Another of Picasso’s imaginative touches occurred toward the end of the ballet, after the lecherous old Corregidor has the Miller arrested, the better to seduce his flirtatious but faithful Wife, danced by Karsavina. When the Corregidor returns by night to take advantage of her, she shoves him off the bridge into the river. Picasso had Woizikowsky, who played the Corregidor, do a quick change into a second coat, sewn with stripes of shiny black American cloth and sequins to suggest the sparkle of water. The ballet then ends with a joyous Goyesque scene: the villagers toss an effigy of the Corregidor in a blanket to celebrate the end of the despotism that his gold-braided tricorne symbolized. Although Tricorne lends itself to political interpretation, Picasso claimed that he took no interest whatsoever in the plot.92 What interested him above all was the ballet’s Spanishness—the Spanishness of his décor, of Falla’s music, and the dances that Felix had devised.
Like Boutique fantasque, Tricorne “took the audience by storm.”93 Unlike Boutique, which cashed in on the fashion for nineteenth-century frou-frou that was erupting in postwar Europe, Tricorne was incontrovertibly modern and it would leave a far more progressive mark on taste than that left by Bakst’s décors. These had proved a fertile source of baddish, modish style as exemplified by the tasseled bolsters and poufs in purple, peacock blue, and orange to be found in many a balletomane’s rooms. Tricorne too would launch a fashion—a fashion for things Iberian: a fringed shawl on the piano, a beribboned guitar on the wall, kiss curls and fans and Gypsy earrings would take the place of Bakst’s barbaric orientalism. As Buckle writes, “London would soon be full of Spanish dancing schools.”94
After the first night, July 22, Diaghilev had arranged a party for the stars and his army of grandees and distinguished fans: among them Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and the T S. Eliots, who would return the following evening with Mary Hutchinson and her husband Jack. Picasso claimed to loathe being lionized or put on exhibit, especially by people with whom he had no common language. Fortunately most of Diaghilev’s friends spoke French.95 However, his ordeal was coming to an end. On July 28, Picasso and Olga, accompanied by Diaghilev and Massine, motored down to Garsington for the visit that Bell had done his best to sabotage. Vanessa and her sister Virginia had both declined; the Aldous Huxleys and a woman friend of the Morrells were the only other guests.96 Picasso remembered the beauty of the house with its great Italianate garden but not half as well as he remembered the bizarrely dressed, six-foot-tall hostess with her prognathous jaw, often to be seen crunching gob-stoppers with her equine teeth.97
The following day, July 29, Bell and Keynes gave their farewell party for Picasso. They had “some forty young or youngish painters, writers and students”98 to sit at “a couple of long tables. At the end of one we put Ansermet, at the end of the other Lyt-ton Strachey (who found Picasso’s work: ‘Futuristic and incomprehensible’) so that their beards might wag in unison. I remember that Aldous Huxley brought with him a youth called Pierre Drieu la Rochelle—that ill-starred and gifted writer.”99 Diaghilev was not invited: too grand. Falla’s father had died, so he had had to return to Spain before the opening night of Tricorne, which he had been scheduled to conduct. Picasso told Duncan Grant that this was “the party he had been looking for ever since he had been in England.”100 This was not mere politesse. Bell was intent on pandering to Picasso.
The company’s last performance of the season took place on July 30. London society was present en masse, so was Bloomsbury To thank Bell, whose enthusiastic article on the ballet had just appeared in the New Republic, Picasso gave him a farewell lunch at the Savoy the following day. Bell described them watching Eddie Marsh, Winston Churchill’s former secretary, who was famously susceptible to male beauty, “hanging around the foyer in the hope of getting a final glimpse of Massine.”101 Afterward they went to the Mansard Gallery in Heal’s furniture store, where Osbert Sitwell and his brother Sacheverell (who had once considered becoming an art dealer) were having an opening of their exhibition of modern French art. This had been organized by Leopold Zborowski, a Parisian Pole, who derived far more profit from being Modigliani’s friend and dealer than from writing poetry. A very mixed bunch of works culled from Paris dealers, this show included a large wicker basket full of sheaves of Modigliani drawings priced at a shilling each.102 Arnold Bennett, the popular novelist who fancied himself a connoisseur, wrote the preface to the catalog and bought a Modigliani and an Utrillo for seventy pounds. Herbert Read, who would replace Roger Fry as Britain’s art guru, served as the Sitwells’ salesman. Picasso seems to have kept tactfully quiet about the merits of the artists represented in this show.
After the opening, Bell took the Picassos for a last day’s shopping. He wrote to Mary Hutchinson that he had “rigged him out as a perfect English gentleman, so far, at any rate, that an English gentleman is a matter of shoes, hats and ties.”103 Since Eugenia had instituted this process two years earlier and had supplied Picasso with suits from the Saville Row tailor Poole and shirts from Jermyn Street haberdashers, this was not altogether true. The same with another of Bell’s claims: Picasso’s final injunction to him—“Write from time to time, and keep me in your thoughts”104—sounds more like Olga.
Clive Bell at home in Charleston, Sussex, 1923. Tate, London.
This letter included one startling piece of news: Picasso had bragged to Bell that Renoir had sent him a letter “in which this vieillard says he will be in Paris on August 3, and that he is coming chiefly to see Picasso and his works. Picasso hopes to make a portrait.”105 In fact, what Picasso had received was a letter dated July 29 from Paul Rosenberg, not Renoir. The dealer said that Renoir was coming to Paris on August 3; and they had talked about Picasso. “It’s too long to write about, but [Renoir] wants to see you. He was impressed by some [of your] things, and all the more shocked by others.”106 Whether the meeting with Renoir materialized, we do not know. Later in the year, Picasso did indeed execute a large, very travaillé drawing of him,107 but from a photograph, not from life. A letter from Rosenberg to Picasso dated August 20 suggests that the meeting may not have taken place: “If you had stayed with us at Vaucresson, you would have lunched tomorrow with Renoir, who is doing me the great honor and great pleasure of being my guest.”108 When an artist he especially admired died, as Renoir did in December, Picasso tended to see himself as an heir to the dead man’s vision. In the next year or two, Renoir would become something of a father figure like Ingres.
Picasso told Penrose he liked London “because of an old romantic dream of an atmosphere, the contrary to Spain and the beggars in top hats,”109 but he had mixed feelings about this trip. As he expected, he found the art scene bereft of energy, but he was enormously stimulated by the rapturous reception of Tricorne. Picasso would have enjoyed it more, he said, if there had been less “Russian despotism” on Diaghilev’s part as well as Olga’s. He needed to escape the atmosphere of intrigue and high drama that was endemic to the Ballets Russes. In Paris he could slip the leash. In London this was more difficult. Picasso would tell Françoise Gilot that he and Olga had failed to get along “almost from the start.”110 However, deny it though he might years later, he would continue to take great pride in his trophy bride. What paled was the primitive Russianness. When Picasso went to have his hair cut, the barber assumed he was Russian. Too much of the ballet had rubbed off on him. That did it, he said.
11
Summer at Saint-Raphaël (The Gueridon)
After more than two months with the ballet in London, Picasso was raring to get back to painting major works that would reestablish him at the forefront of the avant-garde. While he was off with the ballet, his leading rivals—Léger, Braque, Gris, and Matisse—had each had a major show of recent work, and, except for Matisse, each had been perceived as furthering the cause of modernism. Now it was Picasso’s turn. Realizing the need for a riposte, Rosenberg arranged for him to have a sizable exhibition at his gallery in October. To outshine his rivals, the thirty-eight-year-old
Picasso needed to come up with a cohesive group of new work. However, Diaghilev’s demands had left him little time to produce enough for a large show. And so Rosenberg decided to limit the exhibition to works on paper and whatever else the artist came up with over the summer.
Picasso longed to get away to the sea and recover from the turmoil of the London season, but business kept him in the city. Bankers, publishers, and dealers all needed to see him. He also had to arrange for his old friend the Catalan collector Alexandre Riera (a witness to Carles Casagemas’s suicide) to take money to his mother in Barcelona. As Picasso could not stand having a secretary around, he had Olga balance the household books and keep track of sales to dealers.1
Meanwhile, Picasso had every reason to worry that the thing he feared most was a fait accompli: the sale by the French authorities of the stock of his former dealer, Kahnweiler. This would mean that hundreds of the artist’s cubist paintings, papiers collés, drawings, and prints would be thrown on the market and would devalue not only cubism but also his current work. Picasso had consulted lawyers and André Level, one of the few dealers he liked and trusted, only to discover there was nothing he could do.2 His outrage at the prospect of a series of sales surpassed that of Kahnweiler’s other artists—Braque, Léger, Gris, Derain, Vlaminck, Van Dongen— because the dealer had acquired far more of Picasso’s output than anyone else’s. Also he was obsessively protective of his work and felt that the very heart of it was at risk.
On August 6, shortly after returning to Paris, Picasso had a visit from Jean Hugo and his fiancée Valentine Gross—portraitist, balletomane, bluestocking, muse— who had kept the peace when Picasso and Satie were working on Parade and having problems with Cocteau’s pop gimmicks.3 Valentine was famously à la page. She knew everything that was going on in contemporary art, literature, music, and ballet as well as society. She kept Picasso, who relished gossip, abreast of Cocteau’s capers, Satie’s witticisms, and the sayings of the “new Rimbaud,” the barely sixteen-year-old writer Raymond Radiguet, nicknamed “Monsieur Bébé.” Radiguet had been discovered by the writer André Salmon, passed on to Max Jacob, seduced by Picasso’s former fiancée, Irène Lagut, and served up to Cocteau, who would fall obsessively in love with him. Picasso would soon take him under his powerful wing.
Valentine, who would always adore Picasso—eventually to distraction—had her own reason for visiting the rue la Boétie. She and Jean Hugo were to be married the following day in the teeth of his family’s opposition. Satie and Cocteau had agreed to be witnesses, but Valentine wanted Picasso to give their marriage his seal of approval and, maybe, a wedding present. The artist turned out to be in a foul mood, as Jean Hugo, who was on special leave from the army, has described in his memoirs: “[Picasso] opened the door himself. He did not look as if he had been painting; nevertheless one felt one was disturbing him.”4 Hugo remembered the two great Douanier Rousseaus: the Standing Woman in the hall and the Fête populaire in the dining room, which looked out onto a tree-shaded garden. He also remembered being surprised at Picasso’s references to Olga as il; and her references to him as lui. “After a short time, Picasso pulled a key out of his pocket and unlocked a door to the enfilade of studios…. [They] were piled with the usual mixture of treasure and trash, but there was no sign of paint, palette or easel. Where, how and with what did he paint? He showed us some canvases, among them the Three Musicians5 [he mis-remembered] and then he accompanied us to the door and brusquely said ‘good day’ ” Everything had been packed up, as the Picassos were about to leave for the south.
While the Picassos were in London, Eugenia had urged them to return to Biarritz for what was left of the summer, but they wanted to be on their own and finally have a less social honeymoon. Picasso preferred the Mediterranean over the blustery Bay of Biscay. Accommodation was hard to find. The Riviera was still primarily a winter resort. Most attractive hotels in attractive places closed for the summer. They finally found rooms in Saint-Raphaël at the Hôtel Continental et des Bains, a hotel popular with the British, who were famously unafraid of the midday sun. Picasso enjoyed visiting the nearby harbor of Fréjus, where there was a Roman aqueduct and an arena, which served as a setting for Comédie Française productions of classical drama. Later, it was used for bullfights, which Picasso would regularly attend.567 This and other classical remains in the neighborhood evoked the ancient Mediterranean world, whose aura would help to classicize his style.
Eugenia continued to press Picasso to come and stay (“Tell Olga the apartment will be ready in ten days…. there won’t be any Americans nor so many people,” she wrote him on August 20),8 but they refused to budge from Saint-Raphaël. To their surprise, the Picassos had landed in a resort that boasted an Anglican church, a twelve-hole golf course, and an English tea shop. The pattern of this summer would conform pretty much to the pattern of Picasso’s pre-1914 summers. He would head for the south, work intensively in relative seclusion, come up with some new concept, and return to Paris recharged by the sun with a harvest of fresh work and fresh ideas that he would explore and develop in the months to come. The resultant paintings, whether figures or still lifes, would usually be redolent of the woman who had accompanied him.
This summer was different. Except for a few affectionate sketches, Olga makes no overt appearances in her husband’s work. Picasso loved her as a proud Spanish husband would, which was radically different from the way he loved his mistress. Portraying her emerging from her own vagina (Eva’s fate) or in the guise of his own erect penis (his next love, Marie-Thérèse’s fate) would have been unthinkable. For the first five years of their marriage Olga never appears in any of his innovative masterpieces but only in representational portraits, from which the affection gradually seeps— which is why there is never any mention of an époque Olga. It was only later when her physical and psychological problems took their toll on the marriage that she would play a dominant role in Picasso’s revolutionary imagery. These problems called for exorcism. This would take the form of images seething with ridicule and rage, cruelty and resentment.9
Picasso’s traditional attitude toward the bride who loved to sit for him made it very difficult to portray her in any but a traditionally representative way. To reconcile conventional love for Olga with his pursuit of modernity, he turned to the subject of the anthropomorphic gueridon, which had preoccupied him the previous winter, and applied it to Olga instead of himself. While the Smith College gueridon had been about the artist and his work, the ones done at Saint-Raphaël are about Olga and are intrinsically feminine, honeymoon images that radiate with love and sunny freshness and no hints of Picassian darkness.
This second honeymoon was more of a success than the first, despite or maybe because the newlyweds were cooped up together in a smallish room,10 which seems also to have served as a studio. Their room looked out over decorative balcony railings and the pagodalike top of the town’s bandstand to the beach, in those days relatively free of bathers, and “the sea of blue ink” which Level had promised when he recommended the place.11 Sketches of the room done soon after their arrival depict its contents: an armoire à glace, a coat rack, a fringed chaise longue, a radiator, a pair of portes-fenêtres framing the view, and, to Picasso’s delight, a little dressing table with a mirror on top, its shelves carved like daisies. Its kitschiness inspired a detailed drawing.12
Left: Picasso. Still Life in Front of a Window, 1919. Pencil and watercolor on paper, 32 x 22 cm. Private collection. Right: Picasso. Musical Instruments and Score in Front of an Open Window, 1919. Pencil and watercolor on paper. Private collection.
In fact, as sketches reveal, there was no gueridon in front of the Picassos’ balcony window, only a four-legged table elsewhere in the room, which rings an occasional change on the gueridon theme. Only the open window with its curtains sometimes looped back to form a proscenium arch framing the backcloth of sea, sky, and railings are for real.13 The wasp-waisted gueridon with its splayed legs and humanoid array of familiar objec
ts—fruit dish, guitar, sheet music, and tablecloth—is entirely conceptual. It is also strikingly theatrical. Picasso, the stage designer, has set the scene to perfection. His gueridon has the air of a spotlit star alone on a stage. One feels that music from the bandstand below might set the gueridon in motion.
When he was in London, Picasso had turned a deaf ear to Rosenberg’s suggestion that he follow Monet’s example and paint successive views of the same motif in different lights. In Saint-Raphaël, he did something of the sort with his gueridons. Sometimes it is seen against the sunlit sky; sometimes the source of light seems to come from within the room; and sometimes cubist flanges of the still life rear up like a spinnaker, as if to waft the outdoors indoors.14 Six months later, Rosenberg would send Picasso a postcard, apropos the gueridons, prophesying that “1919–1920 will turn out to be the year of the windows! Windows by Picasso, a window by Matisse.”15 “The year of the gueridon” would have been more to the point.
Picasso. Sleeping Peasants, 1919. Gouache, watercolor, and pencil on paper, 31 x 48 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
A Life of Picasso Page 18