A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  In years to come, Picasso and Aragon would frequently meet, but, according to Jacqueline Picasso, the artist never liked the poet, neither in the heyday of surrealism nor later when the two of them became stars of the French Communist Party. After Anicet, it is hardly surprising. As for Jacob, he was deeply humiliated by the exposure and the mockery. Hysterical letters to Picasso reveal the extent of his hurt: “if you find this letter ridiculous, bear in mind that it is only natural for me to want to defend myself yet again—poor me, silent as a battered lamb.”8 Picasso took pity on Jacob. He did an engraving of him9 for yet another collection of poems, Visions infernals, which never in the end appeared. He gave Jacob a jacket (which was too small for him) and almost certainly some money10 Olga was relieved that the poet was no longer around, but Picasso missed him, as witness the two versions of the Three Musicians, the great tertulia paintings that date from the summer of Max’s departure.

  Olga and Paulo, 1921. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  At first Picasso was delighted to have a son, the only male heir born to his branch of the family. Paintings and drawings of the baby in his mother’s arms testify to paternal pride and love. But there was a downside to all of this. Olga would henceforth behave as if the birth of a son and heir entitled her to the prerogatives, not to mention the deference, due to the wife of the world’s foremost painter. From now on, she would play the role of Madame Picasso as if it were indeed a starring role. The artist, who was never anything but a Bohemian at heart, would try to adjust to her notion of how a celebrated artist should live. He was proud of Ol and enjoyed the ambiance she provided. This enjoyment came under increasii attack from some old friends. Gertrude Stein reported that when shown a Man R photograph of Picasso dressed as a torero at one of the Beaumont parties, Braq said, “I ought to recognize that gentleman.”11 This did not stop Picasso from attening these functions and then blaming Olga. “You see, Olga likes tea, caviar, pastri and so on,” he told Jacint Salvadó, the Catalan painter who modeled for him 1923, “me, I like sausage and beans.”12 Cabanne gives us a wonderfully revealii glimpse of Picasso in this same costume looking at himself in a mirror and murmuing, “comedia.”13

  Françoise Gilot points out the principal danger of Picasso’s involvement Parisian society:

  Olga’s social ambitions made increasingly greater demands on his time. In 1921 their son Paulo was born and then began his period of what the French call le high-life, with nurse, chambermaid, cook, chauffeur and all the rest, expensive and at the same time distracting. In spring and summer they went to Juan-les-Pins, Cap d’Antibes, and Monte Carlo, where—as in Paris—Pablo found himself more and more involved with fancy dress balls, masquerades, and all the other high jinks of the 1920s, often in company with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the Gerald Murphys, the Count and Countess Etienne de Beaumont, and other international birds of paradise.14

  Above: Cocteau. Caricature of Marie-Laure de Noailles and Etienne de Beaumont, 1931. Collection PFB / Rue des Archives. Left: Etienne de Beaumont in costume, probably for his Bal de la Mer, 1928. Photograph by Man Ray / Telimage.

  Picasso had met the Charlus-like Maecenas, Etienne de Beaumont, through Cocteau in 1916. He had become a close friend of this fiendish social tyrant. Beaumont’s patronage of avant-garde art (Picasso and Braque), music (Satie), and ballet (Massine) would culminate in 1924 in a ballet season, Les Soirées de Paris, which would include Picasso and Satie’s Mercure. As Gilot confirms, Picasso and Olga made regular appearances at the fancy-dress balls that Beaumont (who had trained as a dancer) and his wife Edith gave in their magnificent hôtel particulier on the rue Masseran. Since the manipulative Beaumont liked to keep his friends wondering whether or not they would be invited, he would always exclude two or three especially vulnerable people, as well as anyone “in trade.” When Misia found to her chagrin that Chanel, who had helped Beaumont with the costumes for his 1920 ball, had not been invited, she refused to attend. Instead, she and Chanel “with Picasso and Sert as our escorts … mingled with the chauffeurs crowded in front of the house to watch the costumed guests make their entrance. Rarely have I been so amused.”15 To épater his more straitlaced guests, Beaumont also encouraged exhibitionism and transvestitism. Jean Hugo, a great lover of women, was once made to dress in drag as Herodias in one of the endless entrées that were the pretext and focus of the balls. Lucien Daudet’s Spectre de la rose costume was so provocative that it was ripped off him, as he had doubtless intended.

  The earliest of these entertainments—the Tower of Babel Ball (Soirée Babel), which Picasso had attended—took place in 1916, but they did not become a Parisian institution until after the war. In 1919, the Beaumonts chose a theme that was risqué but impractical: guests were expected to leave “exposed that part of one’s body that one considered the most interesting.”1617 Later, there would be Le Bal des jeux (1922); L’Antiquité sous Louis XIV (1923); Le Bal des entrées de l’opéra (1925); Le Bal de la mer (1928); Le Bal colonial (1930); Le Bal des tableaux célèbres (1935); and Le Bal du tricentenaire de Racine (1939). The final one took place after World War II in 1949.

  Once the entrées—group after group of guests, directed as a rule by Massine, personifying such subjects as the Awakening of Ariadne, Little Red Riding Hood, or Sodom and Gomorrah—were over, there was little to drink (Beaumont was famously stingy) and nothing much to do except stand around and admire or disparage the guests’ costumes, or take people up on the invitations that certain outfits implied. For although these balls were a throwback to the court of Louis XIV, there were Saturnalian undercurrents.

  Jean Hugo said the dressing-up phase was more fun than the actual ball. The Beaumonts’ bedrooms would be a-shriek with camp followers doing their best to make fools of one another and themselves. Whatever the theme, Satie resented it; Cocteau usually came as Mercury. As for Beaumont, he always managed to upstage his guests by appearing in one spectacularly androgynous costume after another, designed by himself. Picasso claimed to be bored by these events, but he went on attending them until 1925. They remained friends until the Germans came between them in World War II.

  The entertainments devised by the Vicomte de Noailles and his wife, Marie-Laure—dear friends and bitter rivals of the Beaumonts—were far more relaxed and far more lavishly catered (at one of their balls the buffet included a pièce montée of oysters in shells filled with caviar). Picasso, who had met Marie-Laure through Cocteau, did two uncharacteristically staid drawings of her in 1921. In 1923 the twenty-one-year-old Marie-Laure—descended on one side from a family of plutocratic Belgian bankers (the Bischoffsheims) and on the other from Laure de Che-vigné (Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes and a granddaughter of the Marquis de Sade)—chose to marry into the gratin. Charles de Noailles, the twenty-second of his line, claimed that his family had lost more members to the guillotine in the Revolution than almost any other in France. Like Beaumont, he liked men; unlike Beaumont, he was very discreet about it.

  Marie-Laure had been an only child. Her father had died when she was two, leaving her an immense hôtel particulier on the Place des Etats Unis, filled with fine French furniture and old master paintings, including two superb Goya portraits. Over the years she would replace the lesser heirlooms with major works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, Léger, Mondrian, as well as an extensive collection of surrealist paintings, especially Dalís and Ernsts. In addition, she organized concerts of modern music in her rococo ballroom. Besides a frescoed ceiling by Solimena, the ballroom was equipped with a movie projector in a hidden cabinet and a white grand piano stacked with scores inscribed by such as Poulenc, Auric, Sauguet, Britten, Rieti, and Weill. To their credit, the Noailles were prepared to take far greater risks than their rivals in their patronage of avant-garde films: Les Mystères du Château du Dé (Man Ray), L’Age d}or (Luis Buñuel),18 Le Sang d}un poète (Jean Cocteau), and a 1928 thriller called Biceps et bijoux (Manuel Jacques).

  Left: Picasso. Portrait of Marie-Laure de Noailles, 1921. Charcoal on canvas, 130
x 97 cm. Private collection. Right: The Noailles’ ballroom, Place des Etats-Unis, Paris, paneling from a palazzo in Palermo; ceiling painting by Francesco Solimena. Photograph from Connais-sance, 1964. akg-images.

  Max Jacob’s description of this period as Picasso’s époque des duchesses smacks of envy: Jacob was a regular guest of Prince and Princess Georges Ghika and took far more interest in balls and masquerades than Picasso did. Actually, there was only one duchess Picasso remembered liking, as well as fancying: the unconventional Italian beauty Maria de Grammont, who subsequently married Jean Hugo’s brother François.19 Otherwise, he took no more interest in the gratin than the gratin took in him.

  Despite his oath never to work for Diaghilev again, Picasso allowed himself to be lured back into the ballet. He found the company in turmoil. Although credited by Alexandra Danilova with requiring “three girls and a boy to satisfy his daily needs,” Massine told Picasso he had finally fallen in love with an English dancer, Vera Savina (real name, Vera Clark). Diaghilev’s jealous rages were causing havoc at a time when Massine was working on his version of Sucre du printemps: colder and more abstract than Nijinsky’s, which the company had forgotten how to dance.20 Trust Misia to make a bad situation worse. One evening, Savina naively asked Misia, “Have you seen Mr. Massine? I have an appointment with him.” “Where?” Misia demanded. “At the Arc de Triomphe, but it’s such a big place I don’t know exactly where to meet him.” “I should stand right in the middle of the arch if I were you,” Misia replied, and hurried off to inform Diaghilev.21

  This much was published by Sokolova. In 1960, apropos of a mutual friend, whose jealous tantrums reminded him of Diaghilev’s, Picasso told me the rest of the story. On receiving Misia’s news, Diaghilev had telephoned Picasso and insisted that they go together in his car to the Arc de Triomphe. The two of them circled the Etoile again and again until Diaghilev decided that the guilty pair must have returned to the Continental. Back they rushed. “It was like a Feydeau farce,” Picasso said, “Diaghilev going up in an elevator, Massine racing down a flight of stairs, people popping in and out of bedrooms, Vera trying to escape.” A few days later (December 15), Diaghilev gave a grand diner to celebrate the opening of the ballet’s winter season. Guests included the principal stars as well as the Picassos, Misia, Chanel, and Stravinsky. Massine got very drunk and, according to Stravinsky, burned “Picasso’s hand with a cigarette (Picasso never moved).”22 Might this have been in return for Picasso spying on him?

  The company’s next engagement was Rome; and it was there that Diaghilev finally broke with Massine. The impresario was heartbroken and very bitter. “Hadn’t [I] … done everything for [him],” he said to Grigoriev. “Hadn’t [I] made him? What had Massine … been? Nothing but a good-looking face and poor legs!”23 Diaghilev had every reason to be furious. Massine’s departure left the company without a star dancer or a choreographer and the impresario without a lover—all this at a time when he was more than usually broke.

  A month later, a nice-looking, seventeen-year-old refugee from Moscow arrived unannounced in Diaghilev’s suite at the Continental. He turned out to be a precocious balletomane called Boris Kochno, who was immediately taken on—much to his disappointment—as a secretary rather than a lover. (Diaghilev had supposedly asked Kochno to undress. “Put your clothes back on,” the impresario said—“too hairy”)24 Nevertheless, their relationship worked extremely well. For the remaining eight years of Diaghilev’s life, Kochno would be an indispensable right-hand man, scenarist, and artistic collaborator. Picasso liked him enough to do a couple of drawings of him25 but claimed that he was an amusing rogue, one you had to keep an eye on; drawings had a way of walking out of the door with him.26

  On March 16, Kochno left Paris with Diaghilev and Stravinsky for Madrid, where the King had invited the company back for a two-week season. Since he no longer had a choreographer, Diaghilev thought up a balletic entertainment that did not need one. And he set about recruiting the most accomplished Gypsy dancers he could find for Cuadro flamenco—an evening of flamenco—to include in his forthcoming engagements in Paris and London. Diaghilev wanted Stravinsky to arrange the music, but the composer felt that traditional music needed no arranging and declined to do it. Nevertheless, the two of them plus Kochno went to Seville for the Semana Santa and the Feria:

  Night after night [Kochno recalled] the Gypsies poured in to dance for Diaghilev in a private room in a cabaret. Diaghilev’s task was complicated by the fact that most of these artists had not the slightest intention of signing a contract or of leaving Spain; they came for the pleasure of being applauded.… One day several of them … [presented] a protest. [Diaghilev] had concealed from them the fact that to reach Paris they would have to cross the ocean. Who had told them this? The barber in the corner shop.27

  Getting the flamenco performers to agree to terms proved so daunting a task that after signing up the beautiful Gypsy dancer María d’Albaicín,28 Diaghilev, Kochno, and Stravinsky returned to Paris, leaving the negotiations to underlings. Daily telegrams would arrive: May 1, “Ramírez has lost wits. Refuses contract unless we engage Rosario who will not come without aunt or Macarona or Malena who now asking six thousand with husband performer;” May 10, “Absolutely indispensable you meet me station Thursday with address cheap pension and bus transportation for entire flock for they are all repeat all dotty.”29

  As for the décor, this, too, posed a problem. Only a month was left before the first night. Picasso was the obvious choice, but he flatly refused to do it. Diaghilev knew how to win him round: play on the artist’s ticklish vanity by letting him know that he had commissioned Picasso’s “pupil,” Juan Gris, to do the sets. The unsuspecting Gris had even informed Kahnweiler of the good news. A week later came the bad news: Gris’s response had arrived too late; Diaghilev “had made other arrangements.”30 Six days after cabling Gris, Diaghilev had apparently cabled Picasso from Madrid to confirm that he had the job and that Gris had been demoted to doing portrait drawings for the program.31 Diaghilev’s strategy had evidently worked.

  “Picasso got away with it,” Gris wrote to Kahnweiler on April 29, “by producing a set of designs already made, saying that I would never be able to do it in so short a time. He seems also to have rattled the skeleton of cubism and dwelt on the difficulties of executing any conception of mine. However, I never thought of making a lot of poor creatures dance around with buildings on their backs.”32 Picasso did indeed have “a set of designs already made.” Ironically, these were the Pulcinella ones—a stage within a stage with trompe l’oeil boxes to left and right33—that Diaghilev had originally rejected and enraged Picasso by stamping on. And, all too true, Gris was inexperienced and unable to come up with anything as ambitious and original as Picasso’s designs in a matter of weeks.

  Diaghilev duly returned to Paris, and he and Picasso set about adapting the Pulcinella set to the requirements of Cuadro flamenco and the small, ill-equipped stage of the Gaîté Lyrique. The shabby theater on the boulevard de Sebastopol, which catered to a working-class public with a taste for operetta was all that Diaghilev could afford.34 As it turned out, the Gaieté Lyrique proved to be the perfect foil for Picasso’s parodic décor and the perfect setting for a troupe of Gypsies, who, when not performing, perched on a row of chairs, clapping their hands and shouting olé. Kochno told Buckle that the locals, who had whistled and booed the fashionable first-nighters as they arrived (May 17, 1921), soon became fans of the ballet, so much so that “one night Misia, in her box, raised a lorgnette to survey the packed house and, recognizing no familiar face, exclaimed ‘There’s no one here.’ ”35

  To give Cuadro flamenco a macabre Goyesque edge, Diaghilev had included a performer called Maté el Sín Pies. His legs had been cut off at the knees so he had to dance on “stout leather sheaths” fixed to his stumps.36 Picasso was so fascinated by him and his partner, a dwarf dancer called Gabrielita del Garrotín, that he arranged for them to perform a mock bullfight late one nigh
t in the courtyard outside Chanel’s magnificent Faubourg Saint-Honoré apartment, to the horror of the landlord, Count Pillet-Will, who lived above.37

  Despite their popularity in Paris, these “freaks” caused so many protests in London that their dance had to be eliminated. There were no such protests at the Gypsy women’s unorthodox way of accepting applause: “they would lean over the footlights, push up their breasts, and then [jerk] their bodies so that their breasts shook violently.”38 D’Albaicín was so dazzling that Diaghilev decided to keep her in the company. He arranged for Sokolova to teach her the role of the Miller’s Wife in Tricorne. After one performance, it became clear that she would never manage to reconcile the demands of Massine’s choreography with flamenco spontaneity. Nevertheless, she remained with the company and appeared in the revival of the Sleeping Princess in 1921. The scenery for Cuadro flamenco was never used again. Only the bits that Picasso had actually painted—the four stage boxes and a basket of flowers—were preserved.39 Diaghilev was relieved at the departure of his flamenco troupe. Fear of backstage violence had prompted him to hurry nervously past them. If Cuadro flamenco was the last major décor that Picasso did for the Ballets Russes, it was not for lack of offers from Diaghilev. On accepting an invitation from the Prince de Monaco in 1922 to base his company at the Monte Carlo opera house, Diaghilev asked Picasso to do the sets for two operettas: Gounod’s Philémon et Baucis and Chabrier’s L’Education manquée. The artist was not the least interested, so the impresario had Benois do the Gounod and Juan Gris the Chabrier. For his part, Picasso came up with his own conceptual projects—bonnes blagues, he called them—as Cooper relates: