A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Dullin’s assistant, Lucien Arnaud, claims that Picasso left his set design for Antigone until the very last moment. A day or two before the play opened, the artist calmly produced from his pocket “a scrap of white paper, deliberately crumpled, and with his inimitable accent and ironic expression said: ‘Here’s the maquette.’ ”11 A charming story, but it leaves out of account some twenty pages of sketchbook cro-quis and some worked-up drawings for a three-dimensional structure on the stage— all of them projects for Antigone.12 I can only imagine that Cocteau or Dullin, or more likely Picasso himself, was not happy with the maquettes, so he decided to wing it. Cocteau has described Picasso’s modus operandi:

  The day before the dress rehearsal… I was sitting in the Atelier [theater] with Dullin and the actors. On stage was a back-cloth painted a sort of laundresses blue … like the rocky background of a crib. This had openings on the left and right: and in the middle … a hole for the voice of the chorus to come, amplified by a megaphone. Around this hole I had hung the masks of women, boys, and old men which I had made from Picasso’s models and which he and others had painted. Under the mask a white panel was suspended. The problem was to indicate on this surface the meaning of a fortuitous setting, which sacrificed precision and imprecision … to the representation of a warm day.

  Picasso walked up and down.

  He began by rubbing red chalk over the panel, which turned the unevenness of the wood into marble. Then he took a bottle of ink and traced some majestic-looking lines. Abruptly he blackened a few hollow spots and three columns appeared. The apparition of these columns was so sudden and so unexpected that we began clapping.

  When we were in the street, I asked Picasso if he had calculated [the apparition of the columns]…. He answered that the artist is always calculating without knowing, that the Doric column came forth, as a hexameter does, from an operation of the senses, and that he had perhaps just invented that column in the same way the Greeks had discovered it.13

  Unable, as he said, to “imagine Oedipus’s daughters patronizing a ‘little’ dressmaker,” Cocteau had asked his Chanel to make their costumes out of heavy Scotch wool. Antigone was played by a young Greek dancer, whose strong accent delighted Cocteau. He put her in a white plaster mask, through which she enunciated his harsh, pseudo-archaic lines in a harsh, pseudo-archaic manner. For the first few performances, Cocteau declaimed the lines of the chorus through a grill in the scenery. On the third night, he was heckled by a familiar voice from the balcony: his nemesis, André Breton. Through a hole in the backcloth, the “chorus” snapped back at Breton that the performance would not proceed until the interruption ended. The combination of Picasso, Cocteau, Honegger, Dullin, and Chanel ensured a succès d’estime. Antigone ran for a hundred performances.

  Toward the end of 1922, a fresh male presence manifests itself in Picasso’s work: a handsome young man with a prominent Roman nose and helmet of dark hair. The young man bears a striking resemblance to the Farnese Antinous in the Naples Museum. To judge by his earliest appearances in Picasso’s work,14 wearing a romantic ballet costume (silken jerkin and breeches, a ruff, and frilled cuffs), the new model was a dancer. In later appearances, he is portrayed in practice clothes—a leotard and ballet slippers. Like Olga, this dancer seems to have suffered an injury to his foot or leg, since he is almost always seated; and in one of the most familiar paintings of him, The Sigh155 (Le Soupir: a sentimental title dreamed up by Cocteau), there is an otherwise inexplicable walking stick leaning against the back of his chair. After going through photographs of dancers in the Diaghilev company, McCully thinks the model may have been Nicolas Zverev. He was known to the company as “Percy Greensocks” for his green practice clothes; also as “Rasputin” for having filled Nijinsky’s head with the Tolstoyan ideology that had caused much dissension in the company. Since Zverev had danced the Acrobat in the original production of Parade and was also one of the leads in Pulcinella, he was known to Picasso and, of course, to Olga, who loved having Russians around and would have felt a special sympathy for an injured dancer.

  This dancer also stars in two large (130 X 97 cm) paintings, both in the National Gallery, Washington. In the so-called Saltimbanque with Arms Crossed,1617 he sits with a towel around his neck, as if fresh from exercising at the barre. In the other painting, The Lovers,18 Picasso pairs him with Irène Lagut: the only real likeness of her in the artist’s work, she later maintained.19 Irène had come back into Picasso’s life and, according to her, would resume her affair with him.20 The fact that she was also sleeping with Radiguet would no longer have bothered the once possessive Picasso. On the contrary, by putting any suspicions Olga might have had to rest, it was an advantage. The handsome dancer could be said to stand for the artist, but I think Radiguet is a more likely candidate. Picasso seldom gave titles to his paintings, but in this case he presumably did. Visualizing his ex-fiancée in the arms of a stand-in for the writer she shared with Cocteau would have been an irresistible private joke—a joke on Picasso’s part at the expense of all those other lovers of Irène’s like Serge Férat and Jacqueline Apollinaire who had once made him so jealous. The painting’s resemblance to kitschy French postcards of simpering lovebirds sharpens the irony.21

  Picasso. The Sigh, 1923. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 61×50 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  The dancer’s interlude as a model coincided with Picasso’s bid to do yet another classical set piece. In the winter of 1922-23, he tried out various possibilities. His choice of the Toilet of Venus22 may have had to do with Renoir’s choice of the Judgment of Paris for two of his late classical compositions. Like The Lovers, the Toilet of Venus lent itself to pastiche and parody. Picasso took advantage of both. Studies for this work show that he originally envisioned a Coiffure subject: a classically robed or naked deity with a cupidlike child at her feet and an attendant dressing her hair or holding up a mirror to her. However, in the course of working from a male model, Picasso decided to switch from the mostly female Coiffure to a traditional Mars and Venus subject. He relegated the figure holding a mirror up to Venus—traditionally the goddess’s son Cupid—to the very top of the composition. The dancer appears to have been the model for both Venus’s lover, Mars, on the left and the pipe player on the right, inspired by a similar figure in a famous marble group in the Naples museum.23 Mars blurs into the legendarily handsome Adonis, whom the goddess fell for after a chance scratch from one of Cupid’s arrows. The pipe player, who gave a musical dimension to this stilted work, is all that would remain of the Toilet of Venus after Picasso came back and painted out this pretty pastiche and all that it stood for.

  In 1994, William Rubin, then chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art, announced that he had made a major discovery regarding the original Toilet of Venus composition. After studying the X-rays and preparatory sketches,24 Rubin had concluded that the Venus figure stood for none other than Sara Murphy, with whom, he went on to argue, Picasso had fallen very much in love.25 Rubin maintained that Picasso had taken the huge Toilet of Venus down to Antibes, where it played a key role in a passionate summer romance that lasted only a few days but left a lasting effect on Picasso’s imagery. In despair that his love was not reciprocated, Picasso had painted over the Toilet of Venus with the masterpiece known as the Pipes of Pan26 This attempt to canonize Sara as one of Picasso’s major loves has caused nothing but confusion. Rubin’s contention that there are “almost 40 paintings and more than 200 drawings of Sara that we can now identify … [and that] in 1923, pictures of Sara far outnumber those of Picasso’s wife Olga” is sheer fantasy, as is his contention that “by 1922 … Picasso’s infatuation was well under way [and] by 1923 … he was clearly in love with [Sara].”27 The artist once said that sometimes as many as three or four women figure in one of his portraits. This might well have been the case in 1923 with such masterly paintings as the Metropolitan Museum’s popular Woman in White and the Tate Gallery’s bolder, less academic Woman in a Chemise. Picasso apparent
ly wanted to give his women a classical look that is idealized and generic and that draws upon Olga and Sara as well as the Farnese Juno and the Farnese Antinous and, who knows, a maid or model or a mistress.

  Left: Picasso. Head of a Young Man, February 11-12, 1923. Conté crayon on paper, 63×47 cm. Collection Jan Krugier and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski. Right: Farnese Antinous (detail). Roman copy, second century A.D., from Greek original, first half of fifth century B.C. Marble. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

  Sara was beautiful, intelligent, warm, and motherly, and Picasso, like many of her men friends, was attracted to her, but she was impervious to sexual advances. She figures in some of Picasso’s sketches of bathers on the beach, wearing pearls down their backs as Sara did.28 He also executed two likenesses of her in oil paint and sand at La Garoupe.29 On the occasion of Rubin’s marriage, Picasso’s widow gave one of these paintings to him as a gift. This apparently sparked his interest in Sara Murphy, but not enough to keep him from selling the Rubin painting to Heinz Berggruen (now in the Museum Berggruen, Berlin).

  Picasso. Toilet of Venus, 1923. India ink on paper, 24.7×32.3 cm. Private collection.

  Central to Rubin’s case for seeing the original Toilet of Venus composition as a celebration of Picasso’s feelings for Sara as “a kind of pagan mystic marriage” by the Mediterranean is his assumption that the artist had this painting with him at Antibes; and that when the romance went awry, he painted out Sara/Venus and her attendants, leaving only the pipe player to be recycled in the subject that replaced it. Alas for Rubin, instead of rolling up this vast canvas and roping it onto the roof of his car, Picasso had left it behind, sensibly enough, in Paris. And on his return in September, it was still there on the easel, still very much the Toilet of Venus, as Jacint Salvadó, the artist’s next model, confirmed in his 1924 article on modeling for Picasso.30

  Far from confirming a relationship, Sara’s letters to Picasso are friendly rather than affectionate and signed S. W. Murphy or Sara W. Murphy Until Jacqueline Roque entered his life in 1953, Picasso was averse to affairs with women who had had children, preferring to play Adam to unencumbered Eves. Since Olga was exceedingly jealous, he would have been especially wary of an involvement with someone she knew and liked. Lastly, Sara adored her adoring, albeit far-from-heterosexual husband and was famously faithful to him.

  On May 7 and 8, 1923, the fourth and last of the Kahnweiler sales took place at the Hôtel Drouôt. It fetched 227,662 francs and included fifty Picassos, forty-six Braques (among them fourteen papiers collés), thirty-six Derains, twenty-six Grises, eighteen Légers, ninety-two Vlamincks, in addition to a number of the illustrated books Kahnweiler had published. If anything, this sale was even more shabbily conducted than its predecessors, as Robert Desnos, the surrealist poet who worked as a reporter for Paris-Journal, describes:

  The preview was a scandal. Paintings were stacked any old way; drawings were rolled up or folded in boxes, some were sealed in cardboard tubes so that it was impossible to see them, others had been stuck in hampers or concealed behind the rostrum. Everything was in an indescribably filthy mess, which would justify the direst retaliations on the part of the artists in question.31

  Desnos singles out the hanging as particularly egregious: designed to attract war profiteers and vulgarians. The least interesting but most saleable of the paintings in the auction—that is to say, the Vlamincks—had a whole wall to themselves; likewise the Derains. The cubist Picassos, Braques, Légers, and Grises were crammed together onto a single wall.

  The sale itself was no less of a scandal. The auctioneer, Alphonse Bellier, who should have known better, made silly jokes about the cubist gems he was selling— “silly jokes that drew attention to his lack of intellect.”32 His crassness encouraged the porters to outdo him. More often than not they showed paintings upside down, crumpled the drawings, trashed the papiers collés and sand paintings, and failed to display things to the buyers. Lot numbers were struck onto the surfaces of paintings, many of them with signs of recent splattering and in one case the unmistakable imprint of a shoe.

  Desnos ends by describing how he had asked his friend Eluard to bid on a charcoal drawing, cataloged as a Braque but closer in style to Picasso. He got it for thirty-seven francs; and, sure enough, when he took it out of its frame, the sheet turned out to be signed “Picasso;” it was also much smaller than the listing in the catalog. So much, Desnos says, for the integrity of the expert, the high and mighty Monsieur Durand-Ruel, who seems to have replaced Léonce Rosenberg.

  There were further blows in store for Kahnweiler. As the dealer’s biographer puts it, “Derain and Vlaminck let their success at [Kahnweiler’s] auctions go to their heads…. Braque and Léger signed up with Paul Rosenberg, Vlaminck with Bern-heim-Jeune, Derain with Paul Guillaume…. [The sale] was the end… in every sense of the word.”33 The only one of Kahnweiler’s original cubists to stay with him was Juan Gris, who moved to the Paris suburb of Boulogne so as to be his neighbor. Until Gris’s early death four years later, he and the dealer who had made his reputation would remain the closest of friends.

  Once the sales were over, Kahnweiler was able to patch things up with Picasso. After Kahnweiler paid back the twenty thousand francs he had owed him since 1914, the artist agreed to do an edition of prints for him. Later there would be other deals—at first relatively minor. Picasso would always have infinitely more respect for Kahnweiler’s eye and judgment than he would ever have for Rosenberg’s. Henceforth, his relationship with his principal dealer would be restricted to business. Rosenberg’s ability to keep Picasso’s prices higher than those of Matisse—higher indeed than those of any other living artist—ensured Picasso’s loyalty.

  Now that they were pillars of the beau monde, the Picassos were condemned to a constant round of fashionable functions. On the last night of 1922, they had been guests at a New Year’s Eve party given by Rosenberg’s in-laws, the Jacques Helfts. Everyone wore fancy dress, except Picasso, who enjoyed dressing up so long as it was not mandatory. Olga put on a tutu; Paul Rosenberg came as a chauffeur. Picasso was so impressed by the antique French silver on the Helfts’ dining table that he asked whether he could buy a set of eighteenth-century knives, forks, and spoons. Helft took him down to the vault, and the deal was done. Picasso would give Helft a watercolor of a knife, fork, and spoon to commemorate this purchase. The artist had also admired a magnificent pair of chenets by Gouthière in the dealer’s stock. “Everything in your place is hideous,” Picasso told Helft, “but these [firedogs] are works of art.”34 On hearing that the Louvre was interested, Picasso was determined to acquire them. The Louvre won out.

  On May 30, Olga was back again in costume—one designed by her husband— for yet another Beaumont ball.35 This time the theme was baroque as well as classical: L’Antiquité sous Louis XIV. Beaumont had been at pains over the entertainments, especially La Statue retrouvée: a divertissement conceived by Cocteau, costumed by Picasso, choreographed by Massine, to music by Satie. The host gave Picasso detailed specifications:

  The fête takes place in the world of the imagination, that of fairy stories and allegories of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

  The theme is that of a magnificently served supper party with set pieces made of cardboard, during which divertissements will be performed. The first entrée will consist of guests at the [imaginary] supper … women in shades of gold with white wigs and masks … men in shades of brown with golden wigs, and draperies over their formal costumes….

  The fête will culminate in a firework display before the real supper is served. Needless to say the costumes should be of utmost fantasy made from stuffs of utmost simplicity.

  Besides Olga—for whom this must have been a last public performance3637—the Marquise de Médicis and Daisy Fellowes were the stars of La Statue retrouvée. Satie, who treated grandees with even more irony than Picasso did, confided to his “Chère Délicieuse Comtesse” (Edith de Beaumont) that the merc
ilessly chic Daisy Fellowes (daughter of the Duc Decazes and one of “Winnie” de Polignac’s Singer Sewing Machine sisters) “had flabbergasted [him] … if I dare say so myself. Yes. Absolutely. Yes … Yes.”38 That same evening Satie informed his “Chère, Délicieuse Princesse” (de Polignac) that he was writing some special music for her niece, “the utterly charming Madame Fellowes.”39 As for the rest of the entrées, one of them had been inspired by Molière’s Malade imaginaire. In his memoir, Hugo describes Marie Laurencin being carried in on an armchair with an entourage of bewigged doctors and apothecaries carrying clysters, and Radiguet painted with red spots—measles!40 Seven months later, typhoid would kill him.

  To embellish the grandiose Louis XVI music room where the ball took place, Beaumont had commissioned Picasso to paint four large decorative panels. “Nothing would please me more than your idea,” he told the artist.41 Picasso’s “idea” turned out to be an ensemble of classical scenes en grisaille. The artist began with an elegant Three Graces,42 which the sculptor Apel-les Fenosa recalled seeing in the rue la Boétie studio in late May. The size of the canvas is close enough to the size stipulated by Beaumont for us to assume that it probably started life as a decoration for the music room. However, in the course of painting it, Picasso apparently got carried away by the subject—so central to the sculpture of antiquity—that he decided to transform the composition into an altogether more significant feat: a major contribution to neoclassicism that would carry on from Canova’s famous version of the subject. Three Graces differs from Picasso’s other monumental figure composition of the period by respecting classicism rather than parodying it.