Another of this summer’s chefs-d’œuvre is a fine pencil drawing of fifteen naked nymphs at play on the beach.37 Its sheen recalls Ingres’s Bain turc, which had dazzled Picasso when he first saw it at the 1905 Salon d’Automne after a century of concealment.38 The recumbent figure at the center is a direct quotation from Ingres. The linear purity of the drawing also recalls the Etruscan mirror backs Picasso had studied in the Louvre. The intricacy and complexity of the composition, with its three central figures—one standing, one sitting, one reclining—interspersed with playful couples wrestling, running, and caressing each other, suggests that he may have envisaged an ambitious painting along the lines of the large neoclassical Bathers Renoir had painted thirty years earlier.39 However, Picasso’s drawing turns out to have been an end in itself, a manifesto of his neoclassical mastery. To have executed it in paint would have been superfluous—pompier and time-consuming. Most of the single figures and small groups to be found in Picasso’s subsequent neoclassical works derive from this little masterpiece.
In the course of this honeymoon summer, Picasso painted a couple of still lifes of a basket of fruit, which are remarkable for their banality. One of them is painted directly onto a tray,40 which suggests that it was intended as a present; it would have been too kitschy for his exigent hostess, but perfect for his incapacitated wife. The other still life is signed and dated, “Juan de Luz, 1918,”41 and is the only evidence we have that the artist worked at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a charming, as yet unspoiled Basque resort some eight miles south of Biarritz.
That summer, Saint-Jean-de-Luz had been turned into a hive of cultural activity by Princesse Edmond de Polignac, the Amazonian patron who had presided with Misia over the Parade opening. A disciple of Debussy, Winnaretta had been shattered by the composer’s death in March 1918. Instead of spending the season in her Venetian palazzo, she had chosen to grieve at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the cottage where Debussy had passed his last summer. Indignant that this illustrious man had been insufficiently eulogized, Winnaretta devoted herself to memorializing his work. With the help of Picasso’s old friend, the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, as well as Saint-Jean-de-Luz’s cherished composer, Ravel, she had arranged a festival in Debussy’s honor, which was attracting throngs of modern musicians. The proximity of Spain prompted Winnaretta to commission (through Viñes) a work from Manuel de Falla, El retablo de Maese Pedro, based on an episode from Don Quixote.42 Picasso would have had every reason to visit Saint-Jean-de-Luz to find out from Viñes (and possibly Falla) whether or not Diaghilev’s “great Spanish ballet,” soon to be called Tricorne, had been shelved.
Olga at La Mimoseraie with paintings by Picasso, 1918.
There was no mention of Tricorne when the impresario had cabled Picasso in August asking him and Olga to join the company in London for the reprise of Parade in November 1918. The artist had not bothered to reply. Diaghilev would try again in October to reassure his “cher Pica” that visas for England would be no problem43— again to no avail. Picasso knew that Diaghilev’s principal reason for enticing him to London was to paint a full-length portrait of Massine as a commedia dell’arte figure—a project that had been mooted the previous summer. Diaghilev said he had set aside ten thousand francs for this commission. Coincidentally or not, Picasso had already begun just such a painting (as well as an identical, very worked-up drawing),44 but it turned out to be a generic image of a Pulcinella rather than an actual portrait of Massine. Picasso would never paint Massine, but the following year he would do a bravura drawing of him.45
Diaghilev said he was very worried about Olga. “Has she abandoned the art of dancing for good? It would be a great shame. As a choreographer, Massine misses her, so, as a loving old friend, do I. In fact, Olga’s leg was much better. Around August 20, she wrote Jacqueline Apolli-naire that she was still couchée.4647 Ten days later, she wrote that she was finally beginning “to walk a bit.”48 However, it was not until late September that she finally appeared to be “tout à fait remise”49 Normally, she would have had to undergo months of agonizing rehabilitation before being allowed to dance. Whether or not she did so, one thing is certain: Olga never danced again in public. This would prove to be an intolerable test for Picasso’s ambivalent tenderness. The shadow of Olga’s injury would darken his future relationships with women. “Women’s illnesses are women’s fault,” he said to me many years later, as if to shift the guilt and the blame from his shoulders onto theirs.
Olga with a cane, with works from the series Woman in an Armchair, Biarritz, 1918.
Picasso’s work was going so well and he felt so at ease at La Mimoseraie that he would have stayed on another month had he not received news that burglars had broken into the Montrouge house. He immediately (September 28) cabled Apollinaire: “Unable to leave just yet. Would you do the necessary?” He signed it “ton Pablo” rather than Picasso for fear of wartime censorship. This did not prevent the telegram’s being held up for two days.50 On arriving in Paris a few days later, Picasso sent Apollinaire a note: “My old pard … need to see you, if you have a moment… Je t’embrasse. ”51
A photograph taken shortly before Picasso left La Mimoseraie shows Olga, crouched with her stick on the floor of the living room, surrounded by paintings he had done in the course of his visit, as well as the great Seated Man belonging to Eugenia. It is an impressive, stylistically varied group: MoMA’s Pierrot; the Washington National Gallery’s cubist Still Life on a Table (the one with the realistic table leg jutting out at us), which he would rework in Paris; the Musée Picasso’s Bathers; the Portrait of Madame Rosenberg; and a large cubist composition, which was either painted over or destroyed.52 Given the paintings and drawings Picasso had done and the sketchbooks he had filled, his two-month honeymoon had been extraordinarily productive.
Picasso. Self-Portrait, 1918. Pencil on paper, 34 x 23.5 cm. Private collection.
8
Death of Apollinaire
No art, only linen turned out to have been stolen from Montrouge. In her book on Picasso, Gertrude Stein wrote that this burglary
made me think of the days when all of them were unknown and when Picasso said that it would be marvelous if a real thief came and stole his pictures or his drawings. Friends, to be sure, took some of them, stole them if you like from time to time, pilfered if you like, but a real professional burglar, a burglar by profession, when Picasso was not completely unknown, came and preferred to take the linen.1
A few weeks later, Picasso visited Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Mod-erne. Someone commiserated with him for being robbed.2 “Ransacked,” Picasso replied, gesturing at Rosenberg’s walls, which were lined with paintings by cubist copycats. He had a point, although some of these works were doubtless by Juan Gris, who was under contract to Léonce at the time and could have leveled a similar complaint at some of Picasso’s recent appropriations.
The honeymooners returned home to Montrouge at the beginning of October and set about searching for a suitable apartment in central Paris, the farther away from Picasso’s old haunts the better. Paul Rosenberg saw to it that they did not have far to look. To keep his valuable new artist under surveillance, he arranged for him to rent an apartment at 23, rue la Boétie, the building next door to his, and on the corresponding floor. Rosenberg had a lease drawn up, and by October 16 Picasso was able to show the apartment to Apollinaire.3 Two days earlier, they moved from Montrouge to the Hôtel Lutétia, the better to supervise the decoration. Meanwhile, for his work Picasso continued to use the Montrouge studio.
Before leaving for Biarritz, Picasso had embarked on a colorful still life on a gueri-don.4 The image did not live up to its considerable size (147 X 113 cm), which is probably why, when he returned to Montrouge,5 he transformed it into a Harlequin. A few strokes of his metamorphic brush turned a rudimentary fruit dish into a rudimentary moon face; he then added three pudgy fingers to the neck of the guitar to imply arms; two shadows cast by the table to suggest legs—and the Harlequin comes to
life. The resultant hybrid helped trigger a masterpiece, the Smith College Museum of Art’s Table, Guitar and Bottle (see insert);6 it also showed Picasso how to make his still lifes come alive, as we will see in the countless anthropomorphic gueridons of the next two years.
Picasso. Harlequin Playing the Guitar, 1918. Oil on canvas, 147 x 113 cm. Private collection.
Exactly how long Picasso continued to work at Mont-rouge is unclear, but he seems to have made use of the studio well into the spring. That he worked in two very different environments during the winter of 1918-19 is reflected in his astonishing ability to work in two seemingly opposite styles as well. The extent of this dichotomy became evident only after Cowling discovered that the two key paintings of the period—the Ingresque Olga in an Armchair and the cubist Table, Guitar and Bottle—had been wrongly dated 1917 and 1919 and that Picasso had actually begun them both in 1918.7 Picasso saw himself as a paradox, and he enjoyed playing volumetric representationalism against synthetic cubist flatness, much as he enjoyed playing Olga’s conventionality against his own instinctive iconoclasm.
“A condensed representation of [Picasso’s] studio”8 is how Cowling describes Smith College’s Table, Guitar and Bottle. I would go even further and see it as a metaphorical self-portrait. The bottle suggests a head in double profile set on what might be a neck. The L-shaped form below implies an upper arm and elbow; and the stacked forms on the floor set up a rhythmic rapport between a variety of legs—easel legs, table legs, human legs and one that resembles a carpenter’s square. In the course of studying the image upside down, Cowling established that Picasso had done the same while working on it, and an anthropomorphic presence continues to make itself felt. The Smith College gueridon is another chef-d’œuvre inconnu in that the subject is concealed, as it is in its great predecessor, the Seated Man, another bid to rethink and revitalize cubism.
Shortly after his visit to the rue la Boétie, Apollinaire’s precarious health took a turn for the worse. He could not stop coughing. To Vollard, who saw him in the street clutching a bottle of rum, early in November, he said, “with this I can laugh at the epidemic,”9 referring to the Spanish flu that was decimating Europe. With his lungs already weakened by emphysema, Apollinaire stood little chance against it. Cocteau used his friendship with Picasso to stay close to the sickbed, the better to lay the foundation for what Steegmuller describes as “a posthumous friendship.”10 His assiduous courting of Apollinaire had not been very successful, as an embarrassingly plaintive letter (June 9, 1917) reveals:
Dear Apollinaire, I am sad because I had hoped we would see each other and that would bring us closer. Each time we meet, I feel I am an object of suspicion [je vous suis “suspect”]—watertight compartments—solitude—and the realization that if a man like you cannot perceive my profundities, it will be impossible for anyone else to discover them.11
Unable to keep Cocteau at bay, Apollinaire reluctantly accepted the services and the gifts that he proferred, including an expensive pipe—an odd present for someone dying of lung disease. However, a much more formidable young poet was also determined to step into Apollinaire’s illustrious shoes: a youngish (twenty-two-year-old) man in a blue uniform, whom Picasso remembered meeting for the first time in the hallway of Apollinaire’s apartment a day or two before his death—“a military orderly, I think, [who] had been extremely courteous and did not hide his grief at Apollinaire’s state of health.”12 This was André Breton: the future leader of the surrealists and Cocteau’s nemesis. Breton and his friends were already planning a brutal campaign against this pampered, high-society homosexual, who was trying to gatecrash the avant-garde. Cocteau did not stand a chance against Breton.
The morning of Apollinaire’s death, Cocteau summoned Picasso and Max Jacob to his apartment and asked them to let him bring his doctor, the fashionable quack Capmas, to see the invalid. Apollinaire turned out to be terrified of dying. “I want to live. I want to live,” he told Capmas, who thought there was a chance of saving him. Late that afternoon, Picasso happened to be walking “along the wind-swept arcades of the rue de Rivoli,” as he told Penrose,13 when a war widow’s black veil blew across his face, momentarily blinding him. To anyone as superstitious as Picasso this could mean only one thing, death. Back at the Lutétia, the artist sat down in front of the bathroom mirror and started to draw. He depicted himself twice over as a no longer young man about to embark on a new life without the support of the one human being in whom he had total faith—Apollinaire. Self-portraitists usually look lonely, but few as lonely as Picasso does in these drawings.14
In the midst of drawing himself, Picasso received a telephone call from Jacqueline, or someone acting for her, confirming that Apollinaire had indeed died. The artist, who was doubtless familiar with the superstition that to learn of a death while looking at oneself in a mirror is to foresee one’s own death,15 would always treasure these haunted drawings. Shortly before he died, he would give one of them to his second wife, Jacqueline.
On hearing of Apollinaire’s demise, Picasso and Olga hurried off on foot. From the Lutétia it was no distance to the poet’s apartment at 202, boulevard Saint- Germain-des-Prés. Apollinaire had died at 5 p.m. He was thirty-eight, a year older than Picasso, and had expired to jubilant yells of “A has Guillaume” (Down with Kaiser Wil-helm) from the boulevard below. This story has been dismissed as a legend—wrongly. The war would not be over for another two days, but the Kaiser had abdicated on November 9, the day of Apollinaire’s death. Already, the crowd had reason to howl for Guillaume’s blood.
Louis Marcoussis. Jacqueline Apollinaire. Drypoint, 33 x 23 cm. Biblio-thèque Nationale de France, Paris.
Besides a terror of death, Picasso had a terror of infectious diseases. He was so fearful of Spanish flu that, according to Cocteau, he held his hand over his mouth when anyone addressed him.1617 It must have taken all Picasso’s courage to visit Apollinaire on his deathbed. When Cocteau arrived, Picasso took him over to view the body. Shining a lamp on the dead man, the artist said, “Look— he’s as he was when we first met,” and showed him Apollinaire’s “admirable face, in profile, lean and very young.”18
Later that evening, midnight to be precise, Cocteau wrote a letter to André Salmon: “Poor Apollinaire is dead. Picasso is too sad to write. He asks me to do it, and to attend to notices in the newspapers. I have no experience of such things—would you be so kind as to take over? Apollinaire did not know he was dying … but both his lungs were affected…. His miraculous energy had enabled him to stay alive.”19
Salmon, who worked for a newspaper, announced the news to the press. The following day, the surviving members of the prewar bande à Picasso flocked to Apollinaire’s apartment to pay their respects. Max Jacob promised to spend the next nights watching and praying over the corpse until the funeral on November 13: “We have spent enough hours laughing together for me to spend a few hours weeping by his side.”20 Another visitor was Irène Lagut, Picasso’s former fiancée and Jacqueline Apollinaire’s sometime girlfriend. In an interview in 1969, Irène described how
a man from the funeral parlor arrived to measure Guillaume for the coffin. “I don’t know,” he said, “there is a dearth of coffins. I don’t know whether we have one for someone that size.” Off he went and came back sometime later to announce, “Yes, it is going to fit him like a glove!” … And then … they had to go to Père Lachaise and pick out a plot for him. The man returned to announce that [Apollinaire] “is going to be fine up there, just as if he were at home.”21
On the morning of Monday the eleventh, the day the Armistice was signed, Paul Léautaud, the writer and editor who had published Apollinaire’s breakthrough poem, La Chanson du mal-aimé, went to take leave of his friend. In his journal he describes the streets around Saint-Germain-des-Prés as filled with joyous crowds still shouting “A bas Guillaume;” also how inside the apartment, the corpse, under a mass of flowers, was beginning to decompose: “I couldn’t look at him,” Léautaud write
s.22 The funeral took place two days later at the church of Saint Thomas Aquinas, where the Apollinaires had been married the previous May. The funeral cortège was accorded full military honors; a company of territorials accompanied the hearse to the grave. The church overflowed with admirers and followers from Apol-linaire’s multifaceted, multitiered life—everyone from Brancusi to Misia to Léger.23 Picasso, who had Olga on his arm, must have dreaded seeing so many figures from his past. For their part, they would have welcomed a glimpse of Olga.
For once, Apollinaire’s flamboyantly awful Polish mother attracted pity rather than ridicule, as she left the cemetery all by herself clutching the recently awarded lieutenant’s kepi that her son had never worn. She would die of the Spanish flu a few months later (March 1919), as would her lover of many years, Jules Weill. Later in the year, her other son, Albert, would be killed in an automobile accident in Mexico, where he worked in a bank. There was talk of a curse on the family. Another odd fact: the day Apollinaire died, his old friend, Eugène Montfort, received a letter from Géry Pieret, the psychopathic con man who had landed Apollinaire and, very nearly, Picasso in jail after involving them in his theft of the Louvre’s Iberian sculptures.24 In his letter to Montfort, Pieret, who claimed, truthfully or not, to be an officer in the Belgian army stationed on the Western Front, said that a raven had suddenly flown into his room through an open window. “I felt I was getting a message from Guillaume Apollinaire. I’m very worried about him and beg you to tell me whether he’s still alive.”25
A Life of Picasso Page 13