By the end of the summer, Picasso had executed some twenty-five Gueridons in watercolor, gouache, and pencil. He had also experimented in a more traditional style. Among the summer’s more surprising images are some highly finished and highly colored fête champêtre scenes of amorous haymakers enjoying an alfresco nap. These appear to have been inspired by Boucher’s and Fragonard’s genre scenes that he knew from Rosenberg’s stock. One of Picasso’s drawings depicts a voluptuous young woman, rapturously offering her breast to a baby as if to a lover— a wish-fulfilling maternite}1617 Picasso also returned to landscape—farm buildings in a hayfield—something he had not done for ten years or so. Designing for the ballet had left a theatrical stamp on his perception of nature. To the right, farm buildings constitute “wings” (as in Tricome); to the left, two trees cry out to be scaled up, hung on gauze, and used as a repoussoir to imply recession without recourse to perspective. Zervos’s claim that this painting was executed, or at least finished, after Picasso’s return to Paris,18 would explain its look of contrivance. By comparison the paintings of the very same Esterel mountains that he executed forty years later have a van Gogh-like ferocity.
Picasso. Landscape at Saint-Raphaël, 1919. Oil on canvas, 49.4 x 64.4 cm. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, Tokyo.
That this stylized landscape was done at Rosenberg’s behest would explain the dealer’s ecstatic outburst a year later: “the most unbelievable, the most extraordinary, the most inconceivable news, which is going to surprise you and fill you with joy and put your worries at rest. Yes, my friend, I have sold a Picasso … the one you thought was unsaleable, le paysage rousseamste.”19 The Saint-Raphaël painting is the only one that fits the bill. Rosenberg’s hyperbole was presumedly supposed to encourage his artist to do more landscapes, because they appealed to collectors weaned on impressionism. Rosenberg failed to realize that Picasso was not a paysagiste at heart. Nature fascinated him, but only insofar as he could bring it within reach and have his metamorphic way with it.
Picasso and Olga returned to Paris on September 17.20 Diaghilev had written from Venice saying that he and Massine had been working on Vulcinella, the commedia dell’arte ballet engendered by their trip to Naples and needed to get together with him in Paris,21 where Stravinsky was due to arrive. Diaghilev had decreed that the music for this ottocento Neapolitan ballet had to be by an ottocento Neapolitan composer—which is why he and Massine had been studying scores by Pergolesi in libraries in Naples and London.22 Diaghilev originally wanted Falla to transform these orchestral pieces into ballet music, but he declined, and so the impresario turned to Stravinsky, a wild idea that would inspire a new concept of musical neoclassicism.
In his memoir, Stravinsky describes Diaghilev asking him, as they were crossing the Place de la Concorde together, “to look at some delightful eighteenth-century music with the idea of orchestrating it for a ballet. When Diaghilev said the composer was Pergolesi, I thought he must be deranged…. Diaghilev knew I wasn’t the least excited about it. I did promise to look, however, and to give him my opinion. I looked, and I fell in love.”23 Within a week Stravinsky had started work on the tarantella, and by the time he returned home to Switzerland, “the ballet had been agreed on in principle and Picasso had made the little promissory drawing of Pierrot and Harlequin,” which Stravinsky reproduced in his autobiography24
On this trip, Stravinsky stayed with the Jean Hugos in their Palais Royal apartment, where they gave a small party in honor of Editions de la Sirène’s publication of his Ragtime25 The score, with a calligraphic cover by Picasso,26 was dedicated to Eugenia Errázuriz, but the printers had misspelled her name, and the original edition had had to be scrapped. The guests included Picasso, Diaghilev, and Massine, as well as two of Cocteau’s “Les Six,” Poulenc and Auric (for once, Cocteau was not present). At the party, Stravinsky drank “without restraint” and sat down and played the brief (five-minute) Ragtime. The group went on to dine at La Roseraie, a restaurant with red plush walls lit by lamps with shades like little orange bells. “Now that’s what one should paint,” Picasso said.27
Another musical celebrity, the peripatetic Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who frequently passed through Paris, would later write a far from reliable account of his meetings with Picasso. “Come and see me in my nasty apartment,” Picasso supposedly told him when they met at a tea party of Eugenia’s. “It was a nasty apartment all right,” Rubinstein misremembers, “I could well imagine that he would still prefer to live in the shabby, dirty Bateau Lavoir…. What he called his atelier was a typical kind of salon, like the waiting room of a dentist.”28 Nor does Rubinstein’s claim that he paid Picasso “practically daily visits” and watched him paint the same subject (presumably the gueridon) carry much conviction. “Is there a great demand for [this subject]?” Rubinstein asked. “What a stupid question,” Picasso said. “Every minute there is another light, every day is different too, so whatever I paint becomes always a new subject.”29 “A great lesson,” Rubinstein thought. Picasso liked Rubinstein well enough to do a drawing of him. When told that this portrait had been destroyed during World War II, the artist would do several more and give the great pianist four of them.30
Picasso did not miss “the shabby, dirty” Bateau Lavoir. That world no longer existed. Montmartre’s Lapin Agile had become a tourist trap; so had Montparnasse’s cafés the Rotonde and the Coupole. Dadaists and surrealists would soon have their own haunts and hideaways, but Picasso would avoid them—too sectarian, too conspiratorial. Also, Olga would not have fitted in any more than she would have fitted into a tertulia. Much as he said he missed the good old days in Montmartre, he was happy, for the time being at least, with the bourgeois routine of dinners that Olga had created for him served by a white-gloved butler. Complaints to Rubinstein and others were a cover-up. Had he wanted to, Picasso could perfectly well have led a Bohemian vie de luxe, as Derain did.
In her campaign to “de-Bohemianize” her husband Olga made the mistake of having Picasso banish Max Jacob, his oldest French friend and godson. She should have befriended this saintly, incorrigibly disreputable poet, as Cocteau did. En route to the second night of Tricorne (January 30, 1920), Jacob was knocked down by a cab and so badly injured that he had to spend a month in hospital. Picasso rushed round to see him. He was in a public ward with an enormous bunch of violets from Eugenia at his bedside. Picasso teasingly reminded Jacob that when he was received into the Catholic Church, he had told him to take the name of Saint Fiacre. “You see I’m a prophet,” Picasso said. Much offended, Jacob replied that he had been run over by a private automobile, not a. fiacre.31
Of all Picasso’s friends, the one Olga was fondest of was Cocteau. He was elegant, mondain, witty, and had been born into the haute bourgeoisie. Also he was always at pains to charm her, as he would most of Picasso’s women. Cocteau, who would always be masochistically in love with Picasso, had made himself indispensable—a mercurial manipulator—but he was no kindred spirit. For all his brilliance, there was little ballast or depth to this jester. And Picasso needed someone less flamboyantly homosexual than this egomaniacal star. He thought he had found the right qualities in a rich, young Argentinian painter named Georges Bemberg. Unfortunately, Bemberg would turn out to be a paranoid schizophrenic, who wanted to be Picasso.
Georges Bemberg has never figured in the Picasso literature because his manipulative tycoon of a father wrote him out of history. Rather than admit that Georges had gone mad, which happened in 1922, Bemberg’s father told everyone, including his family, that his son had died. Bemberg’s friendship with Picasso began with a letter dated February 13, 1914, requesting a meeting. “Monsieur, je voudrais vous connaître,” it began, “je suis tout jeune peintre.”32 The writer went on to proclaim his admiration for Picasso’s work: “wherever I put my feet,” it is always in Picasso’s tracks. The letter was signed “Jorge Bemberg.” Subsequent letters would be signed “Georges.” Their mutual friend Max Jacob had presumably told B
emberg that Picasso favored people who spoke Spanish, and he would also have informed Picasso that Bemberg came of an exceedingly rich and powerful family.
Originally brewers from Hamburg, the Bembergs had made a prodigious fortune in Argentina and then settled in Paris, where Georges’s sister, Rosita—a daunting, difficult woman—had been married off to the Marquis de Ganay. Alliances de fric were becoming a tradition in the Ganay family. The previous marquis had made just such a marriage to the granddaughter of another Jewish tycoon, Baron Haber of Vienna. Haber had endowed the Ganays with two of the most beautiful châteaux in the Ile-de-France, Courances and Fleury-en-Bière. And then Otto Bemberg had settled a second fortune on them. Instead of marrying into the gratin, Georges had disappointed his dynastically minded father by marrying a Russian dancer and taking up painting. God forbid that the Bemberg millions should turn out to be tainted with insanity.
The friendship with Bemberg would not have flourished if so many of Picasso’s friends had not gone to war. I also suspect that Bemberg’s psychic need of him as a mentor might have reminded Picasso of his earliest disciple, the suicidal Casagemas. Bemberg was very anxious that Picasso should do his portrait; this wish was granted early in 1917: a large pencil sketch of him was followed up a year later by an Ingresque portrait drawing33 in which the artist has caught the fine cut of Georges’s jacket and the fit of his shoes; he has also caught his look of alienation. Further portraits are rumored to have existed, but none has survived.
Picasso. Fortrait of Georges Bemberg, 1917. Conté crayon on paper, 49 x 30 cm. Private collection.
Besides aspiring to be a great modern painter—another Picasso, no less—the deluded Bemberg aspired to be a great composer; in this respect, like another family disappointment, his musical Uncle Hermann, a friend of Proust’s, who had become involved in a homosexual scandal. To further his musical aspirations, Bemberg employed an elderly teacher—a magnificent King Lear-like figure, whose looks inspired a couple of drawings by Picasso, one of them among the most worked up of his pencil portraits.34 In a letter dated November 19, 1918, Bemberg tells Picasso that his old teacher had returned from a trip and was upset that Picasso was not around to paint him.35 This letter establishes the hitherto unidentifiable sitter’s identity; no painting of him exists.
That both Picasso and Bemberg married Russian dancers constituted a further bond. Nothing is known about Bemberg’s first wife, beyond the fact that she and their baby died in childbirth in 1920, and that she is said to have been friends with Olga. Some thirty-five letters from Bemberg to Picasso survive. Most of them concern everyday arrangements, but occasionally Bemberg obsessed about silly, minor things. In a long letter dated May 15, 1919, he takes issue with a woman who had supposedly asked Picasso whether he saw people the way he painted them. “Of course not, that would be terrifying,” the artist replied.36 Bemberg argued that Picasso was doing what poets had been doing for centuries: fashioning une femme vivante out of poetic metaphors (ebony hair, rosy cheeks, coral lips, pearly teeth, and so forth). Bemberg went on to complain how difficult it was to follow in his master’s footsteps: “You know where you are going, I don’t.”
Picasso. Portrait of Georges Bembergs Music Teacher, 1919. Pencil on paper, 60 x 50 cm. Private collection.
Since Bemberg’s paintings were said to resemble his, I asked Picasso whether they had been copies. “Worse,” the artist said, “Bemberg was mad, thought he was me, and wanted to paint his own Picassos.” The mere thought of identity theft so terrified Picasso that he refused to discuss the matter further. Members of the Bemberg family turned out to be no more prepared to talk about Georges than Picasso. The discovery that Bemberg had lent Picasso a studio in his country house at Yerres made the matter all the more intriguing. In the end Bemberg’s loyal stepdaughter, the late Princess Marie Gortchakow, was good enough to explain why the Bembergs had written her stepfather out of history. He had saved her family after their escape from Russia, she said, and she was determined to set the record straight.
12
Fulcinella (1919-20)
Picasso’s exhibition of drawings and watercolors opened at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery on October 20 and closed on November 15, 1919. The catalog had a bombastic preface (“Picasso is all alone between heaven and earth…. Picasso has invented everything”) by André Salmon, an old friend he no longer liked. Since individual works are not identified,1 people have concluded that Picasso followed the example of Braque, Léger, and Gris and exhibited only recent work.2 However, as the artist told the journalist Georges Martin, “voilà toute ma vie.”3 This remark is confirmed by J. G. Lemoine, the critic of the influential L’Intransigeant, who reported that Picasso “agilely pirouettes over cubism which now bores him. He jumps over impressionism. He jostles Courbet in passing and falls on his knees before Monsieur Ingres.”4 Roger Allard went further. In Le Nouveau Spectateur, he complained that the show included a bit of everything: “Leonardo, Dürer, Le Nain, Ingres, Van Gogh, Cézanne, yes, everything … except Picasso.”5
Juan Gris may have had Allard’s article in mind when he declared, two years later, in a letter to Kahnweiler, that he had been
thinking about what is meant by “quality” in an artist…. Well, now I believe that the “quality” of an artist derives from the quality of the past that he carries in himself—from his artistic atavism. The more of this heritage he has, the more quality he has. This has nothing to do with his natural gifts or talent, that is to say his accomplishments or even his style.… One’s resemblance to one’s parents is always strong enough without putting on their clothes.
Ingres had put this differently: “He who will not look to any other mind than his own will soon find himself reduced to the most miserable of all imitations, that is to say his own works.”67
Despite the postwar slump, Picasso’s show sold well enough for Rosenberg to raise his prices. The success was due to a growing perception on the part of the press of Picasso as a celebrity, a perception that obliged him to subscribe to a press-cutting service (June 1919).8 André Warnod described the artist at the Rosenberg vernissage “surrounded by snobs and dealers bleating ‘maître, maître’ ”9—a word Picasso abhorred.
On November 1, Clive Bell arrived in Paris for six weeks or so to see the Rosenberg show, consolidate his friendships with Picasso and Derain, and possibly forge additional ones. In the course of this visit Bell was accepted into Derain’s coterie of mostly minor painters and friendly models, whose rowdy evenings were apt to end in song. Picasso kept aloof from this old-time vie de bohème. He and Olga would have Bell to lunch at home or dinner at the restaurants de luxe—Lapérouse or Voisin— which she preferred to the bistros her husband favored. Bell’s letters to Mary Hutchinson, whom he was forever prodding Picasso to draw, provide sycophantic accounts of their meetings. On the afternoon of November 2, Bell went to the rue la Boétie where Picasso showed him “all the pictures in the house” and mischievously told him he had recently caught Mary Hutchinson’s husband in the streets of Paris with a lady on his arm. “Come and lunch or dine whenever you like,” Picasso told him. “Olga is a nice pretty little thing,” Bell wrote, a touch condescendingly, but “I’m in love with him,”10 though not so much with the work—little of which he understood—as with Picasso’s ever-growing fame.
On the fourth, Bell visited the show at Rosenberg’s (“the virtuosity of that man is almost alarming”); on the eighth, he spent all the afternoon “jabbering with le petit [Picasso]” in his studio. On the ninth, he boasts that “no one but the Prince of Wales has so many engagements”: dinner with the Picassos the night before (“Olga very smart in a new gown, [he] brushed up with a smart bow-tie”) as well as the night after. The artist had inveighed against Epstein’s monument to Oscar Wilde in Père-Lachaise, as well as against the Epsteins themselves: “two of the most disgusting people he had ever met.”11
Two days later, Picasso took Bell to dine in “a little Italian restaurant in Mont-martre—on the wa
y we visited the fête de Montmartre, which we found in full swing, though sadly fallen … from its ancient glory. Still the galloping pigs and lady wrestlers were there.”12 They went on to the Cirque Medrano—a visit that inspired some equestrienne drawings—and ended up at an English bar (probably Fox’s, where Picasso had first met Apollinaire), which Bell described as “sorry.” There was another outing with the Picassos to a typical Montmartre restaurant (“masses of whores, bad champagne … very few American officers … a raucous band … and couples dancing everywhere. … La belle Olga … attracted a good deal of attention and before long several handsome young gentlemen were pelting her with balls and feathers…. We went on to the Bal Tabarin, where they still dance their ‘quadrilles réalistes’ ”).13
The day after the Rosenberg show closed in Paris—the same day Parade opened in London—the Picassos gave a luncheon in their apartment for Bell, Cocteau, and Satie.14 Afterward, with Courbet’s great Atelier in mind, Bell suggested that “the time had come for an Atelier de Picasso.”15 “We were set in a row, for all the world as though we were posing for the village photographer, and Picasso took our likenesses.”16 The alienation of the sitters is a touch comical.17 The lady of the house, very elegant in her cocoon of sables, sits between a prissy-looking Cocteau and a quizzical Satie, with Bell on the right in a wing collar and meticulously drawn spats. To animate this static scene, Picasso has played tricks with the perspective of the parquet floor: the four of them seem unaware that they appear to be posed on the brink of very steep steps. There’s a stiffness to the scene as if the sitters are waiting for “the village photographer’s” exposure to end so that they can look themselves again.
Picasso. Jean Cocteau, Olga, Erik Satie, and Clive Bell at rue la Boétie, November 21, 1919. Pencil on paper, 49 x 61 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
A Life of Picasso Page 19