A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Right: Picasso. Woman Reading, 1920. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81.2 cm. Musée de Grenoble.

  Pregnancy and the blazing southern sun melted Olga’s northern formality. Snapshots reveal her barefoot in loose-fitting dresses, reddish hair falling to her waist. This new relaxed mood is reflected in Picasso’s affectionate drawings of her holding a tennis racket or in the shade of a straw hat wreathed in flowers.28 Olga’s pregnancy had reawakened her husband’s solicitude. Besides a large canvas (which he later painted over) and some fine drawings of her (one in black pencil on canvas) in the ballet costume she never traveled without, Picasso did two major paintings in which he transforms a relatively representational drawing of her (Musée Picasso) into a giantess in an armchair, reading a book.29 The monstrous octopus-shaped hand Olga holds up to her face is a mocking reference to Ingres’s Madame Moitessier, which had also been inspired by a fresco from Herculaneum in the Naples Museum.30 The fulllength version of the painting is in the Centre Georges Pompidou; Picasso gave the more massive-looking head-and-shoulders version to the Musée de Grenoble. This was the first of Picasso’s countless gifts to public collections. Significantly, he chose a museum, where the director Andry-Farcy was a fervent admirer of Matisse, who had already given his museum an important work.31

  As Kenneth Clark wrote, “the nude remains our chief link with the classic disciplines.”32 And sure enough, the nudes that had made a tentative reappearance in the previous year’s work return in force over the next three and a half months: Picasso’s longest Mediterranean sojourn since childhood. As the temperature soared at the end of July, the flimsy nymphs of the first sketches solidify into a posse of hefty sun-bathers chatting, reading, sleeping, and swimming. Pen and ink give way to pastel, the better to evoke the matte sheen of skin. Little by little, the women sort themselves out into threesomes: a squatting and standing figure to left and right presiding over a figure lying on the sand in the foreground. Way out to sea, a disproportionate and disembodied head pops out of the water as if the swimmer were as close as nearby figures on the beach.33 In his most daringly experimental painting of this summer, Three Bathers on the Beach,34 Picasso stretches the limbs and shrinks the heads. And then by situating a bather’s foot at the water’s edge and her pinhead at a vanishing point in the sky, he establishes both a nearness as well as a farness between beach and horizon, also an eerie feeling of disquiet, which stems from a childhood dream Picasso recounted to Françoise Gilot:

  Picasso. Three Bathers on the Beach, 1920. Oil on panel, 81 x 100 cm. Former collection, Stephen Hahn, New York.

  Picasso. Pierrot and Harlequin, July 19, 1920. Pencil and gouache on paper, 21.5 x 27 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  I like nature, but I want her proportions to be subtle and free, not fixed. When I was a child, I often had a dream that used to frighten me greatly. I dreamed that my legs and arms grew to an enormous size and then shrank back just as much in the other direction. And all around me, in my dream, I saw other people going through the same transformations, getting huge or very tiny. I felt terribly anguished every time I dreamed about that.35

  This amazing painting is also unusual in being painted on wood, possibly one of the contre-plaqué panels he had asked Rosenberg to ship to him at Juan-les-Pins.36 Juan Gris, who had switched to contre-plaquéwhen canvas was in short supply during the war, had recommended this alternative form of support to Picasso.37 It made for a harder, sharper, flatter finish.

  Picasso continued to produce colorful gueridons in gouache and tempera along the lines of the ones he had done the previous summer. However, there is a notable difference. Whereas the focal point of the Saint-Raphaël gueridons of the previous summer is a cubist construction, as three-dimensional as a house of cards, the Juan- les-Pins gueridons are two-dimensional and tightly integrated into the composition. A diagram in a sketchbook38 reveals the intricate layering of the planes, each one a fraction behind the other. The way these planes interlock like pieces of a puzzle39 suggests that Olga may have brought a jigsaw with her to while away the time when her husband was working. Dotted lines are another new development in still lifes done later in the year.40 Palau claims incomprehensibly that “the objects represented by dotted lines apparently tell us that they are not really what they seem, although they could be.”41 Surely Picasso is playing a conceptual game. The dotted lines imply the words “Cut here” and they invite us to envision the effect that compliance with his instructions might precipitate.

  This summer, Rosenberg, who now referred to Olga as “La Marquise,” kept up the pressure on Picasso to produce “a large number of canvases” for his next show. Originally scheduled for fall 1920, this would be put off until the spring. To nudge Picasso into taking a more traditional path and attract a more conservative clientele, the dealer told him he was also organizing a show of Picasso’s “cubist and non-cubist work in one of the most beautiful museums in one of the biggest cities of America … his work would be hung next to Verrocchio and Pollaiuolo and great masterpieces of the past.”42 This show would indeed materialize, but not until 1923. The Arts Club of Chicago, where it took place, rented space in the Art Institute, but not in the museum section, so there was no question of Picasso’s work being hung next to any old masters.43

  Picasso paid little attention to the dealer’s deceptive suggestion. In his last two weeks at Juan-les-Pins, he did eight drawings of a centaur carrying off a woman.44 These are usually assumed to represent the rape of Hercules’ wife Dejanira by the centaur Nessus,45 but the absence of the usual iconographic details suggests that Picasso did not necessarily have Dejanira in mind. (He would provide a far more definitive portrayal of this legend in one of his 1930 illustrations for Ovid’s Metamorphoses.) The inspiration for this baroque subject has a surprising source: Rubens’s great bravura set piece, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus.4647 Rubens was an artist he always claimed to dislike.

  Back in Paris, Picasso turned to a very different seventeenth-century master for inspiration, Nicolas Poussin. Once again he settled on a rape scene; it is based on Tancred and Hermione in the Hermitage. Picasso uses much the same three figures as Poussin with the addition of a white horse to evoke a very different story. Whereas Poussin portrays Hermione saving Tancred’s life by binding his wounds with the tresses she has chopped off her head, Picasso portrays his heroine being dragged away, like Dejanira, before she can attend to her supine lover. A year later, Picasso would paraphrase another Poussin: the magnificent Echo and Narcissus in the Louvre. The artist kept these little panel pictures back for himself. Given his irritation at being described as Ingresque, he would not have wanted to lay himself open to a charge of Poussinism.

  Picasso. Nessus and Dejanira, 1920. Metalpoint on tan wove paper prepared with white ground, 21.5 x 27 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago.

  The idyllic life that the Picassos had led at Juan-les-Pins did little to prepare the pregnant Olga for her husband’s neglect back in Paris. The artist spent most of his time in his studio and left her to her own devices. On October 30, Clive Bell, who had returned to Paris to check out Picasso’s summer harvest, described Olga to Mary Hutchinson as feeling so lonely, so miserable, so neglected that she found a visit from Lady Colefax, a relentlessly pushy London hostess, as “something like a treat.”48 The day before writing this letter, Bell said more or less the same thing about Picasso: “[he] talked to me about art and his art with a seriousness, a bitterness, and a lack of reticence, which he has never shown to me before: and when we parted he embraced me—I don’t mean kissed but hugged. He is conscious of being horribly alone.”49 Bell went on to describe

  the aquarelles [Picasso] did during the summer and the big pastels on which he is at present working … [as] marvelous and full of trouvailles [but] he has something like a mania for hiding them and is always on the lookout for spies. Twice during the morning we were interrupted, and both times intricate precautions had to be taken before the stranger was admitted. The first visitor was [Frank Burty] Havila
nd, who didn’t stay long and seemed nice, the second was Leónce Rosenberg, who dragged on infinitely talking politics and dealerism.50

  Bell writes as if he were still on the friendliest terms with Picasso, but a letter that Roger Fry sent Vanessa Bell, a few months later, suggests otherwise:

  I’ve been to see Picasso, [Fry wrote on March 15, 1921] … [who] is rather furious with Clive. You’d better not tell Clive; it’ll pass over (I think very unfairly) because he said something about Ingres. It’s merely what everyone does when they see some of Picasso’s later work. Fortunately I didn’t; on the contrary. I murmured about Fra Bartolomeo, and, in fact, that is nearer the mark. It’s curious how near all his late work is in its aim to the things Fra Bartolomeo and Raphael worked out. (Plastic balance within a strictly limited space.)51

  We can only guess at the nature of Bell’s gaffe. Given his obsessive desire to please Picasso, whatever he said would have been intended as a fulsome compliment. It probably included the word “Ingresque”: a word the artist was tired of hearing. “As if Ingres were the only artist I ever looked at in the Louvre,” I recall Picasso moaning. When Bell returned in May 1921 to see the show at Rosenberg’s, he seems to have been forgiven—but was he? Arthur Rubinstein had infuriated Picasso by bringing a group of chic friends, who had been having tea with hiim at the Ritz, on an impromptu visit to the rue la Boétie. Regarding this incident, Picasso told Bell, over lunch a day or two later, how much he admired intellectuals and how much he detested “the bourgeoisie ci-inclus, Lady Colefax and Marie Beerbohm and Arthur Rubinstein and Madame Gandarillas.”52 Since Bell had brought Lady Colefax and Marie Beerbohm into Picasso’s life, and was also having a sporadic affair with Madame Gandarillas, Picasso might have wanted to hint that Bell belonged with the detestable bourgeoisie rather than the intelligentsia.

  On this visit Bell also saw Cocteau: “I told him about Picasso—you know they have been at odds for some time—and he appeared to be a good deal upset.”53 This coolness stemmed from Parade. Cocteau had never entirely forgiven Picasso, Satie, and Diaghilev for suppressing his “noises off”—revolver shots, sirens, foghorns, and other would-be modernist effects—in the ballet’s original production. When Diaghilev proposed to revive the ballet in the spring of 1920, Cocteau lobbied to have his gimmicks restored, and was none too happy when Diaghilev put off the revival for another six months. Undeterred, the poet made such a fuss—“he’s worn Picasso and myself to a pulp,”54 Satie wrote Valentine Hugo—that Diaghilev finally gave way and agreed to the inclusion of the least bothersome of “Jean’s noises.”

  “Diaghilev is sweet as sugar,” Cocteau wrote the Hugos: “[he] is letting me stage Parade as it always should have been staged.”55 The revival took place at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on December 21. Diaghilev persuaded Picasso and Satie to overcome their irritation and take a bow with Cocteau from a box. Once again, Cocteau insisted that Parade was a triumph—a triumph in that, this time round, there was more of him and less of Picasso. “There were twelve curtain calls,”56 he later boasted, though as he well knew, these were for Picasso and not for him. “The same people who wanted to murder us in 1917 stood up and applauded in 1920. What had intervened? What made those conceited theatergoers do a volte-face and admit their mistake so humbly? A lady gave me the explanation, in the way she congratulated my mother: ‘Ah, madame,’ she cried. ‘How right they were to change it all!’ ”57 The words of Cocteau’s mother’s lady friend carry as much conviction as the imaginary harridans with hat pins in 1917.

  The success of Parade seems only to have fueled Cocteau’s resentment toward Picasso. Unwittingly, Rolf de Maré, Diaghilev’s avant-garde rival, enabled Cocteau to jab his hero in the back. Maré had been very impressed by a reading of Cocteau’s “Nietzschean farce,” Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, and had decided that his Ballets Suédois should stage it. Maré had wanted Auric to do the music, but Cocteau insisted that five out of his Les Six (besides Auric, Poulenc, Milhaud, Tailleferre, and Honegger) should each compose a separate section. This would be the only time Les Six worked together.

  Cocteau took a great deal of care over the seating at the répétition générale of Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel.58 In the absence of Olga, who was pregnant, he arranged for Picasso to join Misia Sert’s box with Chanel as his date. Whether or not he realized that he was being set up, Picasso went ahead and had a sporadic affair with her. This time round, it was not a gang of phantom hags who disrupted the second opening night of Parade, it was an all too real gang of belligerent dadaists out to demonstrate against the hated Cocteau. Somehow or other they had infiltrated the invited audience and “kept standing up and sitting down … shouting Vive Dada!”59 As a result, the critics were unable to hear enough of the words or music to write proper reviews. Although Les Mariés began as a succès de scandale, it ended up having a certain suc-cès d’estime. The dadaists had good reason to loathe Cocteau. He had taken their iconoclastic shtick and defused it into sophisticated, meretricious entertainment.

  Successive honeymoons with Radiguet kept Cocteau away from Paris. Picasso missed his treacherous Rigoletto. He missed his shamelessly insincere connaissance du monde, the fizz of his wit and his spite. He also missed having him around to mock, outwit, and torment.60

  Picasso holding Paulo, 1921.

  14

  L’Epoque des Duchesses (1921)

  At 9 p.m. on Friday, February 4, 1921, Olga gave birth to a son weighing “6 pounds 3 ounces,” according to a diary of Olga’s in the Archives Picasso. On March 14, Mlle. Arnauld, the wet nurse, left. Picasso did some drawings of her breast-feeding the baby;1 later he would draw Olga giving him his bottle. On April 2 at 11 a.m. the baby was christened Paul Joseph (after his father Pablo and grandfather, Don José) at the neighboring church of Saint-Augustin.2 The godparents were Misia Sert and Georges Bemberg, who was supposed to bring a Spanish archbishop to preside over the ceremony. Gertrude Stein—Picasso’s “pard” of prewar days— was not asked to be a godparent. They had quarreled: “they neither of them never knew about what,” wrote Gertrude in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

  Anyway, they did not see each other for a year and then they met by accident at a party at Adrienne Monnier’s. Picasso said how do you do to her and said something about her coming to see him. No I will not, she answered gloomily. … They did not see each other for another year and in the meantime Picasso’s little boy was born. … A very little while after this we were somewhere … and Picasso came up and put his hand on Gertrude Stein’s shoulder and said, oh hell, let’s be friends. Sure, said Gertrude Stein and they embraced. When can I come to see you, said Picasso, let’s see, said Gertrude Stein, I am afraid we are busy but come to dinner the end of the week. Nonsense, said Picasso, we are coming to dinner to-morrow, and they came.3

  After this reconciliation, “the friendship between Gertrude Stein and Picasso had become if possible closer than before (it was for his little boy, born February fourth to her February third, that she wrote her birthday book with a line for each day in the year).”4 Gertrude exaggerates. In fact, they saw rather less of each other.

  Gertrude also records that Max Jacob “was complaining that he had not been named godfather.”5 Nor had he received a formal announcement. When finally allowed to see little Paulo, Jacob claimed that “even the baby turned his back on me. Successive rejections prompted the heartbroken Max to leave Paris, the following June, for a quasi-monastic life in a presbytery attached to the secularised monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. For Max, Picasso had become a surrogate for Christ (and, on occasion, for the devil). Now that his messiah had effectively abandoned him, he decided to settle for the real thing. Shortly before taking this step, Max published another book of poetry, Le Laboratoire central. This includes two nostalgic poems about the past he had shared with Picasso: a long, intensely felt evocation of his visit to the artist at Céret in 1913, entitled “Honneur de la sardane et la tenora;” and a shorter, no less fine prose poem a
bout the Bateau Lavoir. Max evidently felt compelled—and not for the first or the last time either—to recall the highlights of his years as the artist’s disciple. He wanted to exorcise his obsession with Picasso—an obsession compounded of love that was both spiritual and physical and a lot of self-lacerating resentment. Poor Max, no amount of nostalgic verse or penitential prayer would ever banish these feelings.

  Max had another cross to bear: the young poet Louis Aragon. Aragon, who was supposedly his friend, indeed his protégé, and was about to abandon his medical studies to become a dadaist, published a roman à clef entitled Anicet ou le Panorama. Anicet was Aragon; the other characters included Bleu (Picasso), Jean Chipre (Jacob), Baptiste Ajamais (Breton), Harry James (Jacques Vaché, who had recently committed suicide), Ange Miracle (Cocteau), Le Bolonais (a crass American art critic), and the ghosts of Lautréamont and Rimbaud. In a passage of icy cruelty, Aragon describes the rich, celebrated artist, Bleu, jeering at his old friend, the anything but rich and celebrated Chipre:

  “I have been thinking about our life of suffering, dear pauper, savoring my pity for the past we shared and from which only I have been able to escape. In my astrakhan-collared overcoat, I want you, wretched Jean, companion of my freezing youth, to recall our winters without coal in studios without furniture. … oh the sweetness of being able to enjoy a little of the cold in which you still live. Look at me in my glory. I have accomplished all our dreams. You appear to me as if from the depths of a mirror, my exemplary friend, you have not betrayed my very first notion of myself. To me your eyes reflect more than the usual mirror images: your eyes are dazzled by my grandeur and riches…. Admire the costly cigar I am about to light, only three of us in the world smoke such as this: a millionaire, a convict and myself.”67