A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Xavier Vilató, a son of Picasso’s sister Lola, with whom Doña María went to live, characterized his grandmother differently: typically Andalusian: strong, simple, bossy, warm but no fool.10 She had considerable humor and in old age prided herself on “keeping up”: one of those old women in black still to be seen reading newspapers—liberal ones, in her case—under a black umbrella on Spanish beaches. Just as she had played with little Pablo on the Playa de Riazor at Corunna, she enjoyed playing with little Paulo on the Plage de la Garoupe. This shy, uneducated Andalusian widow, who did not give a damn for appearances, endeared herself to the Murphys and their friends rather more than Olga did. (“Olga is so prosaic,” Sara said.)11 To facilitate conversation, Doña María tried to teach the Murphys Spanish—to no avail.

  Picasso was especially anxious that his mother—whose fanatical faith in him included no understanding of any but his earliest work—see how celebrated he had become. And so there were outings to restaurants and friends’ houses. Although he loathed gambling, he took Doña María to Monte Carlo, where Diaghilev was staying; and for the one and only time in his life, he went to the casino and played roulette. To show off to his mother, he gambled simultaneously at different tables and lost a bundle of money.12

  Despite having told Olga that she was the wrong woman for Picasso, Doña María got on so well with Olga that Picasso insisted she return with them to Paris. Now that the marriage was beginning to run out of love, Olga needed allies. Clive Bell reported coming across Doña María in the street—“a dumpy old body, shorter than Olga, comic looking and very shy”—shopping with her daughter-in-law, who was “as exquisite as ever.”13 Before his mother went back to Barcelona, Picasso had her sit for an affectionate yet dignified portrait14—only the second one he had done in twenty-five years—in the same graphic style that he had used in recent paintings of his wife, and of his son on a donkey15 The conventional charm of these paintings reveals the pride Picasso sometimes took in showing off his prowess as a painter of family portraits.

  In August or September, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, who had been house hunting in the Midi, came to stay at Antibes. Their visit had been preceded by a letter from Gertrude, which Picasso had brought down to the beach in fits of laughter to show the Murphys. Gertrude had seen a painting by Picasso at Rosenberg’s and wanted to exchange his famous portrait of her for it. Would he mind? The Murphys were scandalized. “Yes,” Picasso said, “but I love her so much.” “[Gertrude] and Picasso were phenomenal together,” Gerald said, “each stimulated the other to such an extent that everyone felt recharged witnessing it.”

  In her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude describes this visit:

  It was there I first saw Picasso’s mother. Picasso looks extraordinarily like her. Gertrude Stein and Madame Picasso had difficulty in talking not having a common language but they talked enough to amuse themselves. They were talking about Picasso when Gertrude Stein first knew him. He was remarkably beautiful then, said Gertrude Stein, he was illuminated as if he wore a halo. Oh, said Madame Picasso, if you thought him beautiful then I assure you it was nothing compared to his looks when he was a boy. He was an angel and a devil in beauty, no one could cease looking at him. And now, said Picasso a little resentfully. Ah now, said they together, ah now there is no beauty left. But, added his mother, you are very sweet and as a son very perfect. So he had to be satisfied with that.1617

  Visits such as these as well as picnics, alfresco parties, boat trips, even a spoof beauty pageant in bathing suits organized by the Murphys and the Beaumonts, may be the reason why this celebrated summer engendered no major works and little progress. The lack of a studio may have contributed to this meagerness.

  Above: Sara Murphy with her children, Honoria, Patrick, and Baoth, on the beach at La Garoupe, 1923. Left: Gerald Murphy and Picasso on the beach at La Garoupe, 1923. Musée Picasso, Paris. Below: Picasso and Doña María in the right foreground with a group of friends on the beach at La Garoupe, 1923.

  Early in August, the Murphys spent two weeks in Venice staying with the Cole Porters, who had taken the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal for the summer. Gerald had work to do. On Léger’s recommendation, Rolf de Maré had commissioned him to do the scenario and décor for an “American” ballet. Asked to find a young American to do the music, Gerald had suggested Porter, a friend from their days in the Yale Glee Club. Porter’s alimony-rich, socially ambitious wife, Linda, was opposed to the idea. She wanted her husband to become a serious composer, had even tried to lure Stravinsky down to La Garoupe the year before to bring this about. Porter stood firm. He was determined to make his name on Broadway and insisted on accepting de Maré’s commission. The ballet, to be called Within the Quota, was about the impact of America—New York, the Wild West, jazz, Hollywood, and so forth—on a young Swedish immigrant, played by Jean Borlin, who ends up a movie star. Porter’s score would parody “the music played in silent-movie theaters, with the orchestra… [taking] over but the piano always winning out.”18 Gerald’s back-cloth—an eye-catching collage of newspaper headlines—would impress Picasso when he and his wife accompanied the Murphys to the opening night, which happened to fall on his forty-second birthday.

  Gerald spent three weeks in Venice working on the ballet. Linda Porter’s addiction to what Gerald called “sheer society” imposed a constant strain on her guests; so did her well-founded fears that Gerald, like many other men in their group, shared her husband’s homosexual tastes. Nor did Linda take to Sara, who returned to Antibes after two weeks of nonstop partygoing, relieved to be back with her three young children. And it is there at the Hôtel du Cap, a week before Gerald’s return, that Sara and Picasso are said by Rubin to have experienced the ill-fated “pagan mystic marriage,” which supposedly ended with the heartbroken artist painting over the Toilet of Venus. Sheer novelettish fantasy.

  Picasso returned with his family to Paris in late September. Since he had done so little work at Antibes, he would have to devote his energy to providing Rosenberg with paintings for the upcoming New York show. The Toilet of Venus was still on the easel, but he is unlikely to have transformed it into the Pipes of Pan until November or December. Far from signifying a change in Picasso’s feelings for Sara, the eclipse of the Toilet of Venus signifies a change in his feelings for conventional classicism. “The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, nymphs, Narcissuses are so many lies,” as he told Zervos in 1935.19 When Picasso scrapes down a painting and does another one in place of it, the new image will often turn out to comment on the previous one. In the course of his quest for the sacred fire of classicism—a quest that was by no means over—he had sometimes allowed himself to get snared in classicist pastiche. The pastiche had to go, and a few months later Picasso saw that it did—buried under the Pipes of Pan.20 In repainting the canvas, Picasso wanted to play off the New World confusion, as personified by Gerald, against the sensuality of the ancient world, as personified by the Dionysiac pipes player. Picasso also wanted to hint at sexual ambiguity. And where better than at Antipolis, as the Greeks once called Antibes?

  For Picasso, spending the summer months with an American family and their mostly American friends proved an enjoyable experience—also a puzzling one, especially with regard to the paradoxical Gerald: so accomplished and yet so lost. As holiday snapshots confirm, Picasso had Murphy in mind for the standing figure in the Pipes of Pan: same height, build, stance, and bathing suit; the same self-conscious awkwardness and ambiguity. Once again the artist found inspiration in his own earlier work: specifically the Two Youths of 190621—one standing, one seated, as in the present composition, only the other way around. Over the years, the elegiac tenderness of Picasso’s 1906 Mediterraneanism has given way to a feeling of alienation. Like Cézanne at L’Estaque the artist has painted the sea as a blue wall—a device that reinforces the sensation of being shut in. Rubin was right in seeing a Murphy as central to Picasso’s change of subject, but wrong with regard to which one.

&
nbsp; Picasso. Portrait of Sara Murphy, summer 1923. Oil, sand, and glue on canvas, 55×45.7 cm. Museum Berggruen, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

  19

  Cocteau and Radiguet

  Back in Paris in the fall of 1923, Picasso did his best to accommodate Rosenberg and produce paintings that were naturalistic and easy enough on the eye to appeal to the conservative clients of Wildenstein’s New York branch, where the artist’s first major U.S. show was to open in November. Rosenberg was convinced that Americans had not as yet developed a taste for modernism. Insofar as this applied to Wildenstein’s clients, he was probably right; there had been renewed requests for Harlequins. Fortunately for Rosenberg, Picasso had found a suitable new model. Jacint Salvadó was a twenty-two-year-old Catalan painter who hailed from the village of Montroig—the site of Miró’s family farm—and had recently settled in Paris.1 Picasso liked Salvadó for his Catalan look and also for having the same Barcelona art school background as himself. The model would serve as a surrogate for the artist’s Harlequin persona. The paintings might thus be seen as self-portraits in the guise of someone else.

  Salvadó had revered Picasso ever since his first glimpse of him, protesting the expulsion of André Breton from the theater at the Coeur à barbe evening. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he had tried to call on his hero but made the mistake of presenting a letter of introduction from the artist’s old enemy: the Catalan entrepreneur Pere Manyac, who had acted as Picasso’s agent in 1901 and later abandoned him. Salvadó had been turned away from Picasso’s door but would soon be summoned back.2

  Salvadó later described what had ensued. For helping with the decorations for the art students Carnival rout, Salvadó had been given a free ticket. Off he went and rented a Harlequin’s outfit. At the ball, one of the few people he recognized was Derain, even though he was wearing a heavy mask. They talked. “I like the way you are dressed,” Derain said. “Come to my studio with that Harlequin costume. I want to paint you.”3 Salvadó did so and spent the next month working as Derain’s studio assistant and modeling for the artist’s Harlequin and Pierrot set piece—his swan song as a painter of any stature.4 Salvadó painted much of the sky.

  All had gone well until Braque visited Derain’s studio and saw the painting of Harlequin and Pierrot and met the model. Braque had a manipulative streak and could not resist telling the competitive Picasso about Derain’s ambitious Harlequin composition and the “Spanish painter who works for him [and] is serving as his model.”5 On hearing this, Picasso wrote Salvadó a letter inviting him to his studio.

  “I understand that Derain has done a portrait of you dressed as a Harlequin,” Picasso said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well come tomorrow with the costume because I, too, want to paint you.”

  I told him I didn’t have the costume since I had rented it. At that moment Olga, then Picasso’s wife, who was there, said:

  “Remember Picasso that you have a Harlequin costume put away.”

  “Well, get it and we’ll see if it fits him.”

  I put it on and it fitted me fine.

  “Come tomorrow and I’ll paint you.”6

  Salvadó sat for four portraits dressed in Cocteau’s old costume.7 The most carefully worked (though never finished) was the first. In this painting, Picasso used the same graphic technique he had used in the portraits of his mother and his son on a donkey. Very fine brushes enabled him to mimic the cross-hatching of a pen. The first portrait “took only a day,” Salvadó claimed, “The painting … lacked background, but [Rosenberg] arrived and made off with it.”8 Since the rapacious John Quinn was in Paris, intent on buying directly from Picasso, Rosenberg was determined that nothing should be available in the studio. “He grabbed it off the easel” for the New York show, just as he would the next two Salvadó portraits, which are identical in pose and scale (approximately 130 X 90 cm). There is a depth of feeling in these paintings that is missing from recent portraits of Olga. However, by the time he came to paint what appears to be the last of the four—the posterlike image in the Ludwig Collection, Cologne—Picasso appears to have lost interest in the self-referential possibilities of his model.

  Left: Picasso. Paulo on a Donkey, April 15, 1923. Oil on canvas, 100×81 cm. Collection Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.Right: Picasso. Olga, 1923. Oil on canvas, 130×97 cm. Private collection.

  Making off with Derain’s assistant and dressing him up as a Harlequin was not a matter of one-upmanship; Picasso was simply paying his former friend back for pinching the commedia dell’arte subject from him. Salvadó found himself in dire trouble. “Derain didn’t want anything more to do with me,” he said, “but Picasso helped me.”9 Asked what payment he expected, Salvadó jokingly suggested one of the versions of the Three Musicians. Picasso responded by asking Salvadó to give him three of his own canvases to sell for him. And it is typical of Picasso’s generosity, above all to Spaniards, that he not only sold the three paintings for his model but also found him a dealer. The dealer bought the contents of Salvadó’s studio and gave him a contract that enabled him to purchase two studios in Paris and another in the Midi. No one knew better than Picasso the misery of being a penniless Spanish painter in Paris; and no one was more secretly generous with his help.

  For all his loathing of the man, Breton was not above aping Cocteau’s self-promotional strategies, the better to usurp his place in Picasso’s pantheon. Just as Cocteau had wormed his way into this pantheon by insisting that Picasso do his portrait, Breton pressured Picasso to do the same for him: a portrait charge for the book of poems Clair de terre, which he was about to publish.

  I would do anything for you if you would permit a portrait of me by you to preface [my] book—a long-standing dream that I have never had the audacity to propose to you. … If this is not possible, maybe you could lay your hands on something that might pass for a portrait of me, without eyes, without nose, without mouth or without ears … or, failing that, perhaps you could allow me to reproduce two or three of your unpublished drawings…. But a portrait is what would give me boundless joy…. I gather that you never write. All I ask for by way of reply to this letter is one word, as follows: Yes—portrait; No—nothing.10

  Picasso agreed to do a drypoint, but that did not stop Breton from asking whether additional items might be available and, if so, whether they should be part of the book or hors texte.11 There would be no additional items, the artist decreed, only the drypoint portrait. In mid-October Picasso came up with a surprisingly tentative likeness (only one proof exists),12 which pleased neither artist nor sitter. And so, on October 29, Breton brought around a second plate for Picasso to engrave.13 This time, the portrait turned out brilliantly. By focusing upward, Picasso was able to make the most of Breton’s leonine presence and the disdainful de haut en has regard that struck fear into friend and foe alike. Breton, who was eager to project a charismatic image, relished being portrayed as le maître. For his part, Picasso relished having gained a useful ally: a possible successor to Apollinaire though never as close. Polizzotti, Breton’s biographer, claims that this magisterial likeness “added a new element of friendship to what had previously been a mutually respectful, professional relationship.” But he is mistaken when he goes on to state that “Breton’s discourses on automation fascinated Picasso, who shortly afterward began incorporating automatist techniques into his art.”14 Picasso had no time for automatism; he held it against the surrealists and never incorporated it into his work. The nearest he came to it was his exploitation of accidents that occurred in the course of painting.

  Polizzotti goes on to claim:

  [Picasso] was also impressed by Breton’s prophetic aura, and the portrait he drew is unmistakably that of a leader: formally dressed, torso rigid, “eye somewhat fearsome,” as a pleased Breton described his likeness. Breton himself began stepping up his contact as of that fall, and made a point on several occasions of publicly and privately stressing their friendship. “My admiration for you is so great that I can’t
always find the words to express it;” he told the painter in October.15

  While sitting for Picasso, Breton again approached him about selling the Demoiselles d’Avignon to Jacques Doucet, whom he served as librarian and art adviser. Breton had first made this suggestion in a letter to Doucet in 1921, soon after starting to work for him. “I somewhat regret… your failure to acquire one of Picasso’s major works (by this I mean something whose historical importance is absolutely undeniable, such as, for example, the Demoiselles d’Avignon, which marks the origin of cubism and which should not be allowed to end up abroad).” In the spring or early summer of 1922, Breton had had another go at Doucet: he had accompanied him to Picasso’s studio where the Demoiselles was kept rolled up in a corner. On this occasion, the artist did not unroll it for Doucet—maybe he dreaded being badgered into selling it—but he did show it to another visitor, the German critic Albert Dreyfus, who wanted to write an article and a book about Picasso. Dreyfus, who had visited Picasso before the war, describes him spreading the great painting out on the floor:

  I was more or less speaking to myself when I asked [Picasso]: “Didn’t this lead to Cubism?” Many a painter would have [launched into] a lengthy excursion about himself and against his colleagues. Instead of answering, Picasso pulled a small brass top from his vest pocket, gave it a twist with two fingers and—with his Arabian smile—let it dance on the floor.1617

  Sensing that Picasso might be prevailed upon to part with the Demoiselles, Breton sent Doucet an artfully phrased letter (November 6, 1923), pressing for its acquisition: “through it one penetrates right into the core of Picasso’s laboratory and because it is the crux of the drama, the center of all the conflicts that Picasso has given rise to and that will last forever. … It is a work which to my mind transcends painting; it is the theater of everything that has happened in the last fifty years.”18 A month or so later, Breton’s diplomacy was rewarded.