A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Picasso. Head of a Woman, 1921. Pastel on paper, 65.1 x 50.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Scofield Thayer.

  Although he had as little luck with the Sitwells as he had had with the cubist murals for Hamilton Easter Field’s Brooklyn library,55 Picasso was still very eager to work on a heroic scale and challenge Matisse’s magnificent murals for Shchukin. The experience of designing theater décors had taught him, among other tricks of the trade, how to gauge effects of scale at varying distances; so had the experience of seeing François I’s decorations in situ as well as up close. Some had been taken off the wall and were on exhibit in Fontainebleau’s Jeu de Paume. Picasso now felt ready to tackle subjects far larger than himself. The lure of sculpture or, rather, the lure of becoming a sculptor should also be taken into account. Since Picasso lacked the requisite facilities—space, equipment, and above all, time—that monumental sculpture requires, he set about doing paintings in a classical vein that would double as conceptual sculptures. To simulate the matte look of stone, he executed his nudes and heroic-sized heads in pastel or sanguine, sometimes on canvas.

  The most modernist of the large paintings done at Fontainebleau are the two very similar versions of Three Musicians,,56 in which the artist switches from the classical recto to the cubist verso of the Picassian coin. Reff, as I do, identifies the three musicians as Picasso, Apollinaire, and Max Jacob,57 though, as always with Picasso, we should leave the door open to other interpretations. Reff also interprets Three Musicians in the context of symbolist poetry and the romantic, medieval legend of Harlequin as Herlequin—a being escaped from hell.

  In Chapter 12, we saw Picasso Italianizing his Harlequins and turning them into commedia dell’arte Pulcinellas—bawdy and comical. By 1921, however, their picturesque charm was beginning to pall. The Harlequins in Three Musicians are neither Italian nor French; they are Catalan. And far from being palpable human beings, like the figures in Three Women at the Spring, they are effigies, such as a shaman might fashion out of bits and pieces—effigies of the artist himself and the two laureates of his prewar tertulia, who look back in time to Picasso’s breakthrough into the synthetic cubist style, which they personify and celebrate.

  Bust of Juno (Roman copy of an original by Alkamenes, fifth century B.C.). Marble, ht. 60 cm. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

  Although colorful as most of his later synthetic cubist works, both Three Musicians are spiritually dark but not as troubling as his great 1915 Harle-quin?8 which the artist would surely have seen in a recent show at Léonce Rosenberg’s. Like this masterpiece, done at one of the lowest periods of World War I, the two versions of Three Musicians are steeped in nostalgia as well as guilt for caving in to his wife and banishing Jacob and other members of his tertulia. They are also steeped in the loneliness that he had complained of to Clive Bell and Arthur Rubinstein.5859 Three Musicians has also been interpreted as an apotheosis of the three composers— Satie, Stravinsky, and Falla—with whom Picasso had collaborated.60 However, I prefer to see the subject in a larger context: as a requiem for Picasso’s prelapsarian past, before satanic Diaghilev and snaky Cocteau had tempted him away from the path of modernism with the lure of worldly success.

  Just as Apollinaire’s poem hailing Picasso as Harlequin Trismegistus had triggered his self-referential Saltimbanques of 1905, a nostalgic poem dedicated to Picasso that Jacob had recently published, “Honneur de la sardane et de la tenora,” triggered Three Musicians. This poem is a loving yet reproachful adieu, which Jacob fired across the abyss of his resentment, knowing that it would lodge deep in Picasso’s far from guilt-proof psyche. Ostensibly, the poem commemorates an outing that Jacob, Picasso, and his adored mistress, Eva, made to Figueres in Catalonia in 1913.61 Jacob evokes a serene summer evening with circles of local inhabitants performing the sar-dana on a town square ablaze with the red and yellow bunting of Catalonia. Max had been fascinated by the band, known as a cobla, that accompanies the dancers. Coblas consist of six men seated in a neat row on a crude bandstand raised above the dancers.62 The cobla musicians have been traditionally limited to wind instruments: little flutes called flabiols, rustic oboes called tibles, and a larger, rougher version of a clarinet called a tenora,63 whose dry nasal tones Jacob celebrates in his poem. The tenora makes an appearance in a number of Picasso’s cubist compositions as well as in the first (Philadelphia) version of Three Musicians.

  Although Picasso would do a lively cover for the sheet music of Stravinsky’s Rag-time,64 he had taken little interest in jazz until 1923-24, when Gerald and Sara Murphy lent him records from their extensive collection, so I tend to doubt Reff’s claim that the Three Musicians reflects Picasso’s interest in jazz. Otherwise, Picasso’s ear for music was extremely limited. “Tipperary” was one of the few tunes he could hum. He admired Falla because his music was based on cante jondo, flamenco, and Spanish folk music, which he loved as much as he loved the music for the sardana65—“a communion of souls,” he said.66 Indeed back in 1913, he had planned to devote one of the larger panels for Hamilton Easter Field’s commission to this subject.

  Jacob’s rhapsodic poem about his Catalan evening ends with a farewell to Picasso:

  Adieu sardana and tenora! Adieu tenores and sardana

  Tomorrow since fate hounds me

  Tomorrow since the Tsar commands

  Tomorrow I’ll be far away

  Tomorrow in a monastery garden

  Folk will smile and hide their praying

  As for me, I’ll just say thanks!

  Three Musicians is a response to Max’s valediction. After commemorating his friend’s departure for the monastery in a large charcoal drawing (July 1921) of him wearing the cowl and habit of a Benedictine (on the right of the Philadelphia version), Picasso envisions the poet as a masked monk playing an accordion. In the MoMA version, he is singing plainchant from a sheet of music—something he is likely to have been doing at Saint-Benoît. The ominousness of Three Musicians evokes the ominousness of the summer of 1913, when Eva Gouel, the mistress Picasso lured away from Marcoussis, suffered the first symptoms of the cancer that would kill her; when the father he had once loved and later rejected died; and the beloved dog Frika (half German shepherd, half Breton spaniel), which had to be put down.67686970 The perceptive Reff sees the dog underneath the chair of the Picasso figure in the MoMA version as “a ghost of a dog.”71 The image does indeed suggest the ghost of the dog that had been so closely associated with his original tertulia, whose death he would never forget. As for the Harlequin’s red-and-yellow outfit, this is a reference to the quatre barres, the four red and yellow stripes of the Catalan flag that decorated the square where the sardana was danced.

  The grotesque commedia dell’arte masks with huge phallic noses, which Picasso had designed for Massine in Pulcinella, are a far cry from the synthetic cubist masks that Picasso devised for the self-referential Harlequin and Jacob-like monk in the MoMA version. These resemble Spanish carnival masks, which traditionally reflect the characters of the people who not only wear them but make them. As the anthropologist David Gilmore explains, at Carnival time, the men in Andalusian villages raid their wives’ or mothers’ closets for rags and bedcovers so that they can race around the streets shrieking, dressed as women.72 The use of rags (as opposed to shop-bought costumes) “is a conscious expression of working-class solidarity as well as a symbolic demonstration of the triumph of wit over poverty.”73 Gilmore’s photographs of mascarones, comical transvestites who cover their faces in veils of fishnet, fringe, raffia, or lace, the better to conceal their identity as well as their sex, are astonishingly close to the otherwise baffling masks that Picasso has devised for the figures representing himself (fishnet) and Max Jacob (fringe).

  So productive was Picasso’s summer at Fontainebleau that, as he told Roché, he contemplated building a house in the country, where, like “Adam on the first day out of the garden,” he would create “from the whole cloth a total domestic fabric.” Everything wa
s “to be thought out anew by him, with new simplicity and new proportions, even the steps of the stairs, the windows—every piece of furniture: tables, chairs, jugs, glasses, etc., created as for the first time, forgetting all [that] exists already…. [Picasso] says it is the work he feels in his head [that] he would most love to do.”74 This utopian dream sounds more like that apostle of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Henry van de Velde, in whose house everything from the dinner plates to the wall treatment and his wife’s dress had to harmonize and “dissolve into each other”75 like forms in a cubist still life. Nothing ever came of Picasso’s dream house. When he finally bought a house in the country—the Château de Boisgeloup—he made minimal changes.

  The studio at Yerres proved a godsend. For the next two years Picasso would drive out there to escape the bourgeois domesticity of the rue la Boétie and work alongside his admirer, rather as he had done in his youth with the no less neurasthenic Casagemas. To judge by the very few works by him that have survived, Bem-berg appears to have been moderately gifted. Two largish, linear portraits of his wife and her Russian nanny are impressive in their economy.76 So are his still-life drawings: they recall Picasso’s exercises in the same representational genre, but their resemblance could never be mistaken for mimesis. It is only in Bemberg’s drawings of nudes that his schizophrenia manifests itself in the clawlike convolutions of fingers and toes. One can see why Picasso bothered with Bemberg: he must have reminded him of the other lost souls—Wiegels and Casagemas—who had used him as a beanpole of magical power up which to climb and cling. Picasso needed lost souls to satisfy his cannibalistic appetite for other people’s energy.

  The close rapport between Picasso and Bemberg did not extend to their wives. That she, too, was a victim of the Russian Revolution failed to endear Olga to the new Madame Bemberg. “I don’t think Olga ever came to Yerres,” Bemberg’s eldest stepdaughter, Princess Gortchakow, said, “my mother would never have received her.”77 Noble families like the Vrubovs, who had lost everything in the revolution, not least family members, and had been reduced to all manner of humiliating expedients to stay alive, would have been put off by the fact that her railroad engineer father went on working for the Soviets, just as he had for the tsars. People like Madame Bemberg, who prided themselves on their stoic conduct in the face of calamity and terror, would have found Olga’s airs and graces irritating. Neither did Madame Bemberg and her daughters take to Picasso. They found him uncouth in the way he put down their troubled stepfather; they also loathed having to pose for him.78 The two men argued a lot—seemingly about the public’s perception of Picasso’s work. Besides worrying about her husband’s pathological identification with Picasso, Madame Bemberg worried about his manic obsession with Christian Science. In his fight to alleviate his own mental problems, Bemberg had convinced himself that he was a powerful healer of others.

  Although Madame Bemberg had no faith whatsoever in Christian Science, she allowed her husband to treat her daughter, Marie, when she was sick. To the surprise of everyone except Bemberg, the treatment proved effective. Bemberg was also anxious to treat Nijinsky, who had been diagnosed as suffering from a psychosis similar to his own. Knowing that Picasso was working with the dancer’s sister, Nijinska, on the new production ofUAprès-midi d’un faune, Bemberg asked him to forward a letter to her requesting that Nijinsky be brought to him for therapy. He had already devoted two or three days to giving the dancer long-distance treatment. “But,” as he wrote Picasso on April 14, 1922, “receiving no answer to the letter, which you passed on to [Nijinska], I’ve done nothing more. I believe her brother to be absolutely curable, and if he is brought here, there is a very good chance of my being able to do so…. But to treat him from afar with so little collaboration on the part of his family would seem to be a waste of my time.”79

  In his last dated letter to Picasso, Bemberg complains that he himself is “far from being cured. Depression often takes over and leaves me searching for solitude…. You know how much I love you and how the thought that a man like you exists is a consolation to me.”80 Sometime in 1923, schizophrenia finally got the better of this gentle, well-intentioned man. To put an end to his aspirations as a painter, and possibly an end, too, to his dependence on Picasso, he set fire to their studios in the stables at Yerres. The blaze destroyed most of Bemberg’s own work. Princess Gortchakow thought that “quite a few of Picasso’s things might also have perished in the fire.”81 Bemberg’s papers include a battered old photograph of a fascinating drawing in an Ingresque manner, which looks like a collaboration between Bemberg and his master. The original cannot be traced.

  Georges’s ruthless father, Otto, insisted that nobody—neither his ailing mother nor his sister, the Marquise, who was pregnant, let alone any of their friends—be told of his son’s psychotic attack. After treatment in Paris, Georges was packed off to an asile de luxe at Prangins in Switzerland, where he improved sufficiently to be allowed to spend the rest of his long life in a house off the premises. He sketched away—mostly breasts—in his carnets. His wife moved to Lausanne with her daughters and remained close to him until she died in 1936. Meanwhile, the Bembergs continued to deny Georges’s very existence.82 For all the father’s generosity, neither he nor any of Georges’s brothers and sisters ever went to see him. Nor, except for Proust’s friend, the musical uncle, did any of them dare to communicate with him. For a dynasty whose upward mobility was geared to alliances with the gratin, any hint of congenital problems had to be kept very, very dark.

  Georges Bemberg did not die until 1969. After his death, one of his stepdaughters asked the French auctioneer Maurice Rheims to take some unsigned drawings, supposedly Picassos, to be signed by the artist. In one of his television interviews Rheims gave a vivid account of what had transpired.83 The almost-ninety-year-old Picasso had been terrified by the mere sight of the drawings. “Don’t touch them, don’t touch them,” he cried. “They are not by me. They are a madman’s drawings. No Spaniard would dare to touch them.” Such was Picasso’s superstitious fear of his powers rubbing off on others that he would never allow Françoise Gilot to pass on his old clothes to the gardener—some of his genius might rub off on the wearer. No wonder the old shaman could not bear to be contaminated by the work of this madman, who had tried to make off with his sacred fire. That had always been and always would be Picasso’s prerogative.

  Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Olga, probably at Villa America, Antibes, 1926.

  16

  Beau Monde (1921-22)

  After his return to Paris on September 23 or 24, 1921, Picasso continued to work as triumphantly as he had at Fontainebleau. The momentum generated in the course of the summer carried him through into the following year. Back in the rue la Boétie apartment, he did his best to fill the role of a dutiful husband and father, but sometimes the tedium of these responsibilities and the Russian chitchat of Olga’s ballet associates became intolerable, and he would go off to work in the studio at Yerres or call on one of his older women friends—Gertrude Stein, Eugenia Errázuriz, or, at a pinch, Misia—for more inspirational company. And then in October, an attractive American couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy, entered his life and, for the next three or four years, they would be fixtures in it.

  The Murphys were young and well off. Gerald’s father was the proprietor of Mark Cross, a fashionable Fifth Avenue store that sold leather goods: an American version of Vuitton. Sara’s no less upwardly mobile family, the Wiborgs of Cincinnati, manufactured high-quality lithographer’s ink: a world-famous product which Toulouse-Lautrec promoted in a poster featuring a printing press with a fashionable young woman—Misia Sert, no less—standing beside it.1 Like other rich, idealistic American expatriates of the postwar period, they had reacted against the mundane values of their parents and decided to settle in Paris, the better to reinvent themselves socially as well as artistically. And reinvent themselves the Murphys did. Thanks to their charms, including a considerable repertoire of American folk songs and
jazz, and their fresh, guileless, American mindset, they were an instant success in Paris. On the surface, Gerald was handsome, cultivated, and genial—so long as his mood was good. He and his adored wife aspired to lead a life that would be a work of art; however, he suffered from “a sexual deficiency”: Gerald’s euphemism for his homosexuality, which he tried, not altogether successfully, to control. (Donald Ogden Stewart is said to have glimpsed Gerald in the bedroom of his Paris apartment dancing rapturously in front of a mirror in a dress.)2 Sara was a life enhancer: beautiful, intelligent, creative, and a beguiling mother to her three children, but her fidelity made her husband’s “sexual deficiency” the harder to bear: “It must make you feel rotten,” he said.3

  After the intrigue and bitchiness of Cocteau’s entourage, the apparent straightforwardness of “these useful and precious Americans,” as Satie described the Mur-phys,4 came as a refreshing change—especially to Picasso. Their introduction into his life was anything but social. Shortly after arriving in Paris (October 1921), Gerald experienced an epiphany on seeing a painting by Picasso in the window of Rosenberg’s gallery. Inside, he was overwhelmed by the Picassos, Braques, and Grises he was seeing for the first time. “There was,” he wrote later, “a shock of recognition which put me into an entirely new orbit. … I was astonished that there were paintings of that kind.”5 “If that’s painting,” he told Sara, “that’s the kind of painting I would like to do.” Sara, likewise, saw the light, and the two of them went in search of a modern artist, who would accept them and a woman friend as students. Their choice of Natalia Gontcharova, the Russian painter who had designed Diaghilev’s Le Coq d’or, was most opportune. Gontcharova and her lover Michel Larionov, who took part in the teaching, were confirmed modernists, ruthless in forbidding students to paint anything representational—“no apple on a dish,” Sara remembered.67