A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Olga had insisted on a religious ceremony with all the Orthodox ritual. It took place at 10:45 a.m. in the Russian church on rue Daru. Since Eugenia had already left for Biarritz to prepare for the honeymooners, Picasso entrusted the organization of the festivities to Misia Sert. Misia claimed that Picasso had asked her to be a witness.5 I doubt it. She was a famous liar and would not have wanted to be perceived as less important than Cocteau.

  Later that day, Cocteau wrote his mother, who was on holiday in Biarritz, that the wedding had exhausted him: “I had to hold a crown of gold over Olga’s head; it made us all look as if we were performing in Boris Godunov. The ceremony was beautiful, a proper wedding with mysterious rituals and chanting. Luncheon afterwards at the Meurice, Misia in sky blue, Olga in white satin, tricot and tulle—very Biarritz.” Neither Cocteau nor anyone else provides a guest list.67 Misia would have had a hard time rounding up friends at such short notice. The smallish group included no family members, nor any of the artists closest to Picasso: the Braques were at Sorgues; Derain in the army; the Grises at Loches; the Severinis in the mountains. Besides the witnesses, the luncheon might have included the Beaumonts; Misia’s lover and future husband, José María Sert; Georges Bemberg and his Russian wife; Valentine Gross, who would marry Jean Hugo a year later; Erik Satie; Stravinsky; Ambroise Vollard, who had had the bride and groom to dinner to meet his current mistress, Etelka (identified by Picasso as a Turkish prostitute from Madrid); Eugène Descaves; and the André Levels (who had written to ask Picasso what he wanted as a wedding present).8 No wedding photographs were taken. Photographs that appear to have been taken on the day of the wedding were actually taken at Biarritz sometime later.

  The main event of Misia’s wedding luncheon was Apollinaire’s recital of the eight-stanza epithalamium he had written for the occasion.9 “Mon cher Pablo la guerredure, ” it begins, and goes on to envision the war ironically as “tendre de la douceur”— each piece of shrapnel a flower. In another stanza, the poet hails “our marriages” (his and Picasso’s) as “the war’s triumphant offspring.” The version of the poem that Apollinaire copied out in his best handwriting and had bound in morocco as a wedding present for Picasso has disappeared. The version in the Musée Picasso is a preliminary one, jotted down on the back of a sheet of Ministry of Colonies paper, with corrections and a caricatural sketch of Cleopatra’s enormous nose that figures in the poem.

  Olga did not move back into the Lutétia until the day after their wedding, this time with her husband, and into a rather larger room. The same day, she received a letter from Jacqueline Apollinaire, wishing her a speedy recovery but warning her not to be alarmed at the slowness of the treatment: “It’s only a question of time, and I hope that I will soon be applauding you as one of the femmes de bonne humeur. ”10 Jacqueline was right, Olga’s recovery would be agonizingly slow. For the next two weeks, the Picassos stayed on in Paris, waiting for Eugenia’s rented cabane at Biarritz to be ready for them. Once again, Olga’s condition worsened. On the same page of a sketchbook where he noted the departure time of the train to Biarritz, Picasso drafted a letter to her doctor, Pascalis, informing him that she had left the clinic the day before but needed him to come to the Lutétia as soon as possible and take a look.11 Something had indeed gone wrong, but medical records are not available.

  Above: (from left) Olga and Eugenia Errázuriz with two other women in the garden of La Mimoseraie, Biarritz, 1918. Archives Olga Ruiz-Picasso. Right: Olga at La Mimoseraie, Biarritz, 1918. Archives Olga Ruiz-Picasso.

  Meanwhile, the Picassos saw much of Misia, also of Cocteau, who had decided to accompany the Picassos to Biarritz, where his mother was already in residence. At the last moment a better option materialized. Etienne de Beaumont invited Cocteau to move into his magnificent hôtel particulier for a week or two while his wife was away. This was too tempting an offer to forgo. As well as going out on the town together, Beaumont and Cocteau amused themselves organizing mismatched dinner parties: one of them included Anatole France, André Citroën, and the musical-comedy star Mistinguett. In the course of Cocteau’s visit, even more of Beaumont’s waspishness, panache, and style rubbed off on Cocteau.

  When Edith de Beaumont returned, Cocteau decided against joining the Picassos in Biarritz and went instead to Le Piquëy—a fishing village on the Bay of Arcachon with a primitive hotel he had stayed at the year before. It was just like “living in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a negro village,” Cocteau told André Gide.12 He could unwind and go native—sunbathe naked and turn as black as the American soldiers who had played jazz at the “great negro fête” Beaumont gave in his garden as soon as Cocteau left. From Le Piquëy, Cocteau wrote constantly to Picasso, thanking him and Olga for their kindness to his mother in Biarritz. Told that the Picassos were looking for a Paris apartment, Madame Cocteau, primed by her son, had urged them to move to the nice, quiet rue d’Anjou where the Cocteau family lived. Picasso failed to follow up on this suggestion.

  As things turned out, La Mimoseraie would not be ready for the Picassos until July 29. Misia, who was good at pulling strings, had arranged for the newlyweds to have a sumptuous coupé (private compartment) on the night train to Biarritz. This made the journey much easier for Olga, who needed to keep her leg up, and Picasso, who had two dogs with him, Derain’s Sentinel and a new Pyrenean sheepdog called Lotti (a diminutive of Charlotte). Far from being the modest cabane that Eugenia had described, the house was a medium-sized, late-nineteenth-century villa of indeterminate style and considerable charm. It belonged to the owner of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, next door to the casino, and its gardens had provided his hotel with flowers— mimosa all winter. Over the next few years, Eugenia would transform La Mimoseraie into a house of monastic simplicity—whitewashed walls and terracotta tiles. A minimalist fifty years ahead of her time, Eugenia had thrown out everything except a few armchairs. Her innovations would shock her hidebound neighbors, who lived in elaborate villas filled with fake dix-huitième furniture and ormolu bric-à-brac, as much as it delighted her progressive friends.

  Giovanni Boldini. Portrait of Eugenia Errázuriz, c. 1895. Oil on canvas, 76 x 63.5 cm. Private collection.

  In Paris Eugenia’s apartment was furnished with things that would harmonize with the cubist masterpieces on her walls: a stepladder from a hardware store, some metal seats pinched (though not by her) from the Bois de Boulogne, and a massive red lacquer cupboard for the concealment rather than the display of her “things.” The self-denial, even mortification, in Eugenia’s minimalism reflected her resolutely austere taste in art and decoration, as well as her Spanish piety. She did not see herself as a Maecenas or a muse so much as a secret sharer in her protégés’ sacrosanct work. If she provided her geniuses—Picasso, Stravinsky, Blaise Cendrars (and, later, Le Corbusier)—with financial aid and tobacco, she did so in the spirit of almsgiving.

  While Picasso worked away in his studio at La Mimoseraie, Eugenia would work in her garden, barefoot; for just as she liked to drink either the purest spring water or champagne, she either went without shoes or wore the highest of heels. Instead of planting flowerbeds with canna lilies, begonias, and lobelia, as the owners of other villas did, she gave over her entire garden to vegetables neatly set out in rows and rectangles. Eugenia abhorred elaborate flower displays, only liking cut flowers if they were of the simplest variety and stuck in a jar. Houseplants were aromatic ones— rose geranium, lemon verbena, lavender, jasmine—in terracotta flowerpots.

  Picasso’s ten-week stay in Biarritz was not so much a honeymoon as a resumption of his prewar habit of spending the summer somewhere quiet, warm, and meridional—Gósol, Horta, Cadaquès, Céret, Sorgues, Avignon—where he could embark on new projects. Once again, the sea in summer worked its magic. For although the Mediterranean had given birth to Picasso, and provided him with so much of his imagery, it was on an Atlantic beach at Corunna that he had had his first, never to be forgotten glimpse of a woman’s pubic hair. Nudes, conspicuously absent from his r
ecent work, reappear, in the rough-and-ready murals he sketched on the whitewashed walls of his little studio in Eugenia’s house.13 These were among Picasso’s first Biarritz paintings. Two weeks after his arrival, he informed Apollinaire that he had finished some wall decorations that included a stanza from a poem of his. “I am not too unhappy here,” he added, as if in some doubt.14 For someone as physical as Picasso, Olga’s untouchable leg must have been extremely frustrating.

  Wall decorations by Picasso at La Mimoseraie, Biarritz, 1918. Whereabouts unknown.

  Decorating the walls of temporary studios had become a habit of Picasso’s—a compulsive consecration of his place of work. He had done this to studios in Barcelona, Montmartre, and Sorgues and would do so again in Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, and Vauvenargues (the bathroom, not the studio). This time, his light-hearted Apollinairean idylls were a housewarming present for his hostess. The lines on Eugenia’s walls had been taken from the opening stanza of Apollinaire’s “Les Saisons”—a poem written in April 1915 and recently republished in Calligrammes:

  For us beachcombers it was a blissful time

  Going off at dawn barefoot, bareheaded

  Until quick as a toad’s tongue

  Love would strike both the wise and the foolish in the heart.15

  “Les Saisons” goes on to evoke the war in the same ironical spirit as Apollinaire’s epithalamium. A subsequent stanza about stars in the night sky mimicking bursts of shrapnel inspired Picasso to use washes of fountain-pen ink to color the ceiling of his little room a night-sky blue.16 After scratching a Milky Way into the blueness, he surrounded his cavorting nymphs with yet more stars. Each section, including the window, has a border resembling the brass studs on the back of the seventeenth-century chair in which he posed his sitters. “But the house is only rented,” Eugenia gasped on seeing Picasso’s decorations for the first time.17 Eventually (1925), her son Max would buy the house for her, but by that time her fortune had started to dwindle and paintings had to be sold. Picasso would help her out, just as she had helped him out. Eugenia would continue to live at Biarritz ever more austerely until she returned, in her eighties, to die in her native Chile.

  Until the Côte d’Azur took over in the early 1920s, Biarritz was far and away the most elegant summer resort in France. Because of the war, many of the hotels had been commandeered by the army, but the Hôtel du Palais (formerly the Villa Eugénie that Napoleon III had built for his Empress) and the casino continued to attract old as well as new money. In their wake came the courtesans and the gigolos, the jewelers and the art dealers who catered to them. “I have seen [Paul] Rosenberg,” Picasso told Apollinaire, “he has sold all his [Douanier] Rousseaus. [Jos] Hessel is here with all the Paris antiquaires. I have had a letter from Paul Guillaume, he’s arriving any day”18 He failed to do so.19 Nathan Wildenstein, Paul Rosenberg’s partner and father of Georges Wildenstein, had rented a villa, Les Violettes, almost next door to La Mimoseraie, for the winter and stayed on for the summer. Nathan loathed modern art, but his anything but avant-garde son saw there was a profit to be made and courted Picasso. Despite an inherent dislike of the “trade,” the artist made himself available to the Wildensteins and their associates. Now that he was married to a woman with expensive tastes, he needed a dealer with sufficient resources to finance the lifestyle to which they both aspired.

  Picasso. Mme Rosenberg and Her Daughter Micheline, 1918. Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm. Private collection.

  Just as in 1910 Picasso had painted major cubist portraits of his three most important dealers—Kahnweiler, Vollard, and Uhde—he now embarked on a large, representational painting of Paul Rosenberg’s wife, Margot, with her plump little daughter, Micheline, on her knee.20 The delight Picasso took in painting this pouting, squirming piglet21 redeems an otherwise lifeless portrayal of a woman who aroused little interest and no desire in him. Madame Rosenberg—a frustrated good-time girl with a taste for luxe rather than art—disliked the painting. She had wanted Boldini to paint her. Picasso realized this and did a caricature of his portrait, which he signed “Boldini.”22 The painting could indeed have done with a touch of Boldini’s brio. However, Paul Rosenberg was very pleased with the portrayal, and the rapport resulting from the sittings paved the way for an advantageous contract. Picasso’s drawing of the husband—a man he would respect for his business acumen rather than his eye—is far more incisive than the painting of the wife.23 The same can be said of the superb Ingresque drawing of Madame Georges Wildenstein, the next-door neighbor who had become a friend of Olga’s.24 Poor woman! Her husband was about to embark on a secret affair with the less pretty but much livelier Margot Rosenberg.

  Since Olga was confined most of the time to an armchair or chaise longue, Picasso could draw her all he wanted. She enjoyed this ritual; it calmed her when she was upset. However, she always keeps her distance in these portrayals, and he always keeps his libido buttoned. Sometimes he depicts Olga as a noble, Ingresque beauty; sometimes less formally, as a soulful young wife; sometimes as a cubist construction. One of the Biarritz sketchbooks is filled with watercolors in which Olga is reduced to patterns of rhyming curlicues and arabesques: a form of cubist notation that could not be more antithetical to his emergent classicism.25 However far Picasso goes in one direction, he continues to stray in the other.

  In his very similar watercolors of La Mimoseraie and its environs, Picasso carries ornamentation to such an extreme that flowering shrubs and balustrades are indistinguishable.26 Some of these watercolors depict a bizarre, machicolated building, visible from Eugenia’s house. Topped by a dome and six toy-fort towers, each named after one of the owner’s mistresses, the house was known locally as “Bluebeard’s Tower.” Picasso sent Apollinaire a drawing of it. “Le château d’un russe” he wrote.27 In fact, the “château” had been built by a local engineer who owned the Biarritz gasworks.

  Picasso. Portrait of Diadamia Patri, 1918. Pencil on paper, 31 x 23 cm. Whereabouts unknown.

  Picasso also executed a number of highly finished graphite drawings of the beautiful daughters of Eugenia’s Spanish and South American friends who were summering at Biarritz. Of these jeunes filles en fleur, the one Picasso fancied and drew most frequently was the seductive Argentinian heiress Diadamia Patri. Besides three or four Ingresque likenesses of her,28 he depicted her more intimately as a disheveled coquette,29 and gave her a small, Renoir-like gouache of a white rose. She also inspired some lighthearted harlequinades in which an almost nude look-alike gazes at herself in a mirror held up by a child, while a Pulcinella, that is to say the artist, serenades her on a guitar.30 In another of these harlequinades,31 the central figure is very different—seemingly a nun holding a devotional book. A rather representational drawing of this “Spanish nun” reveals her to be Eugenia.32 As a member of an order of lay nuns, this famously pious woman liked to appear in public wearing the habit that Paquin had made for her.

  Picasso told Apollinaire that he was seeing a great deal of the beau monde; so, despite her leg, was Olga. Biarritz had always been popular with Russians, so much so that the fall season was known as la saison russe. From her window, Olga could glimpse the onion domes of the Russian church opposite the Hôtel du Palais. Several of the grander villas belonged to Russian noblemen or rich entrepreneurs. The star of the Russian contingent was the singer Marthe Davelli, who would arrange, a year or two later, for Chanel to become the Grand Duke Dimitri’s mistress. Biarritz’s leading philanthropist was a Muscovite, Lazar Poliakoff (“king of the Russian railroads”), who entertained his fellow countrymen lavishly at his Villa Oceana. Olga preferred her hostess’s more cultivated circle.

  Eugenia’s best friends in Biarritz were the Marquesa Villa-Urrutia (wife of the Spanish ambassador to France), the Marquesa Villavieja, and one of the King’s favorites, Carlos de Beistegui, the enormously rich Mexican ambassador to Spain whom Picasso had met in Madrid the previous year. Beistegui—not to be confused with his nephew and namesake, the obsessive decorator whose
only client was himself—had installed part of his small, choice collection of paintings, including works by Goya and Ingres, in his Villa Zurbiac. Years later, Picasso liked to recall the steel-iness of the bayonettes in a small barricade scene by the meticulous Salon painter, Ernest Meissonnier. Apprised by his mother of Picasso’s success with the beau monde, Cocteau could not resist denouncing his lionization. “He hates that and will take against Biarritz…. There will be dramas,” he wrote, and underlined the words.33 There would be no dramas. Cocteau was envious; the beau monde was his preserve. Picasso was beginning to derive a certain cynical amusement from his social success. What he most liked about Biarritz was that almost everyone spoke Spanish.

  One person Picasso was happy to see was his admirer since the first night of Parade, Chanel, who had chosen Biarritz as the venue for her avant-garde summer fashions. She had followed up her triumph in Paris by buying the Villa Larralde and converting the stables into a bustling workshop. The provocative Chanel bathing suits—sleeveless, skirtless, clinging—would catch Picasso’s eye. Fascinated by this revolutionary garment’s effect on the way women looked and behaved, Picasso did a fine, small painting of three bathing-suited girls—each fiddling with her hair—on the beach below the Palace Hotel.34 This is the first of countless bather compositions in Picasso’s work. Besides using the beach as a setting for classical idylls, he would envision it as a sexual arena, later still as a cosmological limbo outside time and space.

  The Biarritz Bathers harks back to Puvis de Chavannes’s celebrated Young Girls by the Seashore,355 however, Picasso has been careful to exorcise Puvis’s wan blend of romanticism and neoclassicism with up-to-the-minute allusions to the fashion plates of Braque’s old friend, the illustrator Georges Lepape. This summer, Lepape’s svelte, flat-chested, long-waisted flappers are the sisters of Picasso’s. By next summer, these flappers will have grown into hefty goddesses. Picasso’s also drew on his own past: specifically his melon-buttocked Bather of 1908,36 whose elongated arms and legs anticipate the skinny articulation of the Biarritz girls.