor was a direct consequence of the revelation of the Farnese galleries. The marbles would give Picasso back the sense of scale that cubism had denied him by limiting the image to the size of the subject. They would classicize his work far more effectively than the antiquities he had studied in the Louvre. And they would embody the sacred fire—in this case the sacred fire of Olympus—for which he was always searching.

  Of all the Farnese marbles, it was the celebrated Hercules—a Roman copy of a sculpture (second half of the fourth century B.C.) attributed to the Greek Lysippus— that left the most lasting mark on Picasso’s development, above all on his sense of gigantism.32 The sheer size of the Hercules, which looms over the other colossi in the main Farnese gallery, overwhelmed Picasso; he was particularly fascinated by the subtle adjustments of scale—the enlargeme
nt of eyelids and fingers and the widening of the bridge of the nose— which had enabled the sculptor to endow his figure with such monumen-tality and yet such character and pathos. Füseli’s pronouncement that “gigantism lies in the disproportion of the parts” could not be more Picassian. “Disproportion of the parts” would be a recurrent feature of even the smallest of his neoclassical images. Confirmation of his skill at manipulating scale, Picasso said, came about when a very large truck arrived to pick up a very small bather painting.33 The shipper knew the image but had not checked the size.

  Picasso and Massine in Naples, 1917. Photograph probably taken by Cocteau.

  Whether or not Picasso’s own shortness played a part in his obsession with the Farnese Hercules, there can be no question about his identification with the hero’s pensive head, bowed down by the sheer weight of his legendary power. The self-referential figure of a bearded sculptor in Picasso’s engravings of the late 1920s and early 1930s has the same preoccupied expression. In these engravings, Picasso would see himself not only as the sculptor but also, on occasion, the model, and also the resultant piece of sculpture.