A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Like Picasso, Stravinsky regarded Pulcinella as a milestone in his classical development. As his biographer, Stephen Walsh, has written, “Stravinsky had at a stroke re-established himself as the most chic and brilliant modernist—the supreme genius of the unexpected in that age of the artist as an illusionist and magician.” Stravinsky’s words could have been expressed by Picasso:

  Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course—the first of many love affairs in that direction—but it was a look in the mirror, too. No critic understood this at the time, and I was therefore attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing “simple” music, blamed for deserting “modernism,” accused of renouncing my “true Russian heritage.” People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried “sacrilege”: “The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.” To them all, my answer was and is the same. “You ‘respect,’ but I love.”

  Modernist mockery of Picasso’s classicism recalls Arnold Schoenberg’s sarcastic attack on Stravinsky’s classicism: “Why, who could be drumming away there? If it isn’t little Modernsky! He’s had his pigtails cut. Looks pretty good! What authentic false hair! Like a peruke! Quite (as little Modernsky conceives of him), quite the Papa Bach!” Christian Martin Schmidt puts Schoenberg’s malice in an interesting perspective: “it was not the going back to the past as such that incited this protest, but rather the way in which this found artistic expression.” Schoenberg was concerned “with the ‘correct’ relationship to the musical past, which represented one of the pillars of his musical thought…. [He] proposed an ‘internal’ classicism, in contrast to the ‘external’ one, which he thought he observed in Stravinsky and many others.”

  Cocteau and his group of Six were all too evidently “external” classicists. Picasso, on the other hand, conformed to Schoenberg’s qualifications for a young composer: “Of course you cannot imitate … directly; you have to take the essence and amalgamate your ideas with them, and create something new.” By these lights, Picasso was a quintessentially “internal” classicist. To understand what the artist would do over the next four years, we need to keep this in mind.

  The beau monde turned out in force for the opening of Pulcinella at the Paris Opéra on May 15. Sacheverell Sitwell told Richard Buckle that he was a guest in Misia’s box, as was the celebrated dandy and fortune hunter Boni de Castellane. Sitwell overheard Castellane telling Picasso, “I’m not an anarchist.”6061626364656667 After the performance there was a party, which would be central to Raymond Radiguet’s Bal du Comte Orgel, a roman à clef about Etienne and Edith de Beaumont that this wun-derkind would finish shortly before his death in December 1923. The extravagant young Persian Prince Firouz (firouz is Persian for turquoise), who had chosen a fashionably louche dance hall for his ball: a gimcrack suburban “château,” run by an ex-convict friend of Cocteau’s, called René de Amouretti. To help the procession of cars find their way through the Parisian suburbs, men with flashlights were stationed at every crossroad. Besides Amouretti and the Prince, the Picassos, the Serts, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Massine greeted the guests, who included Cocteau, Poulenc, Auric, the Hugos, Violette Murat, Radiguet, and a great many more. A vast quantity of champagne was consumed. Very drunk, Stravinsky raided the rooms upstairs and tossed pillows, bolsters, and mattresses onto the heads of the guests below. The ensuing pillow fight kept the party going until three in the morning.

  Olga with a bird Hôtel de Paris Monte Carlo 1920.

  13

  Summer at Juan-les-Pins (1920)

  On May 17, 1920, two days after the first night of Pulcinella, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who had come over from London for the occasion, visited Picasso’s studio. Vanessa gave Roger Fry an account:

  Duncan and I went to see Picasso … He … showed us an astonishing painting of 2 nudes, most elaborately finished and rounder and more definite than any Ingres, fearfully good, I thought. Also a very interesting beginning of a portrait of the Emperor and Empress Eugenie and Prince Imperial done from a minute photograph.1

  The painting in question, the magnificent life-sized Two Nudes, which Picasso seemingly conceived as a manifesto for his increasingly volumetric classicism— much as he had conceived his more subversive Demoiselles d’Avignon as a manifesto of a far more revolutionary form of modernism—has always been thought to date from the end rather than the beginning of 1920. Vanessa Bell’s letter settles that point.

  Picasso’s preoccupation with hefty nudes goes back to 1905, when he spent a month in Holland doing nude studies of “schoolgirls like guardsmen.”2 Rosenberg, included one of these works in a show in the spring of 1920, at the same time that the celebrated portrait of Gertrude Stein was on exhibit at another gallery. Stein’s stout frame—“sturdy as a turnip,” to quote Elizabeth Hardwick3—had inspired Picasso’s 1906 paintings and drawings of corpulent nudes, couples often arm in arm. Whether or not Picasso had Stein and Toklas in mind, he wanted to hint at sapphic sex and give a hallowed classic subject a modern gloss, as Courbet had done with his lesbian Sleepers.4

  The hints of sexuality in Picasso’s Two Nudes are minimal. True, one of the women has her hand on the other’s knee, but she appears to be making a conversational point rather than a pass. The two women stand for womanhood and, conceivably, earth-motherhood. Their setting might be a dressing room or boudoir or Turkish bath: a place where women get together, undress, and relax.

  The way Picasso combines figures and draperies into a single configuration—a feature of the Two Nudes as well as the countless small paintings, drawings, and pastels that derive from it—has to do with his ever growing urge to become a sculptor. John Quinn, the American collector who purchased Two Nudes and Three Women at the Spring and several other classical paintings, referred to them as his “bronze figures.”5 Lack of suitable premises condemned the painter to being a sculptor manqué until he took to welding with González and later he bought a country house with space for a sculpture studio. In the Two Nudes it looks as if they are carved out of a single block of stone. By cramming them into a space that is too narrow and shallow for them, Picasso makes them appear to be bursting, not just out of their frame, but out of their spatial element.

  The magnification in these paintings afflicts those parts of the body—hands, feet, and noses—which protrude and are closest to the viewer. In his quest for gigantism Picasso has looked back at the devices that enabled classic sculptors to monumentalize their figures—devices that he had learned from studying the Farnese Marbles in Naples. However, he did not make off with the sacred fire of classicism for mere stylistic considerations. He did so because he wanted to bend classicism to his will, Picassify it, question its sacrosanct proportions and the time-honored notions of ideal beauty on which they were supposedly based. In parodying classicism, he subverts it. Had he tried his hand at architecture, Picasso would have made good use of entasis—“a lie that tells the truth.”

  The only models that Picasso is likely to have used for Two Nudes and other related paintings are the postcards and photographs he had brought back from Italy. When asked about this, he usually claimed never to have needed models. This was not entirely true: portraits were mostly done from life; and some drawings (November 1920) of a woman, clothed and unclothed, seated in Picasso’s favorite studio chair, were evidently done from a model—someone who is clearly not Olga.6 Remember, too, that some of his images of the women in his life are a mélange—a mélange, he told me, of as many as three or four different women. Picasso was also a master at flouting physiognomical facts and would have relished using a corpulent colossus to stand for his skinny, fine-featured wife.

  While working on the monumental Two Nudes, Picasso resumed doing portrait drawings: the three composers Satie, Falla, and Stravinsky with whom he had recently collaborated; two dealers, Yvon Helft and Berthe Weill;7 and the art patron Etienne de Beaumont.8 The choice of subjects seems to
have been strategic; friends were always asking Picasso to do their portraits, but he seldom obliged. In reaction against the Ingresque delicacy and virtuosity of the Madame Wildenstein and Lopokova drawings of 1918,9 Picasso adopted a style that has a van Gogh-like intensity and rigor. The three great composers that Picasso chose to portray were almost as short as he was, and nothing like as handsome. To remedy this, he gave them stature. He sat all three of them down in the same chair with their huge hands—only really true of Stravinsky—folded in front of them. At the same time he suggests their gigantism, mental as well as physical. Instead of pencil or silverpoint, Picasso uses black chalk outlines to delineate his subjects—outlines he can work over with an eraser and use smudged pentiments to suggest volume.

  Portraits by Picasso of Manuel de Falla and Igor Stravinsky in Ballets Russes program (Théâtre de la Gaité-Lyrique, May 1921). Musée Picasso, Paris.

  The atavistic pull of the Mediterranean, which had revitalized Picasso’s work in the summer of 1919, manifested itself even more strongly in the summer of 1920. Such was the artist’s anticipation that two weeks before his departure on June 24 he had started on seaside subjects.10 Palau thinks these drawings attest to an earlier trip to the south.11 However, a letter, dated June 23, from Level to Picasso, refutes this.12 And a remark made years later to his biographer Antonina Vallentin confirms that these evocations of the Côte d’Azur were premonitory. “I don’t mean to sound psychic, but it was truly amazing. Everything turned out to be exactly the way I painted it in Paris. Then I understood that this scene [the Riviera] was really mine.”13

  Shortly before departing for the south Olga discovered that she was pregnant. After playing a secondary role in her husband’s imagery the year before, she reappeared, this summer, as a central figure. Olga’s pregnancy seems also to have revived Picasso’s habit of visiting whorehouses, to judge by two drawings. In one of them, dated May 28, a man takes a postcoital nap on a bed, while a naked girl primps in a mirror and an elderly Celestina cleans up after them. In the other, the same girl fondles her breast while a voyeur looks on.14

  Picasso and Olga at Villa des Sables, Juan-les-Pins (postcard sent to Stravinsky), July 20, 1920. Igor Stravinsky Collection. Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel.

  This summer, the Picassos broke their journey south at Marseilles for a few days before returning to the Hôtel Continental et des Bains at Saint-Raphaël. By June 29, they had found a villa on a hillside above the yet to be developed resort of Juan-les-Pins next to Antibes. The Villa des Sables on the chemin des Sables, which no longer exists, was a modest house with a good view of the Mediterranean and a small garden—overgrown with the vines and creepers that figure in the outdoor still lifes of this summer. Picasso chose the place because it was quiet and out of the way—down the road from the Pension Butterfly—and it offered adequate studio space. This summer would prove very productive.

  Picasso had brought his camera and took a great many photographs, which he would show to Clive Bell back in Paris in October. According to Bell, “They were mostly of himself and la belle Olga at Antibes, generally more or less naked, Picasso black as an Indian and très beau. He learnt to swim. Imagine his pride and satisfaction.”15 In fact, Picasso never learned to swim. Jacqueline told me he mimicked the strokes, while keeping his feet on the bottom. The photographs and the affectionate sketches that Picasso did of his pregnant wife writing letters, reading, sewing baby clothes, and, in one case, filing away at her calloused heels suggest that they were wrapped up in each other, more in love —perhaps than they would ever be in the future. A snapshot of Olga at a window of the Blue Train, a birdcage at her side, prepares us for a poignant photograph taken of her at the Hôtel de Paris, in Monte Carlo, holding the bird as she looks at herself in the wardrobe mirror, the birdcage at her feet. Although there is no other record of such a trip, the Picassos had presumably joined Diaghilev, Massine, and Stravinsky in Monte Carlo in mid-April to put the finishing touches on Pulcinella.

  Picasso had few if any friends in the neighborhood. There were, however, occasional visitors from Paris, among them the man who had been his biggest prewar collector, Sergei Shchukin. The former tycoon was spending a week at the nearby Hôtel Graziella. After the confiscation of his collection, the Troubetzkoy Palace where it hung, and his commercial empire, Shchukin was a broken man. In August 1918 he had escaped from Soviet Russia to Germany. The following year he made his way to Paris, where he had sought out Picasso, the artist for whose work this intensely spiritual man had developed a mystical passion.

  Although Shchukin had once bought his work at the rate of ten major paintings a year, Picasso no longer felt especially well disposed toward him. This was supposedly Kahnweiler’s fault. When war broke out in 1914, Shchukin owed Kahnweiler a very considerable sum of money for his recent purchases. Because of the sequestration, this debt had never been settled; and because he had not been paid either, Picasso felt, with some justice, that Shchukin should pay him for these paintings, especially after discovering that, “contrary to widespread belief, [Shchukin] was not poor.”1617 The funds he had deposited in France and Germany before the war to cover his acquisitions “enabled him to live modestly and comfortably” as a refugee. Shchukin turned out to have yet another source of money. On the eve of the revolution, he had sent his wife and three-year-old daughter, Irina, off to Germany and had stuffed the child’s favorite doll with the family’s jewels.18

  Nevertheless, when Shchukin had called at the rue la Boétie, he was well received. Picasso took a liking to the collector’s beautiful young sister-in-law, Nadezhda, and did a drawing of her, which he gave to this former benefactor. “These days it’s worth money,” Picasso said. Shchukin duly sold it.19 Olga would also have had reason to welcome Shchukin. His Paris apartment had become a meeting place for White Russian refugees as well as visiting Soviet officials who dispensed news from home. (Shchukin was the man Diaghilev would consult when he contemplated putting on a Soviet ballet in collaboration with Vsevolod Meyerhold.) Shchukin also kept in touch with refugees who had settled on the Riviera. Since Olga’s contacts with her compatriots were mostly limited to her fellow dancers, she needed others to bring her news from home.

  The year before, Shchukin had a rather more fraught reconciliation with Matisse in Nice. In his infinite pride, the Russian did not want Matisse to see how the revolution had diminished him. At first he avoided meeting the artist. Matisse persisted. Anxious for Shchukin to see his new work, he went to call on him at his hotel. “I am no longer in a position to buy,” Shchukin stammered out.20 Matisse was understandably upset that his kindly concern should have been misconstrued. A meeting the following day at a crowded gathering of Russian exiles went no better. Matisse had one last try at reestablishing a relationship; he arranged to take his former patron by train to see the ailing Renoir at Cagnes. He looked vainly for Shchukin in first class and finally found him in second class. “One must keep in the good graces of the masses,” Shchukin said.21 Their old friendship does not seem to have survived these misunderstandings.

  Early in September Picasso was diverted by the arrival, at Juan-les-Pins’s anything but elegant Hôtel de la Gare, of two of Cocteau’s closest friends, Paul Morand and Darius Milhaud. Morand was a diplomat and man-about-town, who would soon marry the hugely rich Romanian Princess Soutzos and make his name as a novelist, a caustic social chronicler, and, much later, a World War II collaborator who would be obliged to live in exile. Milhaud had recently returned from a trip to London with Cocteau to promote their combined effort—a farcical revue with musical interludes called Le Bœuf sur le toit22 After a successful run earlier in the year in Paris, it had opened in London on July 12 under a new name, The Nothing-Doing Bar, sandwiched between turns by Grock, the great clown, and Ruth Draper, the witty American monologist. They had been royally entertained by Prince Firouz, the host at the Pulcinella party, who had since moved to London. He had been heavily bribed by the British, as Persia’s foreign secretary, to agre
e to an unacceptable Anglo-Persian treaty. This character, who greatly intrigued Picasso, would die mysteriously—probably assassinated—the following year.23

  Picasso. Olga in Ballet Costume, July 26, 1920. Black pencil and turpentine on canvas, 129 x 96 cm. Whereabouts unknown.

  When he installed himself in a new place, Picasso usually did drawings of the area to get his bearings and map out a kind of cosmology for himself.24 A turning in the road, a stretch of railway track, a view of the sea, telegraph poles: such are the subjects of his sketchbook notations. He also did colorful oil sketches of local villas in which he has fun with their distinctive towers and balustrades.25 Playful views culminate in a larger, sunnier, tougher painting, which looks ahead to Picasso’s convulsive visions of the mid-twenties: a vast van Gogh-ish sun shaped like a vagina beats down on a tight little group of tree-shaded, seaside villas and charges the scene with energy that is more sexual than solar. For the next fifty years, this combination of sun, sea, sand, and sex would provide Picasso with the “Dionysiac intoxication” that Nietzsche saw as the classical counterpart of Apollonian tranquillity. Cowling sees these “two modes” as “antithetical but complementary, and great art resulted only from their reconciliation.”2627 In theory, Picasso, who admired Nietzsche, may have agreed with this analysis; in practice he kept Apollo off his beach. It would always be sacred to Dionysos.

  Above: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Madame Moitessier, 1856. Oil on canvas, 120 x 92.1 cm. The National Gallery, London.