Picasso. Portrait of Raymond Radiguet, December 17, 1920. Drawing on transfer paper reproduced in collotype (frontispiece of Radiguet’s Les Joues en feu, 1925). Private collection.
The day before Radiguet’s reading, the Picassos had shared a box with the Hugos and Auric at the first night of Skating Rink, the groundbreaking new work put on by Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suèdois. De Maré, an aristocratic landowner whose millions came from family forests in Sweden and coffee plantations in Brazil, was a tremendous admirer and collector of Picasso and wanted him to design ballets for him. Cocteau, who still resented Picasso for tampering with Parade, would not hear of This; he persuaded de Maré that Picasso’s décors did not enhance the ballets so much as they upstaged them. All a ballet needed, Cocteau told the impresario, was “a single creator, who would combine the tasks of choreographer, librettist, composer, scenographer and dancer”—that is, himself.43 Since de Maré was far more radical than Diaghilev or for that matter Cocteau and his considerable fortune absolved him from mundane conventions and box office considerations, Cocteau’s sabotage of Picasso was particularly regrettable. And so the avant-garde ballets that made the reputations of de Maré and Jean Borlin (de Maré’s principal dancer, choreographer, and lover) included nothing by Picasso. De Maré turned to Léger and Picabia instead.
Skating Rink was an experimental “dance poem” that had been thought up by Picasso’s Italian friend, Ricciotto Canudo, Honegger wrote the music. Léger did a brilliant abstract set that extended into the auditorium and enveloped the audience in a blaze of color. It was the most original, startling, and modernist décor since Parade. The dancers’ jazzy costumes and stylized movements were based on the couples whom Léger, de Maré, and Borlin had watched in working-class dance halls and roller-skating rinks. What Picasso felt about Léger’s brilliant harnessing of synthetic cubism to the stage design in Skating Rink, as well as in his next ballet, La Création du monde, we do not know. Rather than commit himself to an opinion on Léger’s undeniably great work of this period, Picasso would say, “his cubism is not my cubism.” At the first night of Skating Rink, the public made the usual philistine din. Léger did not exploit this as a historic battle between the establishment and the avant-garde, as Cocteau had done with Parade; he played things down: “no need for an orchestra,” nor for rehearsals—“rehearsals are money down the drain.”44
The third Kahnweiler sale took place on July 4, 1922. The timing was anything but propitious: the art market was at its lowest ebb in years and many potential buyers had already left Paris for the summer.45 Kahnweiler tried to persuade Léonce to postpone the auction until everyone returned in the fall. He would not listen. The press was contemptuous, especially the flippant Vauxcelles, who was reasonably fair about the sale under his own name but catty under one or other of his pen names. Léonce should show up in armor, he suggested; Basler in tin hat and gas mask, Braque in boxing gloves, and so forth.46 At the sale people jeered as porters held pictures upside down. No one seemed to care. Kahnweiler was very hurt when the one item he was anxious to buy for himself—Derain’s portrait of his wife, Lucie—went to his enemy, Paul Rosenberg, for a price he could not match. On the other hand, Roger Dutilleul, most discreet and perceptive of cubist collectors, bought the gallery’s archives and presented them to Kahnweiler.
This time, the sale included ten Picassos, fifteen Braques, twelve Derains, and thirty Vlamincks. Although the prices for cubist works were as low as before, Kahn-weiler’s syndicate could not afford to buy much. Indeed, the success of the Derains and Vlamincks in this sale convinced Kahnweiler and his Berlin confrere, Flechtheim, that they should specialize, insofar as they could, in Derain rather than Picasso. A new type of collector had entered the ring: young dadaist poets, who made virtually nothing from their writings, but profited from their “collections,” consisting of bargains bought at sales or minor works cadged off artist friends. Picasso was particularly generous in this respect; André Breton and Elvard particularly greedy. At this third Kahnweiler sale, Breton bought three Braques and a Léger for Jacques Doucet, the collector and bibliophile whom he was advising. Meanwhile, he was pressing Picasso to sell Doucet Les Demoiselles d*Avignon—the painting that Breton would be one of the first to hail as a masterpiece. This transaction would come to pass, but not until 1924. Thanks to Breton, Doucet would keep many of the poorer surrealist writers going by acquiring their manuscripts for the ever-growing library he would leave to the Sorbonne. Under the aegis of François Chapon, the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet would become one of the greatest sources of documentation available to historians of twentieth-century French art and literature.
As they had the previous year, the Picassos chose to spend the summer in the supposedly salubrious north, this time at Dinard. This “family,” rather than fashionable, resort had been recommended by Yvon Helft, a dealer in fine French silver, who was Paul Rosenberg’s brother-in-law and sometime partner. Helft had chosen Dinard for the same reasons that Rosenberg and Wildenstein chose Biarritz: prosperous clients were to be found there. In the course of this summer, the Helft and Picasso families saw much of each other. Whether the Picassos got together with the Murphys, who were spending their summer at a nearby resort, Houlgate (one of the stops on Proust’s petit train to Balbec); or whether they accepted the Beaumonts’ invitation to visit them in Normandy; or whether they attended the soirée mémorable provided by Miss Jane Day and her all-girl band at Dinard’s High Life Casino, we do not know. We can, however, assume that Picasso is unlikely to have missed seeing Monsieur Podrecca et le Theatre des Pic-coli, the puppet show that had captivated him and Cocteau and Massine in Rome in 1917.
Picasso. Estuary from Villa Beauregard, Dinard, 1922. Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm. Private collection.
Picasso, Olga, and Paulo, plus a nanny, checked into the Hôtel des Ter-rasses on July 15. They stayed there for a week while Madame Grosvalet, the local real estate agent, found them a house. The Villa Beauregard, which they moved into on July 22, was a sizable Second Empire house with a mansard roof on the Grande rue, now avenue Georges V. It was perched above the sea, close to the Grand Hotel and opposite the Port de Plaisance, where the ferry docked, and it had an attractive view across the water to Saint- Malo. There was a nice, messy garden but nothing much by way of a studio, as there had been at Fontainebleau. This summer there would be no big paintings.
At Dinard, as at Fontainebleau, Picasso filled a sketchbook with sharply observed drawings of his summer abode: its rustic paneling, shuttered windows, an Empire desk, ormolu candlesticks, and that staple of Breton and Norman interiors, a large oak screw from a cider press.47 Drawings of the garden include details of wrought-iron chairs, wobbly urns, and chestnut trees. Other crisp sketches depict the estuary, with its bustling ferry, lopsided yachts, pleasure craft aflutter with bunting, and, in the distance, Saint-Malo’s seventeenth-century ramparts.
The paintings Picasso did at Dinard are nothing like as ambitious or powerful as the ones he had done at Fontainebleau the year before. One has the feeling that the artist had “emptied himself,” to use Gertrude Stein’s phrase,48 and resigned himself to doing his dealer’s bidding. In the course of the summer he worked on a series of small, sharp still lifes formed out of horizontal black lines superimposed on flat planes of color. Penrose compares their effect to “light filtered by slatted shutters,”49 but Picasso must have taken a good look at the very similar vignettes that Braque had done three years earlier for Reverdy’s magazine, Nord-Sud, using an identical linear technique. The larger, more colorful of the Dinard still lifes transcend their formulaic imagery, but the lesser ones conform to Rosenberg’s request for modernistic images that are easy on the eye.
Picasso. Mother and Child, 1922. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. The Baltimore Museum of Art. The Cone Collection.
The mother-and-child paintings engendered by the atmosphere of this family resort must also have pleased Rosenberg. To this day they are extremely popular with the
general public. By the same token, they are extremely unpopular with modernists, who have used them to impugn Picasso’s classicism. And it is true, these Mater-nités are unashamed pastiches of Renoir’s late work—much in the news, given the recent auction of the contents of his studio50—but the sheer scale (130 x 90 cm) of the magnificent culminating Mother and Child and its slash of vermilion leave the other versions in its shadow. One of the finest of Picasso’s Renoiresque nudes is the exquisite pastiche of a Seated Bather51 that he made the previous summer, based on Renoir’s painting of the lone subject (known as Eurydice), which he had acquired from Rosenberg.52 Picasso was out to claim a place in the great French classical tradition. The saccharine Dinard Maternités do little to justify this ambition.
Left: Auguste Renoir. Seated Bather in a Landscape, called Eurydice, 1895-1900. Oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Right: Picasso. Seated Bather Drying Her Feet, 1921. Pastel on paper, 66 x 50.8 cm. Museum Berggruen, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
These allegories of motherhood are also indebted to one of Picasso’s Andalusian forebears, Esteban Murillo, tenderest of the masters of Spain’s Golden Age. The nuns who had given the sixteen-year-old Picasso his first commission—two altar-pieces for their convent—had insisted that he take Murillo’s Madonnas as a model. Since Picasso’s paintings were destroyed in the “troubles” of 1909, we can only hazard a guess at the role they may have played in his subsequent development. My feeling is that the Andalusian sweetness that manifests itself in Picasso’s work counterbalances the no less Andalusian machismo that fueled the dark side of Picasso’s alma española.
Sporadic flashes of genius would reassure his faithful followers that for Picasso, the classicist pastiche was no more than a temporary lapse. One of these flashes took place shortly before he left Dinard. In a sudden flare-up of his Dionysiac spirit—an explosive reaction perhaps to the ennui of domestic life in this genteel resort—Picasso painted a small powerful panel of two muscular maenads tearing along the beach, their hair streaming out behind them in joyous abandon. In Two Women Running on the Beach,53 Picasso looks back at his Juan-les-Pins drawings of two naked men jogging on the beach, playing with what appear to be beach balls, but turn out to be rocks that they are hurling at targets outside our field of vision.54 There were similar sights on the Dinard beach. Rather than spend all day with Olga, Paulo, and the nanny, Picasso wandered off in search of girls, to watch and maybe befriend, as he would when he returned in 1928 with a young mistress, and portrayed these same beaches with their rows of cabanas as erotic arenas. The maenads in the 1922 panel, who seem to inflate as we look at them, are the forerunners of the pneumatic ball-playing girls of 1928. Picasso, who had recently done a beachlike backdrop for L’Après-midi d’un faune, may well have wanted to give Massine’s nymphs more substance. The balletic echoes that resonate in this little masterpiece appealed to Diaghilev. In 1924 he would use a blown-up version of it as a backcloth for Nijinska’s diverting and influential ballet Le Train bleu.
Picasso. Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race), 1922. Gouache on plywood, 32.5 x 41.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
In mid-September, Olga suddenly fell seriously ill. The nature of her illness has never been divulged. All we know is that she had to be rushed to Paris for an emergency operation. Picasso had a difficult drive back to Paris, coping with Paulo’s car sickness while applying ice packs to Olga’s temples.55 Had she had a miscarriage— Picasso is likely to have wanted more than one child—or, had Paulo’s birth left her prone to problems? A sanguine drawing of Olga, done around the middle of September, shows her looking haggard and sick.56 This drawing evidently had a malign significance for Picasso: he gave it to his son Paulo shortly before Christmas 1963— seemingly the only work that he ever inscribed to him. There would be many more representational portrayals of Olga, but none of them manifest the anguish and compassion that make this drawing memorable.
After Olga’s operation, Picasso returned to Dinard to collect the work he had done in the course of the summer.57 His return attracted attention: while in Paris he had bought a costly new car and hired a driver. The car was a Panhard, not the famous Hispano-Suiza that he would acquire in 1930, and it was impressive enough to be written up in the Dinard newspaper. From now on, everything Picasso did would be news.
Picasso. Olga, 1922. Sanguine on paper, 100 x 90 cm. Inscribed “Pour mon fils Paul/ Picasso/le 1er 12-63.” Work stolen from Christine Ruiz-Picasso’s country home.
17
Paris (1923)
The acquisition of a chauffeur-driven automobile put a final touch to Olga’s embourgeoisement of Picasso. It caused a lot of talk. Many of his fellow artists and writer friends had acquired expensive cars, roadsters or racing cars for the most part, but they were always their own drivers. In the 1920s, Picabia had some fifteen of the finest makes; Derain owned a Renault and a racing Bugatti; Braque had an Alfa-Romeo, which he sold to the one-armed Cendrars. So dangerous was Cen-drars’s driving that Eugenia Errázuriz supposedly put a hex on the car stop it from starting. Unlike most of his artist friends, Picasso refused to learn to drive. He told Françoise Gilot that he was frightened “of spoiling the suppleness of his hands and wrists.”1 If a painter was rich enough to buy a car, Picasso thought, he should be rich enough to afford a chauffeur, and he was always berating Braque for driving fast cars himself. People interpreted Picasso’s pleasure in driving around in a chauffeured limousine as showing-off—all Olga’s fault. And it is true she had succeeded to some extent in gentrifying her husband. She was even trying, unsuccessfully, to stop him smoking, barging into his studio to catch him out.12 Visitors would be asked to take the incriminating cigarette or pipe and pretend it was theirs. No wonder Picasso was becoming resentful, especially now that Olga was often souffrante.
The change in Picasso’s attitude to Olga is reflected in the portraits he did after her recovery. There is a remoteness to them, which bears out something Picasso told Gilot: that “he tried to placate his wife by having her sit for him.”3 Olga figures in her husband’s work as a trophy wife rather than a desirable woman. The three largish portraits of her in a blue dress with a fur collar he did in 1923 are not so much likenesses as idealizations. Though still unashamedly Ingresque, their sharp focus and silken sheen suggest that Picasso had also been studying eighteenth-century pastel portraits in Rosenberg and Wildenstein’s stock. A painting of Olga gazing demurely down at the letter she is writing recalls Greuze in its artifice and sentimentality,4 while a large, exceptionally fine pastel of her in a similar pose5 suggests that he was pitting himself against such virtuoso pastelists as Jean-Baptiste Perronneau and Quentin de La Tour. There is not a glimmer of the devouring sexual passion that would supercharge the images of Olga’s successor, Marie-Thérèse Walter. The chill in these academic tours de force indicates that Picasso’s feelings for his wife were cooling.
The numerous portraits—paintings, drawings, pastels—that Picasso did of his son are more affectionate than those of his mother. The surrealist poet Jacques Baron, who visited Picasso around this time, reported that the artist had allowed Paulo to take over the dining room floor for his model train track. After demonstrating the train’s possibilities, “like a child and like a king,” Picasso got up from the carpet and told Baron:
“There’s a painting by Ingres you probably know of, Henry IV on all fours with a child on his back. He is the horse and the child is the cavalier. The Spanish Ambassador arrives and raises his arms to heaven at the sight of this genial family scene. I am going to do a picture like that: President Poincaré (or Deschanel) with a little boy of ten on his shoulders, and the Spanish Ambassador, Mr. Quinones de León, arriving unexpectedly. Hein, that’s what one should paint today!”6
Picasso. Paulo with a Carved Horse, 1923. Charcoal, pastel, and gouache on paper, 103.5×73.5 cm. Collection Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
Picasso never painted such a scene, but he portrayed Paulo in many different styles an
d poses: on a donkey, with a toy lamb or a horse7 or a motorcar, drawing at his desk, or, a little later, dressed up as a Harlequin, bullfighter, or Pulcinello.8 On one occasion, Picasso took away his sleeping son’s model motorcar and repainted it in bright colors with trompe l’oeil cushions and a checkered carpet on the floor.9 When he awoke, Paulo was furious. Paternal doting did not last long. The father was not happy at the way the boy was pampered and overprotected by his mother. His upbringing at the hands of music teachers, dancing instructors, and such like became a bone of contention between them. Like the father, the son would come to resent Olga.
Picasso. Paulo with a Carved Horse, 1923. Charcoal, pastel, and gouache on paper, 103.5 × 73.5 cm. Collection Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
Aprincipal task that confronted Picasso on his return to Paris from Dinard was the décor for Cocteau’s adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. Although he claimed to be through with the theater as well as Cocteau, Picasso welcomed the prospect of working with Charles Dullin, whom he had first known at the Lapin Agile, reciting poetry for the pennies people threw into his hat. Now, twenty years later, Dullin was revolutionizing French drama at the Théâtre de l’Atelier. Besides directing Antigone, Dullin played the part of King Creon. Cocteau described his version of this seminal drama as a “pen and ink drawing after a painting by an old master” and “an aerial photo of the Acropolis.”10 He claimed that the idea of “putting new dress on old Greek tragedy” came to him during his summer idyll with Radiguet at Pramousquier, as he wandered the beach brandishing a Greek shepherd’s crook topped with a goat’s horn “curved like Minerva’s eyebrow.” In fact Cocteau had already discussed the project with Honegger, who would compose the musical accompaniment (“a little score for oboe and harp”). Emboldened by the success of Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, Cocteau had realized the need for another theatrical advertisement for himself—this time in a more solemn vein.
A Life of Picasso Page 28