A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  One of these projects, described to me by Kochno and confirmed by Picasso, called for a still-life décor of assorted meats and vegetables in and around which the dancers, dressed as flies, would weave while progressively devouring the delights of the table. Another such project, described to me by Picasso himself, was a ballet about the life of Diaghilew, showing him in a succession of scenes from the day he cut his first tooth to the toothless Diaghilew of old age. These projects were, of course, imaginative flights on the part of Picasso.… Yet there was behind them the serious purpose of trying to spur Diaghilew on to recapture the mood in which Parade had been created and produce ballets which were more challenging and lively.40

  It was in this mocking spirit that Picasso agreed to replace Bakst’s ornate, outdated scenery for L’Après-midi d’un faune, which had perished during the war. Diaghilev wanted something more modern, something that would work with Bro-nislava Nijinska’s new production of her brother’s masterpiece. Picasso came up with a minimalist set: a backcloth with horizontal strips of yellowish beach, bluish sea, and bluish-gray sky. The impresario was horrified—“I wanted Egypt and you’ve given me Dieppe”—all the same he used it.41 Forty years later Picasso would have a similar problem with the Paris Opéra when Lifar, the maître de ballet, commissioned him to do another minimal Après-midi d’un faune. Auric, an old but no longer close friend of Picasso’s, first accepted it42 and then, according to Cooper, “refused to allow it to be carried out.”43 Undeterred, Lifar used the curtain in the summer of 1965 at the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse at a special evening of ballets by Picasso that he had arranged. After Lifar showed me the paltry design, I thoroughly agreed with Auric.

  As he had done with Tricorne and Pulcinella, Rosenberg organized a major Picasso exhibition (May 13-June 11) to coincide with Cuadro flamenco. To create a context for the recent classical works, Picasso decided to add important examples from earlier periods. Unlike the 1920 show, the exhibits were mostly on canvas and not paper. There were thirty-nine paintings, but more works may have been added at the last moment. The loans included Gertrude Stein’s Woman with a Fan, Eugenia Errázuriz’s Seated Man, Etienne de Beaumont’s 1914 cubist still life, Gompel’s 1905 Rose period gouache of two young Saltimbanques, and Léonce Rosenberg’s 1915 Harlequin.44 This painting would exert a powerful influence—as Picasso’s earlier works so often did on his later works—on this summer’s greatest achievement, the two versions of the Three Musicians.45 The dealer also brought the large portrait of his wife and daughter down from his apartment above the gallery. Picasso added the 1918 portrait of Olga and the 1918 Biarritz Bathers from his own collection.

  The cynosure of Rosenberg’s show was Two Nudes. Its overwhelming presence and monumental scale did more than any of his previous works to establish Picasso as a preeminent modern painter. Not that most gallerygoers understood what they were looking at. For all its representationalism, Two Nudes was sometimes mistaken, according to Pierre Reverdy, for Adam and Eve.46

  There is little to be learned from the reviews of Rosenberg’s show. Fresh from publishing a mawkish roman à clef, La Négresse du Sacré Cœur, about Picasso (portrayed as a painter called Sorgue) and the orphan that he and Fernande had adopted in 1907,47 André Salman wrote an embarrassing, would-be “brilliant” preface to the catalog in the manner of Cocteau. Maurice Raynal, who had written perceptively about cubism and recently published the first monograph on Picasso (interestingly, in German as well as French), provided loyal but half-hearted support. Bissière, an enlightened critic who would become a well-known abstract painter, made much of a supposed dichotomy between Picasso’s “Spanish” cubism and his “French” classicism,48 but he was too much of a chauvinist to perceive that Picasso’s classicism was rooted in his atavistic Mediterraneanism rather than la grande tradition française; and that, despite his plundering of Gauguin and Cézanne, Ingres and Corot, his art would always be inherently Spanish in its darkness and intensity, its savagery, paradox, and irony. Picasso was closer, in spirit if not in style, to Goya than to most of the French masters.

  On the subject of criticism, Picasso shared Braque’s view that “if a critic’s explanations make things less rather than more explicit, that’s all to the good.” “French poets are particularly helpful in this respect,” Braque said. “Few of them have understood the first thing about modern painting, yet they are always writing about it…. Almost the only exception is Reverdy”49 Indeed, Pierre Reverdy’s text on Picasso50 was one of the few publications about him that he admired. Reverdy, who only liked the company of artists—“They lie less,” he used to say51—had come to love painting, above all cubism, through Braque. He had helped the artist polish the pensées on art, which Braque had jotted down while convalescing from his wound. Reverdy would publish these maxims in his short-lived magazine, Nord-Sud. Such sayings as “A vase gives form to the void as music does to silence” would not so much explain cubism as familiarize readers with the ideas behind it.

  Reverdy is particularly good on Picasso’s portrait drawings:

  Nobody has wanted to say or see that the line in these drawings is cleaner, stronger, more precise and also more incisive than anyone else’s; and that [Picasso] achieves a likeness through a process of reconstitution, whereas others confine themselves to copying…. He avoids the picturesque and never idealizes … [and] he never has recourse to the literary, evocative or extraneous devices, which no other artist in recent years has been able to forgo.52

  Throughout his text Reverdy stresses the importance of poésie—“poésie is to literature what cubism is to painting.”53 This was a concept that Braque would make his own; insofar as it involved metamorphosis, so would Picasso. “Poésie,” Braque once explained, is “the quality I value above all else in art. … It is to painting what life is to man. … It is something that each artist has to discover for himself through his intuition. For me it is a matter of harmony of rapports, of rhythm … of metamorphosis…. Everything changes according to circumstances: that’s metamorphosis.”54 Picasso’s preoccupation with metamorphosis would owe a great deal to ideas formulated by Braque.

  Picasso. Portrait of Pierre Reverdy Reading at rue la Boétie, 1921. Etching, 11.8 x 8.8 cm. Musée Picasso Paris.

  Braque and his wife, Marcelle, had been infuriated by Picasso’s much repeated quips. He used to refer to Braque as “my ex-wife,” and claimed that after seeing Braque and Derain off to war at Avignon station in 1914 he had never seen them again. Their pre-1914 competitiveness still prevailed, but it had soured into disapproval of Picasso’s worldliness. In 1922, Reverdy, who had a mysterious bustup with Braque, would write Picasso a letter about the two large classical figures, Les Canéphores,55 that Braque had recently painted, “Here we have the integral cubist on a new path doing [classical] women which he will not hesitate to say he was the first to come up with. I believe these women have been done for the house that Doucet is building. Braque is a pure and disinterested artist, but he has lost no time in summoning Doucet to see them. Do you agree with me that he will probably sell them at a reduced price? Hein!” Reverdy seems to be egging Picasso on to envision Braque laying claim to a prior role in the neoclassical revival, just as he had come out in 1912 with the all-important first papier collé behind Picasso’s back.

  The two artists may have grown apart, but when it came to painting, Picasso still subscribed to many of the precepts, not only the notion of metamorphosis but the notion of tactile space, that Braque had instilled in him. Braque would always occupy a central place in Picasso’s cosmology. The reverse did not apply. The fact that La Lecture (1921)—Picasso’s painting of two men reading a letter,5657 which commemorates his heroic association with Braque—was never exhibited or published in his lifetime suggests that Picasso did not want anyone to detect the nature of their psychic codependence or their rivalry. Might the letter they are both reading stand for the papier collé that was central to their relationship?58 As Gertrude Stein reported, “Picasso
never wished Braque away.”59 If Braque wished Picasso away, it was much more than a matter of a wounded war hero’s resentment. It was his realization that he had to break with Picasso if he were to survive as a great artist.

  Olga in Picasso’s studio at Fontainebleau; on the wall, a group of large pastels; in the foreground, a pastel landscape, 1921. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

  15

  Summer at Fontainebleau

  Before leaving for the summer, Picasso suffered an ordeal that he had been dreading for the previous seven years: the first of four sales of Kahnweiler’s confiscated stock.1 The collections of two private dealers, Wilhelm Uhde and Richard Goetz, would also be auctioned.2 Since over half his cubist output was at stake, Picasso had fought to have the sequestration set aside. He had expected to recover at least the items for which Kahnweiler had never paid, but now he had lost hope. Braque, Derain, Léger, and Vlaminck, whose work had also been sequestered, were more optimistic than Picasso. As French citizens who had served their country, they felt entitled to preferential treatment; however, the world situation worked against them. The Germans were so slow in paying the reparations stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles that the French government decided to convert all the assets they had been able to confiscate into cash. There would be no exceptions.

  After being turned down once and for all by the authorities, the artists directed their rage at Léonce Rosenberg, who was doing his best to usurp Kahnweiler’s place as the impresario of cubism. Léonce had managed to get himself appointed expert adviser for the auctions. This, he said, would guarantee the success of the sales and put cubism back on the map as an ongoing movement. Léonce claimed to be doing this for ideological reasons; in fact, his motives were anything but ideological. This unscrupulous man wanted to prevent Kahnweiler from recovering his prewar stock, so that he could crown himself king of cubism.

  Paul Rosenberg tacitly supported his brother. The dismemberment of cubism would be to his advantage. However, he was far too canny to appear to have had a hand in things and be tarred with the same brush as Léonce. By flooding the market with the cream of cubism, he effectively devalued it and earned the contempt and distrust of the painters he claimed to be promoting. As Kahnweiler foresaw, the auctions would be a disaster; the prices for paintings by the major cubists would not appreciate for another twenty years.3 Far from garnering any profit or prestige from his auctions, Léonce also did himself in as a dealer and, despite a flair for modernism—a flair devoid of discrimination—he found himself regarded as a menace to the art trade. Léonce would not redeem himself until World War II, when he took conspicuous pride in flaunting his yellow star in the streets of German-occupied Paris and behaving as if nothing were amiss. For once luck was with him. He survived.

  Before dealing with Kahnweiler’s stock, the authorities held a sale of Uhde’s collection at the Hôtel Drouôt on May 30,1921. The seventy-three items included works by Picasso, Braque, Léger, Laurencin, and the Douanier Rousseau. The Braques, all seventeen of them—did badly, but the Picassos did relatively well. His Portrait of Uhde sold for 1,650 francs and his great 1910 painting ofFanny Tellier (Girl with the Mandolin) for 18,000 francs,4 but the highest price of all, 26,000 francs, was paid for the best of Uhde’s many Douanier Rousseaus, Woman in Red in a Forest.5 Considering all the controversy in the press, the Vente Uhde went off without incident.

  The first of the four Kahnweiler sales (June 13-14) was enlivened by a fight, triggered surprisingly by Braque—who was memorably described by his literary friend, Jean Paulhan, as “reflective but violent.” In his rage at Léonce’s attempt to pass himself off as cubism’s spokesman, Braque seized the dealer and shook him like an old rag. Despite his victim’s shouts and screams, Braque went on kicking away at him. When Amedée Ozenfant tried to separate them, he got kicked in the stomach and sent flying into the arms of André Level. After Léonce called him a “Norman pig,” Braque, who prided himself on his Norman upbringing, as well as his prowess as a boxer, pounded the dealer with his fists until the victim shrieked for rescue from “this madman.”67

  All of a sudden, Matisse materialized. Gertrude Stein told him what the brawl was about, and he, too, started shouting. “Braque is right, this man has robbed France, and we all know about those who have robbed France.”8 In the end, the police were summoned and the participants were taken off to the police station where Rosenberg made a scene at being tutoyéd by Braque only to be reprimanded for insulting a war hero with a Croix de Guerre. No charges were brought. Braque did not reappear in the saleroom. Instead, he returned in disgust to his house at Sorgues. Léonce set about learning to box.

  Kahnweiler did not attend the sales. It would have been too painful, and the terms of the sequestration order prohibited him from bidding on his own property. No matter, friends and family members—his brother Gustav, the Berlin dealer Alfred Flechtheim, and Hermann Rupf, who had looked after him during his wartime exile in Switzerland—formed a syndicate under the name “Grassat” and purchased as many lots as they could afford. Kahnweiler’s millionaire uncle, Sir Sigmund Neumann, to whom he had once been apprenticed,9 had advanced him a 100,000-franc line of credit in April 1920, but most of this had been earmarked for his new Paris gallery.

  On November 17, 1921, Kahnweiler had to undergo the torture of a second sale. Once again, the atmosphere in Room 6 of the Hôtel Drouôt was highly charged. Potential bidders drummed their feet on the floor, impatient for the boxing to start. They would not be disappointed. This time, Léonce’s attacker was Adolphe Basler, a Polish critic and “collector,” a euphemism used by private dealers. “Poor Basler,” as he was known to Picasso in the Bateau Lavoir days, was supposedly a supporter of modern art, but, like many other nervous émigrés, he had become more chauvinistic than the French. In an attack at the time of the third sale the following year, this xenophobe had deplored the “Gypsy tricks” with which foreign artists like Picasso “easily fascinate the public.”10 Whereupon Léonce called Basler a “dirty half-breed,” and now, in front of Kahnweiler’s ill-fated stock, ethnic slurs flew.11 “Filthy Pole!” Léonce yelled. “Austrian swine!” Basler yelled back, and brought his cane crashing down on Léonce’s head, as the latter was about to hit him on the nose. Egregious critic Louis Vauxcelles deplored their behavior as “the art world’s new manner”—for once at a loss for a demeaning term.12

  This second sale included forty-six Picassos, thirty-five Braques, fifteen Grises, ten Légers, sixty Vlamincks, twenty-seven Van Dongens, as well as a number of gouaches, drawings, and papiers collés, which were sold several at a time in bundles. At today’s rates, the sale could fetch over a billion dollars. As a result of Léonce’s mismanagement, they made the ludicrously small figure of 175,215 francs. Even so, Kahnweiler’s syndicate could not afford more than twenty-five lots. Given the international slump in the fall of 1921, this sale was even more of a disaster than the previous one. Only Léonce maintained otherwise. “All this is good publicity for the cubists … compensation for your losses,” he had the gall to tell Kahnweiler, who replied that he was too cast down by misfortune “to see it in such an objective manner.”13 In a letter written to Derain a month before the second sale, Kahnweiler had deplored Léonce’s cheeky request to collaborate with him “out of courtesy to a fellow defender of cubism … the Rosenbergs are bastards. To think that Léonce is now making grotesque proposals. I am convinced that had they not meddled, an agreement with the government could have been reached.”14

  Kahnweiler was right. Both Rosenberg brothers were at fault. While appearing to hover above the fray, Paul slyly pursued his own agenda. If Léonce’s irresponsible behavior ruined the market for cubism, so much the better for him. Paul was ready to speculate in cubism if there was money to be made (his Picasso show in June had included as many as twenty cubist works); however, Paul never really understood or liked the movement. He wanted Picasso once and for all to finish with it, stick to classicism, and remain within the b
ounds of traditional representationalism. Unlike Léonce, Paul seems never to have imagined that cubism might come to be perceived as the most significant movement of the twentieth century, which is why, despite derisory prices, he did not buy any Picassos at the Kahnweiler sales. Rosenberg seems also to have dissuaded Picasso from buying back any of his own art—an inexplicable lapse, given the value the artist put on his cubist work and the regret he would feel at owning so little of it. Rosenberg’s hands-off attitude may cast light on another mystery: why, given his former, desperate efforts to retrieve his sequestered works, Picasso took so little interest in their fate.

  Just as Picasso had let Kahnweiler decide how best to market his work before World War I, he accorded the same power to Rosenberg after it. It was all a matter of strategy. Kahnweiler had cleverly concentrated on promoting and disseminating his cubist artists’ work in Germany, where there were fewer local hacks and plagiarists to contend with. However, the war had turned this highly successful Ostpolitik into a fatal liability. Cubist painters, who were foreigners, had been singled out for chauvinistic attack.15 Far from looking eastward, dealers in modern art now looked westward to America for a new market. For Paul Rosenberg—a steely operator who cared far more for the business of art than for art itself—the bargain sales that his brother, Léonce, was promoting were a blessing in disguise in that they made it easier for Paul to manipulate the public into accepting Picasso as a new artist, cleansed of his revolutionary cubist past. Realpolitik would take the place of Ostpolitik.

  To transform Picasso into a best seller, Rosenberg had recourse to a time-honored trick of his trade: encouraging the husband to indulge the wife. The more Picasso pandered to his wife’s taste for Chanel and Cartier, the more he would need to paint. Sure enough, Picasso came up with a number of small, saleable paintings: classical figures on the beach or formulaic still lifes in a decorative cubistic style. These lesser works abound in ingenious combinations of texture and color and are more energized than comparable paintings by the Salon cubists. They sold extremely well. As for the more important paintings, Rosenberg’s ploy was to tell an interested client that the work he liked was “not for sale,” except to him and the Louvre. He also promoted the artist as a protean modern master rather than a “difficult” cubist. Picasso’s prices accordingly doubled or even trebled in 1920-21 and would continue to rise until the Wall Street crash of 1929. Although it was short-lived and unsuccessful, Rosenberg’s attempt to manipulate the artist would cast a long shadow. Critics still cite the early works that Picasso did for his dealer to disparage the masterpieces in which he challenged the canons of classicism.