A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  The only other painting that might relate to the Beaumont decorations is La Grecque:43 a gawky woman leaning against a draped column. It is such a cliché that Picasso must have been poking fun at corny neoclassical decoration. How else to explain this lapse into banality? In the end nothing came of this project. Picasso was coming under pressure from Rosenberg to turn down commissions that entailed a lot of work, little compensation for the artist, and no profit whatsoever for the dealer.44 Rosenberg was particularly anxious that Picasso should devote himself to completing as many canvases as he could for the first exhibition of his paintings at Wildenstein’s New York gallery in November. Once on board a transatlantic liner with the paintings in the hold, the dealer changed his strategy. He sent Picasso a letter urging him to accept Diaghilev’s request and do the décor for yet another ballet, Trepak.455 It would be good publicity for his next show. Picasso turned the proposal down.

  Twelve days after the Beaumont ball, in the “Sert-ified” music room of her palatial hôtel particulier, Winnie de Polignac gave a private performance of a new work by Stravinsky. Les Noces turned out to be one of this composer’s most profoundly moving scores: “a Russian peasant wedding with its primitive pathos and awkward solemnity,”46 which Diaghilev would present the following evening as a ballet.47 Stravinsky had begun Les Noces as long ago as 1913, shortly after finishing Sacre du printemps. Nijinsky and Massine had quarreled as to who should have the honor of choreographing it. Neither, Stravinsky had decreed, but it was not until 1921 when he was luxuriously ensconced in Chanel’s apartment that Stravinsky had been able to whittle the score down to a cantata for four pianos, percussion, solo voices, and a Russian choir.

  Les Noces was rumored to be a masterpiece; and the princess had selected her guests very carefully. Among them were the Picassos, the Serts, the Murphys, and the more musical members of the gratin. Only Stravinsky’s former lover and generous patron, Chanel, was not invited. The daughter of the man who had invented the sewing machine was not prepared to have “that sewing-woman” to her house, although this particular sewing woman had put Mr. Singer’s lucrative gadget to more imaginative use than anyone else on earth. The same group, with the addition of Chanel, was in attendance the following evening when Les Noces had its gala premiere at the Opéra.

  Besides a libretto by the Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz, Les Noces was choreographed by Nijinska and had décor by Gontcharova. The latter’s garish, folkloric sets and costumes had horrified Stravinsky when he finally saw them shortly before the opening. They were all wrong for the darkness and primeval earthiness of a Russian peasant wedding, and he insisted that minimalist brown-and-white flats be used instead. Gontcharova needed someone to help her repaint the set and Gerald Murphy was an obvious choice. The rush job was too much for one man, so he called in his friend, the writer John Dos Passos, who was eager to experience backstage life at the Ballets Russes. After redoing the sets and attending all ten rehearsals, the Murphys decided to give a party for everyone connected with Les Noces. They invited old friends from America, as well as the new friends they had made in Paris—Picassos, Beaumonts, Stravinskys, Serts, Cendrars, Tzara, Cocteau, Radiguet, all of Les Six, the stars of the Ballets Russes, and many more.48

  Originally, the Murphys wanted to hold the party at the Cirque Medrano, where the big draw was the Fratellini brothers—a celebrated trio of clowns whom Picasso was rumored to be painting49—but the manager told them that his circus “was not yet an American colony”50 Instead, they settled on a large barge moored opposite the Chambre des Députés, which served as the chamber’s restaurant. Since the party was to take place on a Sunday, when the florists were closed, Sara decorated the tables with pyramids of toys—“fire engines, cars, animals, dolls, clowns”51—that she had found in a Montparnasse bazaar. Picasso was enchanted and rearranged the toys into a “fantastic accident topped by a cow perched on a fireman’s ladder.”52 Could he have had this game in mind thirty years later, when he constructed a monkey’s head out of two of his son’s toy motorcars?

  In the annals of social history, the Murphys’ party rates almost as high as the Rousseau banquet in 1908. Stravinsky switched the place cards; Gontcharova read palms; Marcelle Meyer played Scarlatti; and, as usual, Cocteau tried to steal the show— at first refusing to go on board for fear of seasickness, and then rushing around with a lantern, dressed up as the captain, proclaiming, “On coule” (We’re sinking). As dawn broke, Kochno and Ansermet (the conductor of Les Noces) took down the gigantic laurel wreath, inscribed “Les Noces—Hommages” which Sara had put up in the main saloon, and held it like a hoop for Stravinsky to take a running jump through. Picasso found American high jinks a relief after the protocol and intrigue that were de rigueur at the Beaumonts’ amateur theatricals.

  Tristan Tzara, 1921. Photograph by Man Ray. Telimage.

  On July 6, Picasso attended an infinitely more subversive event, Tzara’s disastrous Evening of the Bearded Heart (Soirée du coeur à barbe) at the Théâtre Michel. Picasso, Satie, and others in the know realized that this soirée, with which Tzara hoped to revitalize his dying dada movement and stop Breton and his surrealist followers in their tracks, would end in a pitched battle. Satie, who was pro-Tzara and anti-Breton, dismissed the breakaway surrealists as “false dadas.” To Marcel Raval, who was to be his guest,53 he wrote, “We are going to laugh our heads off. The Tzara ‘thing’ should be quite comical. Breton’s gang has been spotted in the distance; Hum!”54

  Compared to most dada spectacles, the first (musical) section of the program was relatively tame: Stravinsky’s Pièces faciles à quatre mains, Auric’s Fox-trot; Milhaud’s “Shimmy” caramel mou, and Satie’s Trois morceaux en forme de poire, all of which received polite applause. In the second section, the actor Pierre Bertin gave a reading of poems, including some by Tzara’s friend and Breton’s bête noire, Cocteau. And then, unexpectedly, a popular, minor dadaist called Pierre de Massot appeared on the stage and embarked on a monotonous litany:

  André Gide dead on the field of battle

  Pablo Picasso dead on the field of battle

  Francis Picabia dead on the field of battle

  Marcel Duchamp …

  Partisan yells drowned out the rest.55

  Massot’s nihilistic text set Breton’s gang—Aragon, Desnos, Eluard, Péret—at the Tzara gang’s throats. On hearing Picasso’s name, Breton had leaped onto the stage, ostensibly in support of the artist he venerated, but, in reality, to act as an agent provocateur. When Massot refused to obey Breton’s command to leave the theater, two of the latter’s henchmen, Desnos and Péret, held the little poet while Breton whacked away at him so violently that he broke his left arm. Picasso, who was in a dinner jacket, jumped from his box and shouted at Tzara, “No police here,” but the police were already massing in the aisles, and Breton assumed, rightly or wrongly, that it was Tzara who had summoned them. To boos from the audience and opposing cries from Picasso—“Non, pas à la porte! Pas à la porte!”—Breton and his henchmen were expelled from the theater.56 Meanwhile, Massot returned to the stage and, despite his broken arm, finished intoning his subversive litany. Things calmed down when the lights were lowered so that films could be projected: Hans Richter’s abstract Rhythme 21; Man Ray’s Le Retour de la raison (slow abstract oscillations enlivened with images of Kiki of Montparnasse); and Les Fumées de New York, “an impressionistic documentary” by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler that had little in common with the other more avant-garde films.57

  The last spectacle on the program was Tzara’s Le Cœur à gaz, a dada farce in three short acts. At its first performance, two years earlier, members of the audience had been so infuriated by its utter pointlessness that they had attacked the dadaist actors—among them Tzara and Aragon—who, when someone struck up the Marseillaise on a trumpet, had stormed out singing. This time round, the cast included professional actors—Jacqueline Chaumont of the Odéon as “Mouth,” Marcel Her-rand as “Eyebrow,” and Saint-Jean of the Odéo
n as “Ear”—as well as Tzara’s associates, Jacques Baron as “Neck,” René Crevel as “Eye,” and Pierre de Massot as “Nose.” Tzara’s characters would come to mind twenty years later when Picasso wrote his own dadaist farce, Le Désir attrapé par le queue; the dramatis personae would include “Big Foot,” “Onion,” “Fat and Thin,” “Anxiety,” “Silence,” and “The Curtains.” In 1923, Tzara had put the actors playing body parts into cubistic costumes made of stiff tubing by Sonia Delaunay This reduced their ability to walk to a geriatric shuffle. To enliven the third act of the spectacle, Ilia Zdanévich (subsequently known as Iliazd) recited one of his linguistically experimental “Zaoum” poems to the accompaniment of an absurdist dance by a woman called Lizica Codréano. Thin stuff, but worse was to come.

  Never one to miss a vindictive opportunity, Eluard, who loathed Cocteau every bit as much as Breton did, could not resist avenging himself on Tzara for including his poems in the same reading as Cocteau’s. Throughout the performance of Le Cœur à gaz, he heckled so noisily that Tzara finally called for order. In doing so, he unleashed a further riot. Eluard clambered onto the stage and hit Tzara and Crevel in the face. Terrified, Crevel tried to flee, but the rigidity of his costume hampered him, and he was grabbed by the stagehands and not only roughed up but shoved into the orchestra pit along with the shattered footlights. The stagehands then turned their attention to other disruptive elements. Aragon—“splendid and diabolical in his dinner jacket and black shirt”—tried to rescue Eluard, who had been badly beaten and frog-marched back to his seat.58 So violent were the fights between the dadaists, including their allies in the audience, and the future surrealists, that once again the police had to intervene. The damage to the theater was considerable. Confronted with rows of smashed seats, the owner gave way to imprecations: “Ma bon-bonnière! Ma bonbonnière!” he wailed. Outside on the street, the battle started up again with renewed violence. Yvan Goll used an uppercut to settle his score with Breton. Whereupon the police arrested the lot of them and took them off to the precinct house.

  When the dust settled, Breton was perceived as having triumphed over Tzara. Dada had self-destructed—consumed in a bonfire of egos and vicious sectarian spite. Breton’s surrealism would replace dada. Convinced that Eluard had been out for personal vengeance, Tzara brought a suit for damages against him. Eluard coun-tersued. These suits petered out, but seven years of infighting followed, during which the surrealists repeatedly denounced Tzara as a police informer who had handed Breton and his cohorts over to the cops. And then, in 1930, Breton, the original provocateur, did a sudden turnabout: in his second Manifeste du surréalisme he attributed the discreditable behavior of everyone, not least himself, at the Coeur à barbe evening to a misunderstanding.

  Misunderstanding or not, Picasso “etait ravi,” to believe Satie:59 he had enjoyed himself no end at this disastrous evening. Nevertheless, he refrained from taking sides. He liked Tzara well enough for his anarchic Jarry-like spirit and would remain a faithful friend. Although he was adamant in his refusal to become a surrealist, Picasso thought it wiser to keep in with the increasingly magisterial Breton, to the mortification of Cocteau.

  Picasso. Three Graces 1923. Oil and charcoal on canvas 200×150 cm. Collection Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.

  18

  Summer at Cap d’Antibes

  On July 23, a week or so after the Coeur à barbe riot, the Picassos left for the summer. Their first choice was Royan on the Atlantic coast, where Picasso would spend the first months of World War II. This choice is more likely to have been hers rather than his. After a week at Royan’s Grand Hôtel du Parc, they failed to find a suitable house for the summer and set off for the Riviera.1 En route they spent a night in Toulouse where they stayed at the Hôtel Tivolier—a block away from the museum, with its great collection of Ingres drawings. Why the switch from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean? In Toulouse, they had received a message from the Murphys suggesting that they join them at Antibes. The previous summer, the Murphys had spent a week there with the Cole Porters, who had rented the Château de la Garoupe, next door to the Hôtel du Cap at the promontory’s beautiful tip. The Murphys had liked the hotel so much that they had persuaded Antoine Sella, the proprietor, who usually closed the place from May to September, to keep a few rooms open on a trial basis the following (1923) summer. To the Murphys’ delight, the Picassos decided to join them there at the beginning of August. Their visit launched a fashion which would enrich not only Monsieur Sella but all the other hoteliers on the Riviera, and, for better or worse, bring about the transformation of the Côte d’Azur into a summer rather than a winter resort. As Picasso once said, looking out over the throng of sunbathers at Eden Roc, he and the Murphys had a lot to answer for.

  The only other people in the hotel were a Chinese diplomat and his family. However, a painter friend of Picasso’s from Montmartre days, who had been spending his summers at Antibes since 1913, was staying next door. This was the popular Glasgow artist J. D. Fergusson (known as Fergus) and his wife, a performer and teacher of modern dance, called Margaret Morris. Fergus had persuaded his rich English patron, George Davidson,2 to buy the property adjacent to the Hôtel du Cap. Davidson renamed it Château des Enfants, and provided the Fergussons with accommodation in exchange for help with the “unwanted children” he spent his life adopting and educating.3 Fergus’s wife had talked Sella into lending her three empty cottages for her assistants and pupils as well as providing her with “raised seating and very good lighting” for dance recitals in the hotel’s garden. “Sella … asked me,” Margaret Morris writes in her memoir, “to bring my girls to bathe at Eden Roc [the dramatic bathing place carved out of the rocks at the end of the Cap] and he would get photographers and would start a Summer Season in the South of France.”4 Margaret’s troupe of some twenty dancers inspired Picasso’s drawings of girls on the beach: “All of them swam divinely,” Picasso told Clive Bell, “but couldn’t dance at all.”5

  Margaret Morris’s dancers with André Sella (son of the owner of the Hôtel du Cap, Antibes), c. 1923. Pierre Joannon Collection.

  Fergus never joined the avant-garde, but his modified fauvism carried rather more conviction than the Bloomsbury artists’ genteel attempts to be modern. He had great charm, great muscles, and a body burnt black by the sun. Picasso was delighted to see him, as Margaret Morris has written:

  He greeted us saying, “Ah mon vieux copain Fergusson,” and embraced him warmly. Fergus expressed surprise at finding Picasso in this conventional hotel, to which he replied that his wife liked it, but he hated it…. “But why are you here?” [Picasso] asked. Fergus explained that we were at the Château des Enfants, next door.

  Picasso had rented a motor launch and wanted us to go with him to the islands. Fergus firmly refused, but said I would be delighted to go. So I had to. Picasso’s first wife … was only interested in the pearls and diamonds Picasso had given her, so my main occupation on these trips to the islands was to hold her jewels while she bathed. I felt like throwing them into the sea.

  One day we met Picasso at Eden Roc and we walked back to the hotel together. He said, “You do not fit into this place,” and he picked a sprig of bog-myrtle from a bush and handed it to Fergus saying, “This is you.”

  Picasso had arranged for his mother, Doña María, to join him at Antibes. Apart from a visit to see her grandson at Fontainebleau in 1921, plans for her to stay with them in Paris had always fallen through.67 Antibes out of season proved to be the perfect place for a family vacation. Doña María enjoyed beach life and loved looking after Paulo, the grandson she had yearned for. Picasso’s feelings for his mother are a mystery and likely to remain one until his sister Lola Vilató’s family make family papers available. According to Brigitte Baer, “[Picasso’s] mother … wrote to him nearly every other day, or at least once a week, and … when he first settled in Paris, reminded him, in one of her letters, of those nights in Barcelona when, after he had stopped roaming around the streets and ca
me back home, he would always go into her bedroom to say good night (or good morning) as if to efface by that last kiss all the goings-on of the previous night.”8 It was from her that he got his energy, ambition, and feistiness, but also his lack of stature, something of which he was less than proud, although it has rather too often been seen as a spur to greatness. Françoise Gilot may not have come into Picasso’s life until well after his mother’s death, but her assessment of Doña María is valuable in that it reveals how negative his feelings for her were. He described her as:

  Picasso. Doña María, 1923. Oil on canvas, 73×60 cm. Private collection.

  willful and stubborn [and] limited intellectually. She insisted on a ritualistic discipline based on a code of behavior that was altogether conventional; she was constricted and constricting, fearful of poverty, of change, of social intercourse. Pablo was her firstborn; she had high ambitions for him and soon proclaimed him to be a future genius, but… there was no understanding of what that entailed…. When her son went through puberty she pitted him against his father and the father against the son to chastise his precocious sexual awakening. She loved him, of course, and he loved her, but their love was accompanied by hatred and suppressed violence.9

  Picasso told his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, a similar story. The only detail she added to Gilot’s account was the characterization of both his father and mother as “bourgeois, bourgeois, bourgeois”—as if to exorcise a taint he shared with most of his friends, not least the surrealists who were in violent reaction against their bourgeois origins. Breton was the only major surrealist to come from working-class stock.