A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  The results of the Kahnweiler sales did not deter Léonce Rosenberg from going ahead with a series of no less ill-advised sales of his own stock in Amsterdam. These would prove to be as much of a disaster for him as for everyone else. By October 1922, he was virtually bankrupt and consigned 381 canvases from his Galerie de l’Ef-fort Moderne, including a great many Picassos, to an Amsterdam auction house called A. MAK. Paris dealers were amazed at his folly. Kahnweiler’s biographer dismisses these sales as a fiasco.1617 And so they may have been, above all for the artists involved; nevertheless, they included important works by Picasso and Braque—the best of which were bought by Helene Kröller-Müller and are now in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.18 The sales also included hundreds of paintings and drawings, many of them by Léger, Duchamp, and Picabia. These Amsterdam sales did little to save Léonce from ruin. His brother Paul, who usually came to his rescue, refused to do so on this occasion. “Penniless and crazed,” Léonce turned for advice to the one person he had done the most to wrong: Kahn-weiler. “You are to blame for everything that is occurring now, the eclipse of cubism and the rest of it,” the valiant, albeit bitter Kahnweiler told Léonce; however, he characteristically extended a helping hand, “not out of compassion for the man but because one liquidation is enough.”19 Cubism would have suffered even more if Léonce’s gallery had closed; “that would be too many in one year.”20 Kahnweiler advised his nemesis to apply for a moratorium available to veterans whose businesses had failed in the postwar slump; this would keep this tragically flawed bungler solvent.

  Olga holding Paulo, with Doña María and Picasso at Fontainebleau, September 1, 1921.

  Toward the end of June 1921, the Picassos, a nurse, and other retainers moved for the summer to a rented house at 33, boulevard Gambetta, in Fontainebleau.21 Picasso had wanted to return to the Midi, but Olga felt that she and her baby needed to be within reach of Paris; also Fontainebleau had a famously healthy microclimate. The house they found was a larger version of the house at Montrouge, and it was likewise protected by railings. There was a pleasant garden with a pond, where Olga liked to nurse Paulo, and Picasso would sit doing drawings of her.22 He also did drawings of the house’s conventionally pleasant rooms, one of which had a piano for Olga to play.23 By way of a studio, he took over the adjacent coach house, which had a cobblestone floor and plastered walls. Its considerable scale and height allowed the artist to work on very large canvases.24

  In this makeshift studio Picasso spent the next three months, turning out a succession of masterpieces—far more than he had done in the previous six months in Paris. Now that the baby had eclipsed him as the main focus of the household, he preferred to shut himself away in the garage and wrestle with classicism. As Penrose says, “Picasso was not entirely happy with his role of paterfamilias.”25 Also he missed

  Paris: “he remarked to friends who visited him that he was thinking of ordering a Parisian street lamp and a pis-sotière to relieve the neat respectability of the lawn.”26 As the rue la Boétie had been packed up for the summer, Picasso preferred not to go there.

  “Fear of loneliness—a dominant trait in Picasso— gave him a sovereign horror of spending the night alone in his apartment… of finding the bedroom with the two brass bedsteads empty”27 He had a tempting alternative: Chanel had put a room in her Faubourg Saint-Honoré apartment at his disposal. She was not entirely désintéressée. Years later, she confessed to Paul Morand that she had fancied Picasso: “He was the only one in that milieu who really turned me on, but he was not free.”28 Nor, for that matter, were Chanel’s other two principal lovers: Stravinsky and Reverdy were both married, but that had not deterred her. The reluctance is more likely to have been on Picasso’s side. Chanel was too much of a celebrity—and not submissive enough.

  Coco Chanel, 1932. Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

  Misia had dried Chanel’s tears after the death of her lover “Boy” Capel in a motor accident two years earlier; she had encouraged Chanel to give Diaghilev massive financial support. But she was outraged when Chanel dared to give her protégé, Stravinsky, money for a concert at the Salle Gaveau. In a spasm of vindictive rage, Misia had fired off a telegram to Stravinsky, who was in Madrid with Diaghilev, informing him that Chanel was having an affair with the Grand Duke Dimitri: “Coco is a midinette who prefers Grand Dukes to artists.” Stay away, Diaghilev wired Chanel, “Stravinsky wants to kill you.”29

  “Tante Brutus,” the name that Cocteau and Satie had invented for Misia, pro-ceded to make trouble between Picasso and Chanel. Misia had apparently boasted of having saved Chanel from the artist, Chanel told Morand: “The only person I needed to be saved from was Misia. Grass never grows back where Misia bestows her affections. Picasso did a great job hoovering up anyone in his path, but his vacuum cleaner never came my way. The man pleased me. In fact, it was his painting I admired, although I did not understand it. I found it convincing, and that is what I like. For me it’s a logarithm table.”30 Chanel went on to say that she had “always had the friendliest feelings for Picasso. I believe them to be reciprocated. Despite upheavals, we have not changed.”31 As for Misia, Chanel had the last word: “We love people only for their faults. Misia has given me abundant reasons for loving her.”32 Despite the bitchery, these daunting women remained friends for life, bound ever more closely together by a fondness for morphine.

  As well as her affairs with Stravinsky and Grand Duke Dimitri and the occasional night with Picasso, Chanel carried on a more serious and long-lasting relationship with Picasso’s old friend Reverdy. She chose well. This remarkable poet would mean more to her than anyone since “Boy” Capel. Reverdy had come into Chanel’s life through Misia, who had helped him launch Nord-Sud (1916-18). Nord-Sud and Pierre Albert-Birot’s SIC were the two most progressive magazines of art and literature of their day. Chanel would try to take over this ascetic and truculent recluse, but never succeeded. She financed Reverdy’s first major book of poems, Cravates de chanvre, a reference to the hempen rope used in hangings. Picasso engraved a portrait charge for it.33 He also did a watercolor on every page of a special copy printed for Chanel.34

  In her early days, Chanel had preferred the company of artists and poets to that of her fashionable customers and so had no problem with Reverdy’s solitary ways or humble origins—hers were even humbler. Besides, they both loved food and wine. Nor did she mind his slovenly Napoleonic looks—physical qualities meant less to her than intelligence, character, and charm. However, Chanel was never able to undermine Reverdy’s loyalty to his wife Henriette, a former seamstress who had given up her work to live with him in poverty in Montmartre. Inspired by Max Jacob, he rejected his socialist father’s atheism and became a Catholic (he was baptized on May 2, 1921).35 Chanel would be further shattered in 1926, when Reverdy decided to abandon worldly things to go and live with his wife at the monastery of Solesmes, as an oblate—a lay monk. And there he stayed until his death in 1960. Reverdy and Chanel remained closely in touch; to her dying day she would be a fanatical champion of his work.

  Among the numerous friends and collectors who visited Picasso at Fontaine-bleau, one of the most useful was Henri-Pierre Roché, the art adviser and writer (Jules et Jim) who had introduced the artist to Gertrude and Leo Stein in 1905. On July 9, Roché motored out from Paris with yet another important modern art collector, the American lawyer John Quinn, and his mistress, a poet called Jeanne Robert Foster, to have tea, including foie gras, with the Picassos in the garden. Quinn was already negotiating with Rosenberg to buy Two Nudes; next spring, he would acquire Three Women at the Spring directly from Picasso.36 Roché was such an old friend that Picasso let him go through his “private collection”—a cache of paintings from all periods, which he kept locked away in the rue la Boétie and had never allowed Rosenberg to see. Roché managed to persuade Picasso to sell Quinn his last two Blue period paintings, but the artist reneged on the deal.

  Since Picasso had never signed a contract
with Rosenberg, he was in a position to do deals on the side, but this sometimes made for complications. “[Picasso] changes his mind … without seeming to know why—and remaining so friendly and sweet,” Roché informed Quinn.37 This useful go-between arranged for the collector to buy “the small giant women”38 as well as some other works from Picasso. The artist was so scrupulous that he refused to accept a check from Quinn’s agent until the paintings had been delivered. Roché cited this as an example of Picasso’s paradoxical way of doing business. “[He] is at the same time very simple, very sweet and very difficult with money—absolutely to be trusted as you know.”39

  Another visitor who had come to play an important role in Picasso’s life was Paulo’s godfather, Georges Bemberg. In September 1920, Bemberg had sent Picasso a heartbroken letter announcing the death of his wife and baby. Since then, Bemberg had staunched his grief by taking on a new wife, Marie Vrubova.40 Like her predecessor, she was Russian. Her husband had lost his life fighting the Bolsheviks. Countess Vrubova had managed to escape to France with her three daughters, Marie, Irène, and Olga, to whom Bemberg would become, all too briefly, a devoted stepfather.

  As well as an apartment in Paris, Bemberg had rented a charming house, Le Manoir Charmilles, at Yerres, a small attractive town twenty-two kilometers southeast of Paris, where Gustave Caillebotte, the painter and pioneer impressionist collector, had lived across the Yerres River from Bemberg. Caillebotte’s views of the town would be a feature of his retrospective at the 1921 Salon d’Automne. The manor house that Bemberg had rented no longer exists, nor do the stables with rooms above, which he transformed into studios—one for Picasso and one for himself. This neurotic young man had always hoped to have the artist as a mentor, and it now seemed as if his wish would come true. Picasso liked the idea of a studio outside Paris, where he could work in seclusion and escape his dealer as well as his wife and baby. After leaving Fontainebleau in the fall, Picasso took Bemberg up on his offer and, according to one of his host’s stepdaughters, for the next two years would frequently make use of the hideaway studio at Yerres.

  Picasso was always sensitive to changes in his surroundings; and the proximity of François I’s château with its decorations by Primaticcio and Rosso and their French followers, as well as the sculptures of Jean Goujon, were crucial to his initial essays in the grand manner. A back entrance, only five minutes from his rented house, provided Picasso with easy access to the eponymous fountains and network of springs in the great royal park, where he liked to exercise his dog Lotti. A shortish walk would bring him to the famous four-hundred-year-old vine or to the Napoleon Fountain, a semicircular stone parapet enclosing a grottolike rock with a spring gushing out of it.41 This would be the setting for this summer’s classical set pieces, the two versions of Three Women at the Spring: the first, a monumental sanguine on canvas; the second, a no less monumental painting, nothing like as lively as the sanguine, which would have pride of place on the walls of the château that Picasso would acquire in 1930.42

  Another source of inspiration would have been the exhibition of School of Fontainebleau drawings that lasted all summer long in the château’s Jeu de Paume. It had been organized by La Société des Amis de Fontainebleau, under the auspices of Bemberg’s sister, the Marquise (Rosita) de Ganay, whose magnificent château, Courances, abuts the Forest of Fontainebleau. Bemberg would certainly have taken Picasso to see this exhibition of the ninety-two works on paper. Several of them were sanguines, which might explain his lavish use of this medium in what is surely the artist’s largest drawing. The drawings in the Fontainebleau show belonged mostly to a collector called Jean Masson, who specialized in the Italians Primaticcio, Niccolò dell’Abbate, and Luca Penni and the French Du Cerceau, Caron, and Dubreuil. They seem to have constituted something of a challenge to Picasso. The slender, long-necked water nymphs emblematic of the château’s genius loci are the antithesis of Picasso’s portly naiads, although every bit as mannerist.43 The indulgence in distortion and exaggeration, in the morbid and the bizarre, are as much a feature of the sixteenth-century School of Fontainebleau allegory as they are of Picasso’s prodigious perversions of the Apollonian ideal.

  Jean Goujon workshop. Roman Charity, c. 1550-62. Stone relief, 269.5 x 133 x 40 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

  Mannerist sculpture—above all the great reliefs (1550–62) that Goujon and his workshop executed for the Cour Carré at the Louvre—left no less of a mark on Picasso’s Fontainebleau paintings, Three Women at the Spring especially, as well as, later, on his sculpture. The works that most fascinated Picasso were the four Michelan- gelesque reliefs that had been taken down early in the nineteenth century by Napoleon’s decorators, Percier and Fontaine, and installed in the garden of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.44 These did not return to the Louvre until 1980, and they now embellish the underground rotunda in the Cour Napoléon. Their enormously enlarged arms and legs, hands and feet, and the way these massive bodies have been crammed into smallish spaces out of which they seem to be bursting endow them with the heft and monumentality that Picasso was always after. Interestingly, “archaic Greece and Jean Goujon”45 is how, some twenty-five years later, he would define the difference between his mistress, Françoise Gilot, and one of her girlfriends.

  Picasso. La Source, July 8, 1921. Pencil on paper, 49.4 x 64 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  Picasso also helped himself to “one of the most famous images in all Fontaine-bleau iconography,”46 a sixteenth-century engraving after a drawing by Rosso, traditionally entitled The Nymph of Fontainebleau. This engraving, which corresponds to a decoration in the king’s gallery, inspired a number of drawings of a similar nymph emptying an amphora into a rock pool from which a dog sometimes drinks.47 In the earlier versions of this subject, dated July 11 and 12—that is to say soon after his arrival—the nymph with the amphora reclines on a beach,48 as if sunbathing at Juan-les-Pins. Picasso’s Fontainebleau imagery is permeated with the atmosphere of these history-haunted woods and watercourses and the fountain, where he sets his hefty women stretching out their hands to the splashing water as they fill jugs that mirror the scale and amplitude of their owners.

  Quasi-Pompeian sketches done around the same time testify to the pull of classi- cal antiquity49 and his mastery of the classical vernacular. At the same time, Picasso delved back into his own past and found inspiration in a critically important early cubist painting, Three Women of 1908,500 which is almost exactly the same size as the Fontainebleau painting. He may also have been reaching back into his childhood memories of crouching under a table at the feet of his thunder-thighed aunts who helped his dumpy mother at the washtub or kitchen sink, while the father hung out in the local cafés with his tertulia.

  The Nymph of Fontainebleau (detail), c. 1545-54. Engraved by Pierre Milan and René Boyvin after a design by Rosso Fiorentino. Intaglio sheet, 31.8 x 52.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Junius S. Morgan.

  After he returned to Paris, Picasso envisaged an urban, modern-dress version of Three Women at the Spring: a group of women and children—conceivably Bem-berg’s stepdaughters, who complained of having to sit for Picasso—gathered around a very different source of water: a Wallace fountain.51 Nothing came of this composition, but some of the figures reappear later in the fall in some spectacular pastels.52

  In a report to Vanessa Bell about his springtime visit to Picasso, Roger Fry declared that “he now needs a vast hall to decorate.”53 Presumably, Fry had heard that a major commission was in the air. An eccentric English baronet, Sir George Sitwell, owner of a large castle in Tuscany called Montegufoni, had allowed his literary sons, Osbert and Sacheverell, to commission Picasso to fresco one of the castle’s staterooms. Unfortunately, these would-be patrons had set their hearts on Renaissance pastiche. Picasso welcomed the prospect of working on a huge scale, but not the Sitwells’ proposal that he reinterpret Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes in the Medici chapel.54 Since Osbert Sitwell owned a fine albeit very faint Picasso d
rawing of mischievous Harlequins teasing a girl, there was also talk of a commedia dell’arte subject.

  After meeting with the younger Sitwell in Paris, Picasso agreed to do the work for a fee of one thousand pounds. He told them he wanted his then pregnant wife to go somewhere restful, whereupon Sacheverell suggested that the Picassos spend the winter of 1920-21 in their uncomfortable—underheated and understaffed— castle. In the end, Sir George, who enjoyed agreeing to his offspring’s schemes, and then sabotaging them, refused to provide the money. Instead, the Sitwells had Se-verini do a decorative Tiepolo-like harlequinade. Undeterred, Sacheverell Sitwell, who was still at Oxford but saw himself as a budding patron of arts and letters, came up with another fanciful Picasso project: to illustrate an edition of Sir Thomas Urquhart’s seventeenth-century translation of Rabelais with a foreword by D’An-nunzio. Nothing came of that, either.