A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Léonce Rosenberg, Paul’s elder brother, who had kidded himself that he was Picasso’s dealer, was most displeased with this arrangement. He felt he had a far greater understanding of modern art than his brother. He had acquired his first Picasso in 1906 and, shortly before the war, had bought fifteen cubist paintings from Kahnweiler (indeed, he still owed 12,000 francs on them). He was also proud of having helped Picasso out, in November 1915, by agreeing to pay 8,500 francs for his two most powerful wartime paintings—the great Harlequin and the even greater Seated Man.

  Picasso. Portrait of Paul Rosenberg, 1918-19. Pencil on paper, 35.6 x 25.4 cm. Private collection.

  Thanks to a cushy job in the army, Léonce was able to keep his gallery functioning throughout the war and was convinced that he alone was qualified to replace the fugitive Kahnweiler, and that “the destiny of the cubist movement was in [his] hands.” Léonce had even boasted to Picasso that he was about to “undertake an extremely energetic and vast action in all of Europe and America” to promote cubism. “Together, we will be invincible. You will be the creator, I will be the action”—far more effective than “the boche dealer” (Kahnweiler). Even more offensive coming from a German Jew with a background similar to his own was Léonce’s accusation that Kahnweiler had contaminated Picasso’s work “with a vague odor of sausage and sauerkraut.”18 Since Léonce was perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy, his claim to have subsidized the entire cubist movement with continuous purchases did not make for credence.19

  Léonce further irritated Picasso by railing against the insidious influence that the Ballets Russes and the reactionary Cocteau were supposedly exerting on him and other modernist artists.20 In fact, Picasso enjoyed working for the ballet and no longer wanted to be perceived primarily as a cubist. And he was damned if he was going to be criticized by an uppity dealer whom Apollinaire had denounced as someone who reduced “chefs-d’ ceuvre… to the level of hors d’ceuvres.”21 Despite fine works by Gris and Léger, Léonce’s stock was a mixed bag of “puzzles,” as the dealer Réné Gimpel said: “cubes of canvases, canvases of cubes, marble cubes, cubic marbles, cubes of color, cubic colorings, incomprehensible cubes and the incomprehensible divided cubically ”22 Despite a passionate belief in modernism and a goodish eye for it, Léonce would never have the intellectual or financial acumen to replace Kahnweiler, or be much more than a costly embarrassment to his brother Paul.

  The Rosenbergs’ most feared rival was the new boy on the block, Paul Guillaume. By 1919, Guillaume, who started life as a garagiste, had become a major dealer—an achievement that his show of Picasso and Matisse in 1918 had done much to establish. Like many another short, self-made man with an overblown ego and a murderously ambitious wife,23 Guillaume had contracted a severe case of folie de grandeur. He had taken to driving around with an entourage of assistants in two Hispano-Suizas, the chauffeurs “dressed up like generals in the Tsar’s imperial guard.”24 Picasso, who had once thought well of Guillaume, had no further time for this pretentious poseur, who boasted of having a better eye than any museum director in France. Picasso preferred dealers who made no bones about being in trade. He approved of Rosenberg’s claim to find no beauty in a canvas unless it sold.25

  By the last months of the war, the Ballets Russes was on the verge of bankruptcy; “Our small savings [had] dwindled to nothing,” Grigoriev, the company’s regisseur, relates.26 But once again, Diaghilev managed to save the day. He arranged a booking in London—not at the prestigious Drury Lane Theatre, where they had appeared in 1914, but at a music hall, the Coliseum—where they were expected to give “two performances daily, with a weekly change of programme.”27 Despite their reduced circumstances, the company opened their London season on September 5, 1918, with Cléopdtre, and new sets by Delaunay. Its success persuaded Diaghilev to make London his base—at least for a year or so—and he settled into the Savoy Hotel with Massine, his valet Beppe, and Beppe’s wife, who was in charge of the company’s costumes. Diaghilev and his company endeared themselves to the British by recruiting local girls, who were given Russian names—Isomina, Grantzieva, Muravieva28—the better to replace defecting Russian dancers. At last Massine could set to work with Felix Fernández on Tricorne.

  Toward the end of March 1919, Diaghilev dispatched Massine to Paris to discuss the décor for another new ballet, Boutique fantasque, with the recently demobilized Derain, and also talk to Picasso about Tricorne. Two weeks later, Diaghilev himself came over from London to negotiate terms. On April 15, he sent Picasso a pneuma-tique: “I will come and see you tonight and spend the evening with you.”29 They came to the following arrangement:

  I want you to be responsible for the décor of the Income ballet… for my Ballets Russes production. You will do the designs for the drop-curtain, sets, and costumes and accessories that the said ballet requires and also supervise the execution of these curtains and costumes, and you yourself will paint sections of the décor if you think this necessary. For these services I will pay you ten thousand francs. You will make yourself available in London from May 20, 1919, until the ballet’s first night. … It is understood that the sketches will remain your property, and the curtain, set, and costumes will become my property. Your devoted, Serge de Diaghilev30

  Despite detailed discussions with Diaghilev and Massine in Spain in 1917, Picasso did not start work on Tricorne until the contract was signed. He began with the set, as Diaghilev informed Falla on May 10: “Picasso fait une merveille de mise-en-scène.”31 At one point Picasso suggested having the dancers wear modern dress,32 but Diaghilev stipulated eighteenth-century Andalusian style. Knowing nothing about historical costume, Picasso asked Max Jacob to do the research.33

  The Picassos’ departure for London was delayed by visa problems, which Diaghilev took up with the British authorities.34 On May 1535 the impresario sent a telegram confirming that their visas had come through, but it would be another ten days before they arrived in London—the first time for Picasso, though not for Olga.

  Picasso and Olga in front of a Ballets Russes poster featuring Picasso’s design for the Chinese Conjuror’s Parade costume, Alhambra Theatre, London, 1919. Popperfoto.

  10

  London and Tricorne (1919)

  Shortly before the Picassos arrived in London, tragedy struck at the heart of Tricorne: tragedy all too reminiscent of Nijinsky’s collapse a year before. The victim was Felix Fernández García, the acutely nervous little Gypsy whose flamenco virtuosity had so thrilled Picasso, Diaghilev, and Massine two years before. Early in May, Felix (known by his friends back in Spain as el loco) had suffered an attack of dementia, brought on, it was said, by Massine’s callous exploitation of his phenomenal skills.1

  To understand how this came about, let us return to Barcelona in the summer of 1917, when Diaghilev, Massine, Falla, and Felix took leave of Picasso and Olga and embarked on an extensive tour of Spain in search of raw material for Tricorne. The tour was a triumph. After a visit to the Generalife in Granada, Falla—who believed that a composer should “draw sounds and rhythm from natural, living sources,” as opposed to “folkloristic documents”—had stopped to listen to a blind man playing a guitar.2 The composer had asked him to “repeat the mournful little tune…. [He] stood with his eyes closed humming it through and then methodically writing it down in his notebook.”3 The melody would provide the theme for the sevillana in the second part of Tricorne, just as a tune to which Felix had danced in Madrid would inspire the famous farruca. Since he was well known in the Gypsy world, Felix had no problem bringing Diaghilev and his associates together with performers of flamenco and cante jondo, so that Falla and Massine could gather material for their jotas, fandangos, and boleros. “Even the cripples danced,” Massine said.4

  Massine, who was almost as relentless as Picasso in his pursuit of the sacred fire, watched these performances with manic attention, jotting everything down in a notebook that he kept in his pocket. A slight defect in the shape of Massine’s legs ruled out a caree
r as a danseur noble, so it was all the more important for him to perfect himself as a character dancer and wear trousers instead of having to pad out the calves of his white silk tights with strips of ermine.5 All the more need for him to master the dynamics and minutest details of Felix’s technique, from the arch of an eyebrow to the clickety-clack of the heel beats.

  In the summer of 1918, the entire company had embarked on an even more ambitious tour of Spain than the last one. Felix continued to teach the dancers, but “he had a quick temper and screamed at [them] when they could not do a step.”67 Sokolova describes Diaghilev taking a chosen few of them in carriages to a café in an orange grove outside Seville, where Gypsies performed in “pavilions strangely built between [the] trees.” After a number of ever more dazzling performances, a spectacular-looking youth proceeded to stun them—Diaghilev especially—with his bravura. Whereupon, challenged by the applause for this young man, Felix

  leaped into the middle of the room and danced as he had never done before. He tapped his heels faster and faster in amazing rhythm, and played on his fingers as though they were castanets. He danced on his knees and leaped into the air and crashed his body down on the side of his thighs, turned over and jumped up with such speed that it was unbelievable that the human body could stand such a strain without injury. The gipsies were themselves amazed and encouraged him with all they had to give. [Felix] … was exhausted, but would not stop. We called “Basta, basta” but it was not until the gipsies surrounded him that he would give in. After that evening, Diaghilev [realized] he would never find a dancer who could do better than Felix.8

  A few months later, when the company finally made it to London, Felix continued to train Massine as well as other leading dancers for Tricorne. Since Falla was slow to finish the score, Diaghilev decided to put the Spanish ballet on hold. Massine switched to another project, his Nutcracker-like ballet, Boutique fantasque, with music by Rossini, arranged by Respighi. Diaghilev brought in Derain to replace Bakst and to do the décor. Ironically, Bakst’s supposedly démodé décors would have a triumphant comeback while Derain’s have been forgotten.

  As soon as he finished with Boutique, Massine switched to Tricorne, whereupon Felix’s worst fears were confirmed. The star role of the Miller—the reward, Felix had naively assumed, for sharing the secrets of his métier with a “treacherous Russian interloper”—was to be Massine’s, not his. As Felix’s technique was entirely a matter of improvisation, he was unable to follow the dictates of a choreographer, so there were no other roles for him in the company’s repertory.9 As a sop, Massine tried him out for the tarantella in Boutique fantasque. When he proved incapable of performing it, Massine bought him a metronome, but this made matters much worse. In despair at being done out of the Miller’s role, Felix went mad. He took to timing his actions to the ticking of Massine’s metronome. Walking down the street, he would adjust his pace to different speeds; he would even masticate his food to the gadget’s relentless tick-tock tempo. At a rehearsal of Boutique, Diaghilev, who had dismissed Felix’s behavior “as a pose to keep himself in the limelight,”10 was appalled when the dancer suddenly put on a hat, made faces at him, and refused to be separated from a gigantic sandwich.

  After Tamara Karsavina, the company’s greatest star, who had difficulty escaping from Russia, joined them in London, Diaghilev insisted that she assume the role of the Miller’s Wife. So that she, too, could give her performance an authentic Spanish edge, he took over the Savoy’s ballroom late one night and had Felix demonstrate his powers. “I followed [Felix] with open-mouthed admiration,” Karsavina wrote,

  breathless at his outward reserve when I could feel the impetuous, half-savage instincts within him. He needed no begging, and gave us dance after dance. In between, he sang the guttural songs of his country accompanying himself on the guitar. I was completely carried away, forgetful that I was sitting in an ornate ballroom ’til I noticed a whispering group of waiters. It was late, very late. The performance must cease or they would be compelled to put the lights out. They went over to Felix too, but he took not the slightest notice. He was far away. … A warning flicker and the lights went out. Felix continued like one possessed. The rhythm of his steps—now staccato, now languorous, now almost a whisper, and then again seeming to fill the large room with thunder—made this unseen performance all the more dramatic. We listened to the dancing enthralled.11

  This turned out to be Felix’s last performance. The next night (May 13), when he should have been onstage as an extra, “he was discovered in his dressing room, his face spotted with a weird mixture of greasepaints, grimacing at himself in the mirror. … By the time the ballet was over Felix was nowhere to be found.”12 Later that night, the police caught up with him: he was dancing as if possessed on the altar steps of Saint-Martin’s-in-the-Fields, James Gibbs’s great theater of a church in Trafalgar Square. Felix was certified insane and admitted to an asylum, Long Grove Hospital at Epsom. He was twenty-two. Sokolova, the original choice for the Miller’s Wife, said that “those of us who had known him best visited him at various times. … he remembered me and talked to me a little. [Sokolova spoke Spanish.] But he had become like a small child in mentality, and never stopped shaking his head.”13 As she wrote in her memoir: “Felix’s reason was the price fate demanded for the creation of a masterpiece—a masterpiece for which Massine would take total credit.”14

  A few months later, when Matisse came to London to work on Le Chant du rossi-gnol, Massine and Diaghilev took him to visit Felix at Epsom.15 They would surely have arranged a similar outing for Picasso when he arrived; unless his superstitious fear of insanity might have decided him against seeing a fellow Andalusian—in his own way a genius—in an alien madhouse. While Picasso was in London, he did a fine drawing of a doleful Felix dancing with Vera Nemchinova.16 He must have worked from a photograph: by the time he arrived, the poor man was incarcerated.

  Picasso. Vera Nemchinova and Felix Rehearsing “Tricorne,” 1919. Pencil on paper, 31.5 x 24.5 cm. Whereabouts unknown.

  When Tricorne was eventually performed in Madrid—with Leon Woizikowsky replacing Massine, who had by then broken with Diaghi-lev—the impresario was terrified that the story of Massine’s treatment of Felix might leak out and cause a scandal that would antagonize the Gypsy community And so he summoned the company to a meeting on the stage and, brandishing a telegram, announced that Felix had died. Sokolova did not discover that this was a lie until she went backstage, some seventeen years later, to congratulate Massine on his new ballet to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony He told her that a few days earlier he had visited Felix in his suburban madhouse. Felix was physically as fit as ever, but much fatter and still insane. Sokolova could “only think that Diaghilev must have had private reasons for having made that announcement.”17 Felix died at Epsom in 1941.18

  There are two postscripts to this story. In 1947, when Massine was in London, performing what else but Tricorne, he agreed to star in Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger’s film The Red Shoes, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story about a dancer possessed by an urge to dance herself to death. Massine plays the choreographer, as it were himself, as well as the Carabosse-like cobbler in The Red Shoes ballet, whose scenario mirrors the plot of the film. Anton Walbrook is the jealous impresario, a role clearly based on Diaghilev, while Moira Shearer, who had starred with Massine in Tricorne, plays the doomed dancer, a surrogate for Felix. So striking are the parallels between the film and the macabre events of May 1919, it is difficult to decide whether Massine intended to exploit or exorcise his Svengali-like treatment of Felix. During the filming, Shearer confessed to being “tantalized” by Massine’s air of mystery—tantalized by the sense that there was a “hint of a deeper, more cryptic, and quite unreachable level to him.”19 Margot Fonteyn, who also danced the Miller’s Wife opposite Massine, said that his “marvelous eyes … fascinated yet also had the effect of a closed door. … I felt at a great distance from him.”20

  The
second postscript: The Red Shoes was so successful that Sir Arthur Rank, the British mogul who produced it, summoned Nijinsky, who was supposedly recovering a measure of sanity, to work on a film based on his own life. To stimulate Nijinsky’s interest in the project, Rank arranged a special viewing of The Red Shoes. Nijinsky was so revolted by the film that he lapsed back into insanity. When Eric Wollheim, who had been Diaghilev’s London agent, took his son, the philosopher Richard Wollheim, to visit Nijinsky in the suburban house Rank had rented for him, they found the dancer pacing the garden in impenetrable silence. However, as Joan Aco-cella points out, as well as being a romantic cliché, the theme of the possessed dancer has its roots in the essentially Dionysiac nature of the dance.21

  The news that Picasso was coming to work in London gladdened the heart of Eugenia Errázuriz. She had given up her apartment in Paris and rented a house in Chelsea at 27 Saint Leonard’s Terrace, where she insisted the artist and his wife should stay. She sent Picasso a checkered overcoat—she would also have a suit made for him—and arranged for Diaghilev and Massine, who were off to Paris with Lord Berners, to take Olga the largest possible bottle of her favorite eau de toilette, Pen-haligon’s Hammam. Far from wanting to move in with her elderly rival, Olga insisted on staying close to the dancers—in particular Lopokova, who had taken the place of her no longer accessible family.