A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  On July 12, despite testimony in his favor from Cocteau, Gris, and other friends, Satie was condemned to a week in prison, a fine of a hundred francs and a thousand francs’ damages to Poueigh. This would have resulted in a seizure of Satie’s royalties and scores and an embargo on his music in state-supported theaters. He appealed in November, but the verdict went against him. Jail loomed. Powerful friends intervened, including the Princesse de Polignac and Misia Sert, and in March 1918 his sentence was reduced to probationary suspension. As Satie wrote to Henry Prunières (September 14, 1917), “Parade separated me from a great many friends. This work is the cause of many misfortunes. I have against me a thousand unpleasant people who have more or less abused and mistreated me. Too bad!”70

  By comparison, Picasso’s problem was slight, but it would have ramifications. Diaghilev, who was punctilious about such things, had arranged a grand dîner for the four creators of the ballet and the stars as well as Olga, after the premiere. Picasso must have known all along—he had excellent manners as a rule—the he would have to attend this dinner, even if it meant reneging on his promise to attend the one that Max Jacob and other friends had organized in his honor. By turning his back on his Bohemian past—an act that was more symbolic than he probably realized— Picasso elicited a tart response from the hosts dictated by Paul Dermée: “We, the undersigned, who have come together at Henriette’s humble Montparnasse abode for the Picasso dinner regret that serious business has kept him apart from those who desire his presence and feel that they alone [these two words added in Max Jacob’s hand] deserve it.”71 The letter was signed: Prince de Lipchitz, Max von Jacob, d’Hermée, Sola (the painter Léon Sola), Marthe Laurens, Duc de Laurens (Henri Laurens), Metzi (Metzinger), Madame Sola, Juan Gris, Madame Dermée, Lucie Metzinger, Grisette (Josette Gris), and Kikimora (probably Kisling, who was nicknamed Kiki).72 It was registered and addressed (in Lipchitz’s writing) to Picasso at “Grand Montrouge.”

  Picasso. Portrait of Max Jacob, 1917‘. Pencil on paper, 32.6 x 25.3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Picasso had allowed himself to be maneuvered into a trap seemingly by Max Jacob, who was not happy at his old friend’s neglect of him. Whether or not Jacob had as yet been introduced to Olga, she could never stand the idea of him any more than she could the rest of the Bateau Lavoir Bohemians. Picasso should have insisted that Diaghilev—or Misia, who probably arranged the dinner—include Max. Failing that, he should have had the courage to tell Jacob of his change of plans, instead of putting the blame on his famously reliable memory.

  In all fairness to Picasso, there was a further reason for his rejection. Fond as he was of Max, the artist had not forgiven him for his outrageous behavior at the funeral of his beloved mistress, Eva, in 1915. (En route to the cemetery, Jacob had got drunk, cracked macabre jokes with the driver of the hearse, and finally made out with him.) Picasso continued to hold this against him. After promising to engrave a frontispiece for Jacob’s collected poems, Le Cornet à dés,73 he had kept him waiting six months. And then, on receiving a copy of the book, he told a mutual friend it was a chef-d’œuvre—and, indeed, it was. Thrilled at this verdict, Jacob had jumped in a cab—“a fantastic luxury for him”—to hear the words from his hero’s own lips. “I haven’t read it,” Picasso said.74

  And yet Picasso had great need of Max Jacob: for his poetic spirit, his wit, his vast knowledge of magic and mysticism, his historical expertise (Max would do research for Picasso’s ballet costumes), and not least for the slavish, homosexual adulation— marred by petty resentment—which the artist’s paradoxical psyche craved. Hence the acts of cruelty on Picasso’s part and the retaliation from Max, epitomized in the aborted dinner. After Olga foolishly had him banished, Max, who had a bande-rillero’s skill at getting his barbs to stick, nicknamed the next phase in Picasso’s development as l’époque des duchesses (the Duchess period).

  Diaghilev’s season at the Châtelet ended on May 27. The company’s next stop was Madrid, where they opened in June, and Barcelona, where Picasso looked forward to introducing Olga to his mother. Whether Olga traveled with Diaghilev or the company or separately with Picasso, we do not know.75 Picasso had no idea he would spend the next six months in Spain.

  4

  The Ballet in Spain

  Earlier in 1917, Picasso had obtained a visa to leave Paris for Barcelona so as to present Irène Lagut to his mother, but he had canceled the trip after Irène rejected him. Now he was back in Spain on a similar mission: to introduce his new novia to his mother and sister and other family members. Back, too, because Diaghilev needed to have Picasso along for the Spanish luster he would shed on his company, even though Parade was not as yet on the roster. When Picasso arrived in Madrid around May 30, he assumed he would stay on in Spain until early July, when the company was due to leave for South America after a short season in Barcelona. He and Olga would then return to Paris and, all being well, get married. Things would not turn out as planned.

  Picasso had never liked Madrid. He had hated the bleak winter he had spent at the San Fernando Academy in 1897-98—he had been only sixteen—desperately lonely, desperately poor, and, in the end, desperately sick. After an almost fatal bout of scarlet fever, he had been thankful to return home to Barcelona. A subsequent visit in 1901 had been almost as miserable—again in the winter—when he had helped edit an ill-fated magazine, Arte Joven. Picasso had found the Madrileños haughty and cold. This time around, he returned as a celebrity. Everybody wanted to meet him; also, it was summer.

  Picasso stayed at the Palace Hotel,1 Diaghilev and Massine at the Ritz; Olga and the other dancers were lodged in a more modest establishment. The company, above all Diaghilev, was in a state of nervous excitement at the news of Nijinsky’s return. Four years before, the dancer had left Diaghilev to marry Romola de Pulszky, daughter of a well-known Hungarian actress. After being held under virtual house arrest as an enemy alien in Budapest, Nijinsky had been released—thanks to the balletomane Spanish king’s intervention—and was arriving with his wife and child to dance for him.

  Nijinsky had never danced in Spain before. At first all went well. Diaghilev burst into the lobby of the Ritz to give Nijinsky a big Russian hug. He even made a point of being “a fatherly friend, protective and kind”2 to the dancer’s wife, Romola—a woman he had every reason to loathe and would soon loathe even more. In her memoir, Romola describes Picasso in Madrid: “reticent and very Spanish looking… when he began to explain anything, he became full of excitement, and used to draw on the tablecloth, the menu cards and on top of Diaghilev’s ivory walking stick.”3 According to Romola, Nijinsky distanced himself from Picasso because he thought Parade “strived after modernism for its own sake.” He did not realize that this was Cocteau’s fault, not Picasso’s.

  In honor of the Nijinskys and Picasso, Diaghilev had laid on various entertainments, notably a performance by the celebrated flamenco singer and dancer Pastora Imperio. This performer dazzled them with her famously gritty, glottal voice, the cadenzas on her castanets, and the way she moved her arms above her head, which revolutionized flamenco. “With a few gestures she offered the history and soul of Spain.”4 Picasso found her “intensely sexy.” And then there were the bullfights, which Picasso had so sorely missed in France. Belmonte—possibly the greatest torero of all time—was the star of this season’s corridas. Picasso was very proud that they became friends. In the evenings, he and Massine would go in search of flamenco and cante jondo in Gypsy hangouts. Nijinsky’s famed proficiency at Spanish dancing made Massine the more determined to master it. He would scrutinize the flamenco dancers’ every move with ravenous intentness and film the performers with his new movie camera.5 The more flamenco they saw, the more determined Diaghilev and Massine became to do “a great Spanish ballet” with décor by Picasso. Ever the perfectionist, Massine first of all had to ensure that not only he but the company were fluent in flamenco and Spanish regional dances.

  On an earlier tour of Andalusia, Mas
sine and Diaghilev had discovered a very small (five-foot-two-inch), very shy Gypsy called Felix Fernández García dancing with a flamenco troupe in a café in Granada. Although he looked sick and undernourished, Felix had an intensity and technical mastery that dazzled Massine. “Not only had he devised a notational system for the zapateado … but he had taught himself to sing the difficult seguidilla and alegría songs while dancing.” After their first encounter, Massine and Diaghilev had lost touch with Felix, but they now rediscovered him in Madrid dancing in a working-class cabaret. On being taken to see Schéhérazade and Thamar, Felix became an instant balletomane; he foolhardily quit the cabaret where he was working and joined Diaghilev’s company as a teacher and consultant as well as a dancer. Picasso took a great shine to him. As Lydia Sokolova recounts in her memoirs:

  The employment of Felix was the first step towards the realization of the great Spanish ballet which Massine intended to create, though at that time neither Diaghilev nor Massine can have known exactly what form it would take. The essential was that Massine and the company would learn to perform Spanish steps in a Spanish way; and Massine in particular had to master the grammar of the Spanish dance before he could work out his choreography. At this stage Diaghilev and Mas-sine probably saw Felix as the eventual star of their Spanish ballet… but, as Mas-sine learned more of the secrets of this very special art and grew more sure of himself, and as poor Felix’s unstable nature became more apparent… they gradually came to visualize Massine as the hero of the ballet. One thing is certain: Felix joined the company in the confident expectation that Diaghilev intended to make him a world-famous star.67

  The “great Spanish ballet” would emerge two years later as Tricorne. It would be a triumph for everyone involved, except for Felix, who had been the catalyst, until Massine usurped his place.

  Diaghilev opened his Madrid season on June 2 with a spectacular program, including Lopokova and Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la rose, and Massine and Nijinsky in Carnaval. The reception was ecstatic. Alfonso XIII made a point of attending every performance. The court had no choice but to follow suit. In addition, the King had Diaghilev arrange special performances in a small private theater on an upper floor of the palace, where he and Queen Ena (Victoria Eugenia) and their friends could sit around informally in armchairs. When a political crisis clashed with an important horse race, and the King was late for UAprès-midi d’un faune, His Majesty asked an aide to explain apologetically to Nijinsky that he had “just given birth to a new government.”8 While the monarch fell for the beautiful ballerina Tchernicheva (the cruel Queen in Cléopdtre) and even tried to mimic her partner’s leaps, his cousin, the glamorous red-haired Duchess of Durcal, chased after Nijinsky (the Slave in Schéhérazade). Romola encouraged this relationship, but Nijinsky was dismayed by it. “Please, femmka [little wife],” he begged her, “do not leave me so much alone with [the Duchess].”9

  After being feted for a week in Madrid, Picasso left ahead of the rest of the company for Barcelona—their next stop before sailing off to South America—as he had to prepare for Olga’s arrival. He moved in with his mother, who still lived in the parental apartment on the carrer de la Mercè, the walls of which were lined with paintings by his father, as well as many of his own early works. Given the oedipal shadow that his father had cast over his early years, Picasso felt ill at ease working in the family home and went in search of an alternative space. Within a day or two he had arranged to share a studio at the top of the Ramblas with a likable hack from Málaga named Rafael Padilla. He had also arranged to share Fatma, Padilla’s beautiful French-Moroccan model and mistress.

  As soon as he moved into the studio, Picasso set to work painting Fatma as a maja. To show off his virtuosity, Picasso allowed the press to see this unfinished fusion of popular imagery and pointillism10—something he had never allowed before. Now that he was back in what had once been his hometown, he evidently wanted to follow the strategy his father had urged on him twenty years earlier: dazzle the public with a tour de force. The publicity paid off. Journalists marveled at the modernity of this anything but modernist portrait and treated the artist as a returning hero. Picasso seems never to have touched the painting again. He had carried it quite far enough, and it had served its purpose. Years later, when Douglas Cooper asked him about it, he shrugged dismissively and said he wished people would stop referring to the model as “La Salchichona” (the sausage woman).11

  Lola Vilató, her son Juan, Picasso, Doña María and Fin Vilató in Barcelona, 1917. Collection Doctor Vilató, Barcelona.

  The press report that Picasso had returned to Barcelona was followed up by an account of a commemorative dinner.12 This had originally been planned to honor two Basques, Francisco Iturrino, the painter with whom Picasso had shared his 1901 show at Vollard’s, and the art critic and painter Gustavo Maetzu.13 On hearing that Picasso was in town, the organizers made him an additional honoree. The dinner took place at the Lyon d’Or, a restaurant that had replaced Els Quatre Gats as a gathering place for writers and artists. Besides Padilla, the guests included many of Picasso’s old friends: among them, Miquel Utrillo, Manuel Pallarès, Alexandre Riera, Ricard Canals, and the Junyer-Vidal and de Soto brothers. The newspaper account makes the occasion sound depressingly official: speeches in French, Catalan, and Castillian, the singing of the “La Marseillaise” and “El Segadors” (the Catalan anthem), and a group photograph. During the dinner, someone announced that the city of Barcelona was planning an international exhibition of contemporary painting later in the year, and that there would be a special gallery reserved for Picasso. Nothing would come of this project; however, most of the work executed on this Barcelona visit would be exhibited at the Palau de Belles Artes in 1919.

  Instead of remaining in Barcelona until the company arrived a week later, as he had planned, Picasso received a telegram on June 13, signed by Diaghilev and Olga, summoning him back to Madrid.14 The King had expressed a wish to see Parade, which “he had heard much of and was interested in because the décor was by a Spaniard whom he was anxious to meet.”15 Diaghilev had omitted this ballet from his Spanish repertoire as too advanced for such a backward country. The King felt otherwise. Picasso had to hasten back for the command performance of Parade on June 18. He complained that he did not have the correct clothes, nor any knowledge of court protocol: how to walk backward from the royal presence without ever looking him in the eye.

  Fortunately, Eugenia Errázuriz, Picasso’s Chilean mother figure and a friend of the royal family, came from Biarritz to deal with such problems as this and also meet Olga. Diaghilev, who was fussy about the way his entourage dressed, had already managed to impose a certain formality on Picasso. Instead of the mechanic’s overalls and espadrilles that he had sported in Montparnasse, the artist would now wear a suit, starched collar, and tie, especially if the impresario and Olga were around, and he took an increasing pleasure in doing so. Picasso’s dandyism should not come as a surprise, given the early drawings in which he depicts himself and one or two of his penniless friends as elegant boulevardiers. After Eugenia’s grooming, Picasso was ready for the King; ready, too, for the beau monde, for the Durcals, Albas, and Beis-teguis, to whom Eugenia and Diaghilev introduced him. The Spanish nobility took to Picasso; he took to them, but his attitude to the court was as skeptical and ironical as Goya’s.

  Picasso, who had seen himself as “el Rey” in an early self-portrait,16 got on famously with the monarch. However, Alfonso XIII was notoriously cursed with the evil eye, and an audience with him must have been an ordeal for anyone as superstitious as Picasso. Fortunately, the King turned out to have loved Parade—especially the two-man Horse, whose antics “convulsed him”17—far more than the public did. La Epoca had been especially virulent: “the product of a sick imagination … this cubist ballet may be seen once as a curiosity, but no more. Parade augurs no future for cubism on the stage.”18

  On the night before Picasso left Madrid, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, editor of an av
ant-garde journal, Los Quijotes, laid on a dinner for him at Pombo, the headquarters of the city’s avant-garde. His aim was to reunite the artist with figures from his remote Madrileño past and also have him meet the new generation. According to Gómez de la Serna, the evening was a great success. “Picasso smoked an unlit pipe and took delight in being the guest of honor … and spoke afterwards … as if he were an emigrant who had been to paradise and returned to his humble surroundings.”19 The next day, Picasso and Olga, Diaghilev and Massine, and the rest of the company left for Barcelona. Olga and the more important dancers and musicians, including Ansermet the conductor, lodged at the Pensión Ranzini at 22, passeig de Colon. Diaghilev, Massine, and the Nijinskys checked into the Ritz. Picasso moved back with his mother—at first.

  As soon as they arrived in Barcelona, Picasso took Olga to meet his mother, who had longed to see her son married. Many years later, Picasso told Françoise Gilot that Doña María had taken a very poor view of Olga as a daughter-in-law. They were wrong for each other, Gilot reported him as saying. Olga was not strong enough to make Picasso a good wife. “You poor girl, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for,” she told Olga. “If I were a friend, I would tell you not to do it under any conditions. I don’t believe any woman would be happy with my son. He’s available for himself but for no one else.”20 Given Picasso’s tendency to mythmaking about his past in the light of subsequent events, we should not take this story too literally. Doña María longed for a grandson and is unlikely to have admonished this presentable young woman in such a crude way. Over the years she became very fond of Olga. Perhaps the words Picasso later put in his mother’s mouth were intended to convey a warning about himself to Gilot.