The following day, Bell called on Gertrude Stein and “her red Indian companion, Miss Jockness[sic].” “Old Gertrude,” he reported to Mary Hutchinson, “has a certain horse sense and humanity that are comfortable.”18 A few days later, he went back there with the Irish painter Roderick O’Conor—a friend once upon a time of Gauguin’s. After admiring Gertrude’s Picassos, Bell allowed that this was “where a good bit of Derain comes from, not that Derain is a bit the smaller artist for that.” It was not until Picasso dropped him later in the 1920s that Bell solved the problem of reconciling his worship of Picasso with his affection for Derain: “of all the French painters … the one I know best… the only one whom I tutoyéd.”19
Like the Picassos, the Derains took Bell to the Cirque Medrano, where they had a drink with Gustave Coquiot, the impresario who had commissioned Picasso to do a portrait drawing of Jane Avril and other music hall stars, in 1901.20 “It was a fine starlit night, and they decided to walk home across Paris. Suddenly Derain burst out with terrific abuse—Picasso was a ‘mauvais camarade,’ a mean arriviste.”21 Then his wife, Alice, took up the cudgels and went on about how badly Picasso had treated Fernande Olivier and his other women. He was nothing but “un petit syphilitique sans talent.”22 When, at Bell’s urging, Derain admitted that Picasso was a great draftsman, he could not resist adding that he was “unable to paint… only the French can do that.” “I begin to take against [Alice],” Bell wrote, “though I begin to recognize more clearly than ever that she is terrifically handsome and passionately in love with Derain … I suspect there is a good deal—a great deal even—in what they say of Picasso’s character, but all the French are so jealous of his art and his influence that one hardly knows how far they may not go in the way of exaggeration.”23 Picasso seems to have surmised what the Derains were up to. Once again he asked Bell to dinner at the rue la Boétie and once again “showed him everything in his studio.” The strategy worked. “I now have not the slightest doubt,” Bell wrote, “that Picasso is a greater artist than Derain.”24
One day when Derain failed to turn up for lunch, Bell looked in on Rosenberg, who showed him “extraordinary things,” “amazing Picassos, Courbets, Corots, Renoirs,” as he told Mary Hutchinson.
In the middle of it all came a telephone message and news of Renoir’s death. [Rosenberg] wept; I offered to go; he insisted that I should stay…; he embraced me and poured out a torrent of tolerably insincere sentimentality, ending up with “In any case, I was the one who paid him the homage: I offered him 250,000 francs for a painting” … It [was] unforgettable. This black jew, with the smutty tears on his cheeks, a lump of half-real emotion in the heart, and in his head a very clear idea of the probable rise in the price of Renoirs of which he has a sizable collection.25
Two days before returning to London, December 10, Bell gave the Picassos dinner at Lapérouse. The only guest mentioned by Bell was a charming and “so good-looking” designer called Fauconnet, who had flattered the very heterosexual Bell by making a pass at him. Picasso liked him, so did Cocteau, who had asked him to do the décor for his Le Bceuf sur le toit revue. Bell needed an extra man who was “tolerably mondain. To his mistress Bell described Olga as “vastly improved—gay and ladylike, two qualities, as you know, that please me. She is extremely pretty and dresses charmingly. She is also small and slim and fond of pleasure and likes partridges and Grand Marnier.”2627 Picasso surprised Bell by asking him “whether it was true that Roger Fry had once tried to rape Lady Ottoline and that it is one of the grand scandals of Angleterre. I gave them the true story as I believe it to be.”28 Bell surprised Olga by coyly asking her to pick out two pairs of garters for him to give a lady friend for Christmas. “For Lady Ottoline?”29 Picasso joked; but they were, of course, for Mary Hutchinson. According to Bell, the Picassos “entreated [him] to stay in Paris till the New Year.”30
Once the war was over, it took the Louvre over a year to bring its contents back to Paris, which had been removed to the country for safety. By the end of 1919, the museum was ready to reopen. That summer, André Lhote wrote an article urging painters to visit the museum to check their bearings and see how far off course they had drifted. Lhote saw salvation for modern French art in classicism—as exemplified by Le Nain’s Peasants and David’s Rape oftheSabines, two paintings that Picasso particularly revered. J. E. Blanche declared Lhote’s article “intelligent, yet utterly incomprehensible”;31 Picasso is likely to have agreed with it. As someone who saw himself reworking the masters of the past in his own idiom, he was all too ready to return to the Louvre eager to convert, as Lhote put it “the classic theme into the furniture of our pictures;” he needed to study how the masters of French classicism had reacted to the classicism of the ancient world, the better to reinvent the style in his own work.
The Salle Française du XIXème Siècle was the principal focus of Picasso’s interest. Here were many of the masterpieces he would wrestle with in years to come— Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe—as well as a number of other works which he would borrow from less overtly: Courbet’s Atelier; Géri-cault’s Radeau de la Méduse, and both Poussin’s and David’s Rape of the Sabines. Picasso would have also wanted to take a good look at Ingres, whose influence on his work had got him into trouble with modernists. Much as he admired this artist, he needed to move away from the shadow of someone whose name had become too closely associated with his own. Well-intentioned friends were deluging him with postcards of Ingres’s work; and enemies, such as the hypocritical Delaunay, had taken to using Ingres against him—“Picasso … imitates Bouguereau, being unable to attain the purity of Ingres,” Delaunay wrote, while feebly following in Picasso’s neoclassical footsteps.32
Many of Picasso’s portrait drawings do derive from Ingres, but that does not mean that all his representational works of this period can be lumped together as “Ingresque.” On the contrary, many of his less representational works—especially the pristine little “crystal”33 cubist still lifes—turn out to be strikingly Ingresque in their immaculate finish and clarity; at least one major painting, notably Italian Woman,34 Picasso’s most worked-up image of the winter of 1919–20, owes more to Corot than to Ingres.
Picasso. Italian Woman, 1919. Oil on canvas, 98.5 x 70.5 cm. Whereabouts unknown.
Confirmation of Picasso’s renewed interest in Corot’s figures is to be found in Paul Rosenberg’s catalog preface to Thannhauser’s 1922 show in Munich—the first major Picasso show in Germany since before the war. Unaware of how much Picasso’s cubist guitar players owe to the Corots he saw at the 1909 Salon d’Automne, Rosenberg announced that “chance” in the form of a Corot Portrait of a Woman had prompted Picasso to “create a Corot in the same style.” The portrait is almost certain to have been the one of Mademoiselle de Foudras that was in Rosenberg’s stock at this time.35 However, when he came to paint his Italian Woman, he is more likely to have had the Louvre’s famous Femme à la perle in mind.
Derain, too, was trumpeting Corot as “one of the greatest geniuses of the Western world;” and then to demonstrate how independent of cubism he had become, he went on to say, “By comparison [Cézanne] hangs by a thread…. His painting is as pleasing as face powder.”36 As a modernist influence, Cézanne was indeed going out of fashion: but Derain was not a modernist. If anybody’s paintings are “as pleasing as face powder,” it is Derain’s. Compare his overblown Italian Woman37 of 1921–22 to Picasso’s magisterial painting of the same subject and the insipidness becomes all too evident.
Picasso next addressed himself to Chardin. In the winter of 1919-20, Picasso did a Chardinesque painting, Still Life with Pitcher and Apples,388 of the jug on the chim-neypiece in the drawing of Bell, Olga, and friends in November 1918. Gris, too, had developed a taste for Chardin: “I believe you can borrow the means of a Chardin,” he wrote Kahnweiler, “without accepting either his style or his notion of reality”39 Picasso would have agreed. He has seemingly taken a detail from a Ch
ardin—a painting, which Paul Rosenberg may well have handled—with its “absolute equilibrium and perfect construction”40 and eroticized it. By hinting that the pairs of russet apples in this painting might stand for breasts, buttocks, or testicles, and the jug’s lip for an oral, anal, or vaginal orifice, Picasso conjures up a flesh-and-blood presence, suggestive of a vessel in need of filling. The jug might also stand for the artist himself. Picasso often animates the inanimate with a shot of anthropomorphic sex, but seldom as subtly, mysteriously, and subliminally as here. Note the disconcerting arrangement of the apples on top of the jug.
Robert Rosenblum interprets this timeless painting differently. He sees its camaïeu tonality as “dust over layers of history”41— a reference to the pots covered with volcanic ash from Pompeii, which Picasso had seen in Naples in 1917. He was certainly intrigued by these poignant relics. Another possible reference to Naples is the use of a dusty, muted palette to simulate stone and give this smallish painting the heft of sculpture that characterizes so much of Picasso’s classical imagery.
Picasso. First Communion, 1919. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
In his reaction against the “Rosewater Hellenism” of Puvis de Chavannes42 that had faintly tainted the Blue period, Picasso saw eye-to-eye with Stravinsky, who believed that “the only critical exercise of value must take place in art, i.e., in pastiche or parody.”43 Picasso chose parody. This involved seeing the old in terms of the new, the déjà vu in terms of the dernier cri. He tried out his volumetric classicism in variations on a subject of utmost banality: a photograph of an unknown boy and girl, presumably brother and sister, dressed for their First Communion.44 The subject harks back to the painting Picasso had done at the age of fourteen of his sister Lola’s First Communion.45 By mocking the sentimentality of one of his earliest works, he seemingly hoped to exorcise the trauma of his own adolescent piety: his teenage vow to God that he would never paint again if his sister Conchita’s life was spared.
These First Communion paintings can also be seen as stylistic exercises. Four out of the five look ahead to the pneumatic stylizations of the following year, while one of them looks back at the flat, jagged planes of synthetic cubist drawings of the dead or dying Eva in 1915.46 The artist would always be in search of ways of playing style and content off against each other. Paradox is intrinsic to Picasso’s vision. He had an instinctive understanding of something pop artists would discover fifty years later: namely that banality, even inanity, used ironically can provoke people into seeing familiar things anew.
Work on Pulcinella started at the very beginning of 1920, possibly even earlier. Diaghilev had moved his troupe to Paris, and to make life easier for Picasso and Sert (the designer for another eighteenth-century ballet, L’Astuce feminine), he had arranged to bring the Polunins over from London. Even so, Pulcinella got off to a terrible start. Since he had first discussed the idea for a commedia dell’arte ballet in Naples in 1917, Picasso had had a change of heart. As he told Douglas Cooper, he no longer wanted to do the traditional commedia dell’arte spectacle that Diaghilev had envisioned; he wanted to do something more modern in period as well as in style.47 What Diaghilev wanted from Picasso was the same as he wanted from Stravinsky: something traditional with a modernist gloss. Picasso’s first proposal for the décor was ornate and fin de siècle, like Derain’s Boutique. It involved a stage within a stage: the interior of a theater with tiers of boxes on either side as well as a chandelier and a proscenium arch, giving on to an arcaded Neapolitan street scene with a baroque fountain in the foreground and a view over the bay to Vesuvius in the background. Picasso modified this in two similar but simpler designs, one of them with couples in the boxes in the manner of Renoir’s La Loge48
The stage-within-a-stage device was supposed to give the ballet the look of the puppet shows that had so impressed Picasso, Diaghilev, and Massine in 1917. In the course of a previous summer, Massine had returned to Naples to do further research. While there, he had bought an antique hooked-nose Pulcinella mask—one side laughing, one side crying. This had originally belonged to Antonio Petito, a celebrated commedia dell’arte actor of the eighteenth century. Massine wore the mask and then began trying out Pulcinella’s gestures and movements. Later, he would have a copy made for the actual performance. Meanwhile, he searched the libraries of Naples for a suitable scenario for his ballet and found one entitled The Four Little Pulcinellas; he also searched the streets for puppet shows featuring Pulcinella. To judge by his memoirs, Massine came to identify with Pulcinella, much as Picasso had identified with Harlequin. Massine’s Pulcinella was “a local hero in Naples … witty, eccentric, a composite creature—magistrate, poet, schoolmaster, spy, philosopher.”49
Massine and Diaghilev’s failure to make their revised concept of Pulcinella clear to Picasso led to the “lack of liaison between the choreographer and the artist” reported by Cocteau.50 When Diaghilev rejected his Second Empire-style maquette of a theater within a theater, Picasso exploded in rage. Stravinsky has described the scene.
Diaghilev was very brusque: “Oh, this isn’t it at all,” and proceeded to tell Picasso how to do it. The evening concluded with Diaghilev actually throwing the drawings on the floor, stamping on them and slamming the door as he left. The next day abject apologies on the part of Diaghilev and a great deal of diplomacy on the part of Misia helped to mollify the deeply insulted artist. Diaghilev did succeed in getting him to do a commedia dell’arte Pulcinella,51
Picasso. Design for Pulcinella costume, 1920. Gouache and graphite on paper, 34 x 23.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
one that, according to Massine, was more “abstract.”52 Both sides, it seems, had had changes of heart. Picasso, who had originally wanted simplicity, had tried to give Diaghilev what he mistakenly thought he wanted. It all ended happily. Picasso’s simple, cubistic set was perfect.
Stravinsky had similar difficulties. There had been a misunderstanding about the orchestration. According to Cooper, “before Stravinsky delivered the orchestral score—towards the end of February—Diaghilev had told Massine that it would be for a ‘large orchestra with harps,’ whereas Stravinsky had scored the ballet for a small string orchestra, a wind quartet and three voices.”53 Stravinsky was obliged to make repeated trips to Paris before this matter was sorted out. According to the composer:
there were often disputes which ended up in pretty stormy scenes. Sometimes the costumes were not as Diaghilev had anticipated them, sometimes my orchestration proved a disappointment…. when I was shown certain steps and movements which had already been decided on I realized with horror that the meagre sound of my little chamber orchestra did not match them in character and importance. Wishful thinking and their own taste had unfortunately led Diaghilev and Massine to expect something quite different from what they found in my score. So they had to change the choreography and adapt it to the volume of my music, which did not please them at all.54
By the time Diaghilev and the company left on a tour of Rome, Milan, and Monte Carlo in early February, everyone was more or less in agreement. Picasso still had one outstanding task to perform: a rideau de scène, such as he had done for Parade and Tricorne. He did three pencil sketches of a group of Harlequins romping around a nude on a bed and a small painting of Harlequin, Columbine, and a clown on a horse in a circus arena.55 In the end, none of these was ever used, despite a peremptory telegram from Diaghilev in Monte Carlo to Polunin asking whether the “rideau Picasso” was finished.56 It seems never to have been started.
Picasso. Set design for Vulcinella, 1920. India ink, gouache, and pencil, 23.4 x 33.6 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Pulcinellas problems were still not over. Sloppy scheduling, compounded by a railroad strike, very nearly resulted in the company being stranded in Monte Carlo four days before the first night at the Paris Opéra. Diaghilev was in despair. At the last minute, sleepers were found on a night train to Paris for Diaghilev, Massine, Karsavina, and Matisse, who had joined th
em to arrive in time for the first night of his ballet, Le Chant du rossignol. The rest of the company managed to squeeze into the very crowded compartments. Massine has described being awakened by a violent jolting, a heavy ashtray hitting him on the nose, and an Englishman in the other bunk, who had been doused in mineral water, asking, “I say, could there be a leak?” The line had been cut by strikers and the engine lay on its side. No one in the company was hurt; Diaghilev and his group continued their journey by car.
The first night went off without a hitch. To Diaghilev’s delight, Picasso had whittled down his décor to a simple configuration of two houses built up cubistically out of flat planes.57 According to Sokolova, the set suggested the improvised screens of a troupe of strolling players:
an irregular quadrilateral of white was the moonstruck wall of a house, a triangle of grey conveyed the shadow and mystery of a narrow street, a few marks on the back cloth—moon, boat and volcano—placed the action geographically and expressed Naples. This décor showed triumphantly what cubism could be and could do. One innovation was the omission of footlights. The chalk-white floor-cloth provided an arena for the action, and it was no doubt thought that all the lighting should come from above to suggest moonlight.… The absence of footlights revealed the faces of the audience and the dancers realised, to their distress, that they were under observation.58
Although the puppet theater concept, favored by Picasso and Massine, did not survive Diaghilev’s suggestions, Picasso told Cooper that he “liked Pulcinella the best of all the ballets he designed because the sets ‘corresponded so closely to my personal taste.’ ”59 This time around, Picasso decided against elaborate, highly finished designs for impractical costumes, as he had for Tricorne. Instead, he based them on the historical research that Max Jacob had done for him and came up with costumes that did not impede the dancers or boggle the eye. Pulcinella inspired a series of dazzling commedia dell’arte gouaches, which Rosenberg had no trouble selling.
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