The more Picasso worked with Diaghilev, the more convinced he became that the impresario’s cult of the new was a showman’s gimmick rather than a matter of modernist conviction. This emerges in a very hurt letter—from Diaghilev written a day or two before the first night of Boutique on June 5—that he had sent to Picasso’s room. “Cher, cher Pica, You know how fond of you I am. … I am writing to you in all frankness. Massine has given me a distressing lecture on the decadence of my taste and activities, based on a reflection you and Derain made to the effect that Diaghilev serves up the same stuff as the Folies Bergère, except that they do it better.”59 This critique had apparently been made in Massine’s presence during an argument over a controversial prop for Boutique. Diaghilev, who had reservations about Derain’s set (the toy shop reminded him of “a restaurant overlooking the Lake of Geneva”),60 had wanted to add “some wretched green lamps.” He would not have minded, Diaghilev wrote, if Picasso and Derain had told him of their reservations in person, but it was galling to hear them from someone he regarded as his pupil. Massine, it appears, was beginning to question his mentor’s precepts and resent his yoke— much as Nijinsky had done. Diaghilev ended by saying that he would not attend any more rehearsals. Massine would take over: he “will execute your orders and have a better understanding of what Derain desires. … I would be happy to lunch with you and Massine, as always, at the Savoy at 1:30. Whether Picasso went we do not know. Massine, who was stumped for a finale to Boutique, had every reason to be delighted with Derain: he had come up with an extremely apt solution: “the dolls should rebel and attack the shopkeeper and his customers”616263—an ingenious way of expressing his and Picasso’s annoyance with Diaghilev.
Massine as the Miller in Tricorne, 1919. Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris.
On July 10, the company would once again become the focus of a scandal. This time the spotlight was on Lopokova: a great favorite with the British public on account of her mischievous wit as well as her dazzling virtuosity. Since Picasso fancied Lopokova, he was careful not to have Olga around whenever he did a drawing of this enchanting dancer.64 The newspaper headlines—FAMOUS BALLERINA VANISHES—overplayed the story. Lopokova had simply left her nice, intelligent, but not especially alluring husband, Randolfo Barocchi, Diaghilev’s business manager, and eloped with a Russian officer, albeit no farther than St. John’s Wood. The affair did not last long and she rejoined the company, only to leave it once again when Massine quit. In 1923 Lopokova would surprise her friends by going to live with Duncan Grant’s former lover, Maynard Keynes, the brilliant young economist who had recently walked out of the Paris peace conference. She would marry him two years later. When Picasso and Lopokova met in London in 1950, he promised to send her a drawing of her dancing the cancan with Massine in Boutique fantasque. Instead he sent her a photograph inscribed “en attendant l’original” Apparently she never received the drawing.65
In the past, Picasso’s contacts with the English had been limited to the coterie known as Bloomsbury. Before the war, Clive Bell, his wife, the painter, Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister), and Duncan Grant had visited Picasso’s studio on rue Schoelcher. Grant had given him some wallpaper samples for his papiers collés; and Vanessa had bought a small cubist painting from Kahnweiler for twenty dollars. Picasso had already met Bloomsbury’s guru, Roger Fry, on his trip to Paris in 1910 to organize his breakthrough exhibit of modern art in London. However, he had never really warmed to Fry—for all his harum-scarum charm, he was too earnest a prose-lytizer for Picasso’s taste. Bloomsbury’s leading aesthete came from a prominent Quaker family and had been raised in the bosom of William Morris’s arts and crafts movement—a movement that had inspired him to set up in 1911 a modern equivalent of it. Fry’s Omega workshop was at the very heart of Bloomsbury, but for all its worthy intentions, Omega never prospered. The more gifted adherents broke away and founded a more progressive movement, vorticism. Fry and his cohorts, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, battled bravely on, but their artifacts were painfully artsy-craftsy and all too evidently homemade. By 1919 the workshop was on its last legs, but Fry insisted on taking Picasso to the showroom, where everything was on sale. Fry’s biographer attributes Picasso’s evident distaste for Omega’s wares to his belief that “all English art was either pretty or sentimental [and he] was only moved to praise by the pottery.”66
The dinner Fry gave for Picasso and Derain, early in June, at his new house on Dalmeny Avenue in North London, was no less of an ordeal. “The three men relaxed in the conservatory after dinner and Picasso told amusing stories about tortoises and cacti. Afterwards they accompanied Fry upstairs to his studio, but what Picasso said about his paintings has not been recorded.”67 Fry’s dry pastiches of Cézanne and Derain would have been of far less interest to Picasso than a glimpse of his own painting of an almost abstract cubist head, which Fry had had the courage to buy virtually off the easel in 1913.
Another old acquaintance who was intent on inveigling Picasso into her clutches, as she had formerly inveigled Nijinsky, was Lady Ottoline Morrell. This ramshackle grandee (daughter of the Duke of Portland) had recently cut her hair short and dyed it bright orange. It made for an eye-catching effect combined with her preposterously plumed hats and strings of Marie Antoinette’s pearls that she habitually wore. Lady Ottoline—“Ott,” to her Bohemian friends—was not really a “Bloomsberry,” as members of the coterie were known. However, she had bedded and otherwise entertained several of them and had bought their work—not that this had earned her their gratitude or affection. On the contrary, most of them enjoyed castigating her: Virginia Woolf referred to her as Lady Omega Muddle. Bell was the beastliest. Before the war, Ott had been taken by Gertrude Stein to Picasso’s studio, where she bought some engravings and drawings. To Bell’s dismay, Ott was now hell bent on returning the favor by giving a dinner for the Picassos in London and having them for a weekend in her seventeenth-century manor house, Garsington, near Oxford— a house so magical that it served as an irresistible target for Bell’s envious sneers.
Bell set out to foil Ott’s plans. Weeks before Picasso arrived in London, he and Fry and Harry Norton—a Cambridge mathematician who owned a cubist Picasso686970— had organized a supper party for him and the ballet, but had given up when the artist postponed his visit. When Ott discovered that neither she nor her entourage of painters and writers had been on Bell’s guest list, she lashed out at him, and he lashed back. “Apparently one can neither give a dinner-party nor not give a dinner-party, without inviting the old whore and her trembittage. ”71 “Picasso loathes parties,” Bell added, but this did not deter him and his roommate, Maynard Keynes, from rescheduling the Picasso supper party. It would now take place on July 29. Once again, Bell failed to invite Ott. Worse, he dissuaded the Picassos from attending the weekend party she had arranged in their honor. It was a shame because Lady Ottoline had invited Mark Gertler,72 a rather more interesting painter than any of the Bloomsbury Group. The poor woman had to settle for having the Picassos as well as Diaghilev and Massine down to lunch at Garsington, a house mordantly commemorated in Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow. At another dinner for Picasso given by Flora Wertheimer, the wife of Sargent’s art dealer, she got along famously with him. What, one wonders, did Picasso make of the twelve full-length Sargent portraits of the family members that covered the Wertheimers’ walls.
Like Ott, Bell had met Picasso through Gertrude Stein, shortly before publishing Art (1914), the book that launched his theory of “significant form.” Art, which purported to explain modernism to a “public bewildered by competing notions of the avant-garde,” was a best seller and would continue, for the next twenty years or so, to give its readers the illusion that they knew what modern art was all about.73 As Bell admitted in his preface, many of his ideas, such as the supremacy of Cézanne, had been culled from his mentor, Roger Fry. However, Bell was a more eloquent popularizer. On the strength of this book and some nicely phrased articles, Bell had come to
be perceived as England’s most eloquent supporter of modern art, as personified by Matisse, Derain, and Picasso, but only so long as their work was easy for him to understand.
A measure of Bell’s limitations is his obsessive promotion of Duncan Grant as “the long looked-for British genius.”74 Grant was famously lovable, but his skills were no match for his modernist aspirations. D. H. Lawrence made this brutally clear when he asked Ott to stop Grant making “silly experiments in the futurist line.”75 Though a lifelong lover of men, Grant lived mostly with Bell’s wife, Vanessa, a marginally more interesting painter, who had recently borne him a child, Angelica.76 As a result of these involvements, Bell’s sponsorship of Grant was much resented by other British artists. They felt that Bell was denying them access to Picasso and Derain, who were supposedly bringing modernism, courtesy of Diaghilev, to their shores. Picasso was aware of their feelings. “Why,” he asked Wyndham Lewis, “when I ask about modern artists in England, am I always told about Duncan Grant?”77 Picasso was being disingenuous; he knew the reason.
Picasso’s adoption of Bell as his London cicerone had nothing to do with Bell’s theory of “significant form,” and everything to do with his promotional skills and the fact that he corresponded to Picasso’s somewhat Pickwickian notion of an English gentleman—affable, rubicund, merry. It also helped that Bell was a bit of a toady, as his letters to Picasso bear out. The son of a rich colliery owner turned country gentleman, Bell was better off than most of Bloomsbury At Cambridge he had “seemed to live, half with the rich sporting set and half with the intellectuals.”78 By the time he came into Picasso’s life, Bell was perceived—approvingly by the smart set, disapprovingly by Bloomsbury—as worldly and unserious, a bon vivant with a taste for wine and women, who spoke excellent French and enjoyed modern art and literature, so long as it was not too modern (dada and surrealism shocked him). Bell’s readiness to please may have been a major flaw in the eyes of his sister-in-law, Virginia Woolf, but it commended him to Picasso and reassured Olga as to his suitability as a friend, just as, forty years later, it would commend him all over again to the artist and his second wife, Jacqueline.
After an evening that, as Bell wrote, left Picasso and Derain “very much inclined to like me,”79 he gave a lunch for the two artists at the house in Bloomsbury he shared with Keynes. He hired a large Daimler and arranged outings for the Picassos: a tour of East End pubs (without Olga); an expedition to West End shops (with Olga); visits to Bloomsbury’s livelier parties. At one of these David Garnett noticed Picasso talking to Douglas Fairbanks Sr. He also enjoyed the spectacle of Lytton Strachey and Mary Pickford introducing themselves to each other.80 Bell was seldom if ever accompanied by Vanessa, who was busy nursing Grant’s baby. He was more often in the company of his principal mistress, Mary Saint-John Hutchinson, the wife of a popular literary barrister who was a distant cousin of two quintessential Bloomsbury families, the Stracheys and the Grants. Vanessa had recently painted an unflattering portrait of her husband’s mistress, in which she evokes a look of calculation rather than Mary’s celebrated warmth and wit and charm. Ten years later, Vanessa’s sister Virginia would publish a rather more incisive portrait of Mary as “the febrile socialite Jinny” in The Waves81 Since both of them were married, and therefore not always available to each other, Bell wrote Mary a great many gossipy letters chronicling his meetings with Picasso and other Parisian celebrities. There was much talk of Picasso doing a drawing of Mary, whom he found “sympathique.” This never materialized, but no matter: Mary persuaded her next lover, the handsome French Byzan-tinist, Georges Duthuit, to persuade his father-in-law, Matisse, to draw her. Matisse took to Mary. According to her grandson, Lord Rothschild, every year on her birthday, Matisse would send her a carefully packed lily, its petals enhanced with dabs of color.82
Picasso’s social life in London was by no means confined to Bloomsbury. He saw a lot of Eugenia, who had stayed on in London to help her much loved relative, Tony Gandarillas, a more or less permanent attaché at the Chilean embassy, to sort out the mess of his marriage to her richissime niece, Juana Edwards. Besides being homosexual, Gandarillas was a confirmed opium addict. Such was his charm that no one seemed to mind. From time to time, he would slip away to Paris to hang out with his opiomane friends Prince Yusupoff (Rasputin’s killer) and, later, Cocteau. Picasso, who had met Gandarillas through Eugenia, was relieved to find someone in London who spoke Spanish and knew a bit about modern painting (Eugenia would give Gandarillas the Majolie still life that the artist had painted on the wall of his house at Sorgues in 1913).83 This diverting little dandy would take Picasso, some time in June, to see Augustus John, the flamboyant Bohemian painter whom Picasso had known in his Montmartre days. In 1907 John had declared Picasso to be “a wonder,” and they had visited each other’s studios.84 However, John’s inability to stomach cubism had curtailed their friendship. Picasso was intrigued by the Welshman’s obsession with Gypsies: “Auguste est noble comme les animaux,” he told Bell, and to someone else he described him as “the best bad painter in Britain.”85
Gandarillas made the mistake of introducing Bell to his unfortunate wife, Juana. She would fall for him and he would use her as his mistress when Mary was off with someone else (Aldoux Huxley’s wife, Maria, for one). Although Bell complained that Juana was too silly to converse with, their affair dragged on until 1927. Meanwhile her husband had embarked on an affair with Christopher Wood: the only young English artist of any real merit to have gone to Paris and become a friend of Cocteau, Picasso, and Braque. Gandarillas got “Kit” Wood hooked on drugs, and would be blamed when Wood threw himself under a train in 1930. Five years later, Gandarillas would again be blamed—unjustly—when his next lover, the surrealist poet Réné Crevel, committed suicide.
A social rather than an intellectual snob, Diaghilev felt ill at ease in the dauntingly high-minded milieu of Bloomsbury At one of the few Bloomsbury parties he did attend, the hosts had been at pains to rustle up a “princess” in the unlikely form of Dorothy Brett (the artistic sister-in-law of the “White Rajah of Sarawak”) to make him feel at home. Ever since the Ballets Russes’ first appearance in London in 1911, Diaghilev had courted the more affluent and cultivated members of London society for their social cachet as well as their potential as backers. Now that the war was over, he saw to it that powerful hostesses such as Lady Ripon, Lady Cunard, Baroness d’Erlanger, and the sharp-tongued Daisy Fellowes vied with each other, as they had before the war, in giving parties for the stars of his company. Night after night, Picasso had to don his brand new dinner jacket and escort Olga, now described by her husband as “ma femme légitime,” to supper parties, which he claimed truthfully or not bored him as much as they stimulated her. As Bell reported, “Madame Picasso has no notion of joining in the rough and tumble of even upper Bohemia.” Olga may not even have attended the jolly party to celebrate the completion of Tricorne that the Polunins gave for Picasso in a rope makers’ loft. “Upper Bohemia” was well represented at this event—among them the society portraitist Oswald Birley, his beautiful wife Rhoda, and young Florrie Grenfell, later Lady Saint-Just, a passionate balletomane whose lover, Leon Woizikowsky, one of Diaghilev’s stars, would father the next Lord Saint-Just. Picasso later joked that in one respect Olga’s disdain was a godsend. It allowed for assignations on the side.8687
Belated peace celebrations (the Treaty of Versailles had been signed on July 1) postponed the first night of Tricorne, from July 18 to July 22, only eight days before the company’s season ended. Cyril W. Beaumont, the learned British ballet critic, described the scene backstage at the Alhambra: the low-ceilinged storage room for props, which served as a green room (with bouquets for the ballerinas laid out on a large table). This was Diaghilev’s “headquarters in the field.”88 It was here that the impresario would discuss such forthcoming productions as Pulcinella with Picasso, or go over scores with his conductors, Ansermet and Defosse, or confer with his troubleshooter, Edwin Evans. Diaghilev
had taken on this popular and perceptive music critic, who described himself as the company’s “buffer state,” on his first visit to London and would use him for press relations and such problems as keeping disgruntled dancers from disturbing him. Picasso liked Evans enough to do a little drawing of him.
On the opening night of Tricorne, Beaumont watched the stage being set and Picasso strolling “into view, accompanied by a stage-hand carrying a tray of greasepaints”:
One of the dancers, dressed as an Alguacil, came on the stage, walked towards Picasso, bowed and waited. Picasso made a selection of grease-paints and decorated the dancer’s chin with a mass of blue, green and yellow dots, which certainly gave him an appropriately sinister appearance. As he went off, another Alguacil appeared, and I well remember his startled look on seeing his fellow artiste.89
Just as he had painted arabesques onto Lopokova’s Acrobat costume before the curtain went up on Parade, Picasso used the faces of the Tricorne dancers as his canvases. In preliminary studies for the makeup, he tried out tribal markings as well as the pointillism he had been using in his recent paintings. Unlike Derain, who gave each of the dancers a diagram indicating how to apply their makeup, Picasso preferred a more hands-on approach.
And then, as Beaumont describes, the ballet began, “with a fanfare of trumpets followed by the slow thunderous beats of a big drum. But, before the curtain rose, there was a volley of enthusiastically shouted olés, immediately followed by a burst of heel-tapping and the dry rhythmic clicking of lustily shaken castanets.”90 These sounds, which had been added at Picasso’s insistence, displeased Margot Asquith, the outspoken wife of the ex-prime minister. She took it upon herself to send a note to Diaghilev the following morning: “… the cries were feeble and not at all spontaneous they [should] be sharp & all together. The castagnettes [sic] were not quite in time…. Can you Déjeuner today 1:30? Or tomorrow jeudi 24th and bring Mme. Bruce [Karsavina]. Please do.”91
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