A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  “I remember the day,” Breton later wrote when Doucet “bought the painting from Picasso, who, strange as it may seem, appeared to be intimidated by him and offered no resistance when the price was set at 25,000 francs. ‘Well, then, it’s agreed, M. Picasso,’ Doucet said. ‘You shall receive 2,000 francs per month, beginning next month, until the sum of 25,000 is reached.’ ”19 The price entered into Picasso’s sales book in Olga’s writing is 30,000 francs.20 This might be an error; it might mean that Picasso did not want Olga to know how drastically Doucet, a famously hard bargainer, had beaten him down. Olga would not have minded. She had been horrified at her first glimpse of the Demoiselles and wanted to get this whorish masterpiece out of the house at any price.

  Picasso. Three-Quarter Portrait of André Breton, 1923 (frontispiece for Breton’s Clair de Terre). Drypoint, 28×19 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Surprising as it is that Picasso sold the Demoiselles, it is even more surprising that he sold it for so little. In 1916, when his work was nothing like as valuable, he had refused an offer of 20,000 francs. A few months after the sale to Doucet, Roché would appraise the painting at 200,000-300,000 francs. The explanation: Doucet had deceived Picasso with a false promise: “After my death, the whole collection shall go to the Louvre and I shall be the only collector whose authority compels the Louvre to accept avant-garde painting.” 21 Doucet made similar declarations to most of the painters whose work he bought, but did not live up to these vows in his will. The only paintings he left to the Musées nationaux were Douanier Rousseau’s Snake Charmer and Seurat’s large sketch forLe Cirque22 After his death, the rest of his paintings, including the Demoiselles, were sold one at a time over the years—mostly through César de Hauke, a dandyfied dealer of Polish origins, who worked for Jacques Seligman.

  Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in the stairwell of Jacques Doucet’s studio in Neuilly, c. 1929. Courtesy Daniel Wolf, Inc.

  For Picasso, the prospect of his revolutionary masterpiece hanging in the Luxembourg, and thence the Louvre, alongside his favorite Manets, Cour-bets, and Ingres, took precedence over other considerations. Doucet not only cheated the artist over the price of Demoiselles; but he did so on the spurious grounds that he could not hang a painting of whores in his wife’s drawing room.23 Why ever not, someone said, given that Madame Doucet supposedly started life as an equestrienne in a circus?24 Picasso would turn down Doucet’s invitations to see the Demoiselles in situ and would flatly refuse to sell him La Darise, another masterpiece the collector yearned to own: a decision that the terms of Doucet’s will would fully justify.

  Need for money may have necessitated the sale of the Demoiselles. In 1923, Picasso contemplated leaving the rue la Boétie. He required a much larger space with a separate working area, preferably an hôtel particulier. To raise the money, he would have had to make some major sales, hence that of the Demoiselles. Picasso had alerted friends to his requirements, among them Roché, who went looking for a house, “maximum price 600,000 francs, to include an atelier, preference for an old house in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 6th, or 4th arrondisements.”25 Roché’s diary confirms that he took the Picassos in search of suitable premises on January 17 and 31, 1924 (“driving around in a car, house-hunting, nothing pleases them”); and again on February 10 (“the Picassos: still in search of a house. He dragged along his wife and son”).26 Meanwhile, Edith de Beaumont had come up with two small pavilions at Neuilly, “avec jardin, chaque pavilion sépare;” and José María Sert had written to say that “if you are interested in my studio, you know that you have priority over everyone else.”27 Sert’s huge ornate studio—which had inspired Degas’s comment: “How very Spanish—and on such a quiet street”—did not tempt him.

  Why not have a modern architect build a house to your specifications? Gertrude Stein suggested. (Braque would soon acquire a plot of land near the Lion de Belfort, where Auguste Perrin would design a modernist house for him.) “Imagine, if Michael Angelo would have been pleased” Picasso said, “if some one had given him a fine piece of Renaissance furniture. Not at all. He would have been pleased if he had been given a beautiful Greek intaglio.”28

  In the end, Picasso found nothing that pleased him. Instead, he settled for an additional floor in the rue la Boétie building, which he could use as a studio. Negotiations would take another three years. At last he would be able to lead an independent life. Picasso’s marriage would never be the same, nor would his work.

  The first American exhibition of Picasso’s paintings opened at Wildenstein’s in New York on November 17, 1923. Of the sixteen works, three were biggish pastels; the thirteen oils included three of the Salvadó portraits, a couple of the Dinard Maternités, and some bravura portraits of Olga. All had been chosen for their “easiness on the eye,” in other words their sales potential. Cubism was excluded. This was a mistake. Insofar as Picasso had a following in America, it was a modernist one—young artists, writers, and intellectuals, mostly without the means to collect. Well-informed critics like Henry McBride felt that Rosenberg had underestimated American avant-gardism in limiting the show to establishment taste.29 Also, Rosenberg had not allowed for the fact that the two biggest collectors of modern art in America—Dr. Barnes, who preferred Matisse to Picasso, and John Quinn, who preferred Picasso to Matisse—made most of their acquisitions through their Paris agents.

  Rosenberg had only himself to blame for the failure of the Wildenstein show. He was so dazzled by the riches of the New World and so greedy to share in them that he asked prices nobody was prepared to pay. Works of minor importance were all that sold. Picasso was dismayed that Rosenberg had misjudged the U.S. market, just as he and Thannhauser had misjudged the German market on the occasion of their large show at Munich the year before. “I am sorry for Picasso’s sake,” John Quinn had written Roché, “that the Munich … exhibition was not a financial success, but Mr. Paul Rosenberg was too cocky about it. When he very cockily and most impudently wrote me about the exhibition … I could not help … pointing out that I doubted whether it would be a financial success.”30 In March 1924, Quinn reported to Roché that Marius de Zayas had seen Picasso, “who was very much disappointed at no sales having been made in America [and] realized that [Rosenberg’s] prices had hurt him very much … and that he [Picasso] would have been willing to sell the clowns (Harlequins) for forty to forty-five or fifty-thousand francs, but that it was Rosenberg who made them seventy-five or eighty-thousand francs.”31

  Rosenberg wrote to reassure Picasso. The opening had gone off “without tambourines or trumpets,” he said, but it “has had a great succès d’estime et moral. Everybody finds it marvelous … even if there are only sixty visitors a day, which is apparently a lot!”32 On November 26, Rosenberg wrote that “les Montparnassiens”— presumably New York’s modernists—found that “a change has come over their Picasso…. The painting that should have pleased the most, the Harlequin in profile [Salvadó], pleased the least, the most popular [paintings] are the woman with the blue veil and [La Réponse]. It’s just as we thought.”33 On December 11, the day after the paintings were shipped to Chicago, Rosenberg reported that New York “had been a success on every level except that of sales.”34

  The Chicago show differed from the New York one in that it was held under the auspices of the Arts Club of Chicago, an organization of moneyed, art-loving ladies (much like the founders of New York’s MoMA), who rented gallery space in the Art Institute complex. This was not quite the same thing as the great museum show Rosenberg had promised Picasso. The Arts Club was a nonprofit organization, but it was entitled to make sales. Paul Rosenberg had counted on helping the good women of Chicago do this, except there were no sales. Hence his conclusion that the new country was not conducive to the new painting; America was fine for contacts, but Paris was the place for sales. This conclusion would be confirmed when the paintings that failed to sell in America were shown at his gallery. The most resolved of the Salvadó Harlequins promptly sold for 100,000 francs to
the Swiss collector Rudolf Staechelin. In his review of the show, Picasso’s old friend, Maurice Raynal, took Rosenberg to task for failing “to hang a group of works that presents the current different tendencies.”35 The artist would see that Rosenberg never made that mistake again.

  In his letters to Roché, his Paris agent, John Quinn—the ruthless Irish-American lawyer who was already one of the two or three greatest collectors of Picasso in the world—provides a cold-blooded analysis of the situation. Listen to the brute gloating over Rosenberg’s failure:

  That will be a setback to Picasso in Paris. Picasso will want to make sales to you or me in the course of the next three or four or six months. And he will not do so. The stand-off attitude can be played by both sides. Picasso stood you off after you saw him this autumn. Now when he comes to you about selling things to me, you can stand him off. When he does that I think you may frankly say: “Mr. Quinn thought we had a friendly understanding, honorable to both sides. Mr. Quinn did not wish to jew you down and did not make any condition[s]…. Mr. Quinn was very much interested in the Harlequin and would have been glad to trade with you … if you had not taken the attitude that you… could do nothing until Rosenberg saw [it].

  For all his dislike of dealers, Picasso treated Rosenberg honorably. He was indeed entitled to make sales behind Rosenberg’s back, but he was certainly not going to allow Quinn or anyone else to have first pick of the paintings that he was preparing for Rosenberg’s New York show. Nor was he going to allow Quinn or his cat’s-paw, Roché, to drive a wedge between him and his dealer. Quinn saw himself becoming the greatest of all Picasso collectors, but he died unexpectedly the following year. The only other U.S. collector who surpassed him in ruthlessness and rapaciousness was that other egomaniacal Irishman, Dr. Albert Barnes of Philadelphia.

  Quinn’s dislike of Rosenberg was fueled by anti-Semitism, given his description of the dinner he unwillingly gave for him in New York:

  [Rosenberg] was very anxious to come to see my things. Finally I had to agree.… [Felix] Wildenstein and he accepted my invitation to dinner. … Wildenstein is a perfect gentleman whereas Rosenberg showed himself to be a cheap little Jew. He disgusted everybody by constantly turning to me and asking me to come in … so I can show you a wonderful portrait of Madame Cézanne, etc., etc…. Rosenberg talked shop nearly all the time and nothing but shop. Wildenstein did not talk shop and showed himself to be a sympathetic and gentle man.3637

  In his last letter to Roché (June 25, 1924), written shortly before his death from cirrhosis, Quinn once again castigates Rosenberg: “I don’t like that kind of Jew jobbery. That is too much of Paul Rosenberg’s trickiness for me.”38 “Despite their combative relationship,” Michael FitzGerald, who has done so much to clarify Picasso’s relationships with his dealers, would have us believe that “Quinn and Rosenberg clearly understood each other very well.”39

  Rosenberg had the last laugh. On hearing the announcement after Quinn’s death, in July 1924, that his entire collection was to be sold at auction, Rosenberg immediately contacted his executors and made an offer for all fifty-two paintings and sculptures by Picasso. The disappointing results of the Kahnweiler sales played into his hands.40 To the dismay of collectors and dealers poised to fight over Quinn’s treasures, Rosenberg’s offer was accepted. It would prove a very profitable deal.

  Meanwhile, the souring of the relationship between Cocteau and Radiguet was becoming the subject of much malicious speculation, especially on the part of Picasso, who found Cocteau’s jealousy of Radiguet as absorbing as Diaghilev’s jealousy of Massine. Just as he had encouraged Massine to dump Diaghilev, he encouraged Radiguet to dump Cocteau. Jean and Valentine Hugo unwittingly amplified the anxiety that had settled on their group by conducting table-turning séances at which death manifested itself. Jean got this idea from his great-grandfather, Victor Hugo, who communed with spirits during his exile in Guernsey However, as Jean certainly knew, his surrealist friends were also delving into the supernatural. The table-turning took place in the Hugos’ new apartment in a small anteroom hung in pink velvet. Jean transcribed the messages that a little black gueridon tapped out. As well as the Hugos, the participants included Auric, Cocteau, Radiguet, and, on occasion, Paul Morand.41 Radiguet appeared to be the spirit’s target. On April 21 it announced that “malaise increases with genius.” “What malaise?” “Uncertainty.” On April 25, Cocteau asked the table to tell them its name. “No,” it answered. “Because it is forbidden?” “I am death.” “Is it death that speaks?” “Think of me.” On April 30, the table rapped out a request for Radiguet’s youth (“]e veux sa jeunesse”). At this, the Hugos and their guests found themselves suffering from collective nervous depression and stopped the séances. It was too late. Fear had been unleashed.

  Raymond Radiguet and Jean Cocteau at Le Piquëy, September 1923. Collection Serge Tamagnot, Paris.

  Twenty-year-old Radiguet had never accepted the role of Rimbaud redivivus that Cocteau tried to thrust on him, except in one respect: the derangement of the senses through excessive indulgence in alcohol, drugs, sex, and self-destructiveness in quest of the artistic martyrdom advocated by Rimbaud. Radiguet did not go as far as Rimbaud in his quest; although, according to Cocteau, he was drinking “a bottle of whisky and a bottle of gin a day.”42 He was also smoking opium. He had been involved with numerous women—among them Irène Lagut, Beatrice Hastings, and Thora Dardel (the beautiful Swedish wife of Nils de Dardel, Rolf de Maré’s former boyfriend)—before falling under the spell of two sexy young Polish models he had picked up in Montparnasse. “Mes chinoises,” he called them. Bronia and Tylia Perlmutter were the daughters of a Polish rabbi who had settled in Holland. To extricate himself from the embarrassment of Cocteau’s infatuation and egged on by Picasso, Radiguet asked the eighteen-year-old Bronia to marry him. Bronia—later the wife of the film director René Clair—has stated that Cocteau became so jealous of her that he threatened to have her and her sister deported.43

  Valentine Hugo. Raymond Radiguet, 1921 (frontispiece for Radiguet’s Le Diable au corps). Lithograph.

  In July, Radiguet gave in to Cocteau and agreed to spend the rest of the summer recovering his health on the Mediterranean. For this rest cure, Cocteau chose Le Piquëy, an isolated fishing village where the sunset had a way of turning the sky, water, and sand a nacreous pink. Jean Hugo said it was like being inside a pearl. La bande à Cocteau took over the one and only Hôtel Dhourte. Besides the Hugos and Auric, the group included Bolette Natan-son, Misia’s manic-depressive niece, who was much loved by everyone except her aunt. Bolette had fallen suicidally in love with Cocteau. Chewing on lightbulbs had failed to work, but she eventually found a more effective method. There were also a couple of alcoholic aesthetes, the half-French, half-English Count François de Gouy d’Arcy and his rich American boyfriend, Russell Greeley, art patron friends of the Hugos.44

  During this troubled summer, Cocteau would finish his booklet on Picasso, Jean Hugo would do evocative little watercolors, and Radiguet would dictate his Bal du Comte d’Orgel to Auric, who traveled with a typewriter. He also traveled with a rented piano, which had to be ferried to Le Piquëy on one of the gondola-like boats that plyed the Bassin. While Greeley encouraged Radiguet to drink, Gouy d’Arcy, who loathed Etienne de Beaumont, urged him to darken and sharpen his subtly cruel portrait of him.

  Valentine Hugo, writing thirty years later, remembered their stay as eerily idyllic, with “an underlying malaise both physical and moral.”45 The weather was ominous—torrential rain and thunderstorms—and on July 30, Radiguet, who was a strong swimmer, would have drowned in the current had not some fishermen gone to his rescue. At first the prodigy suffered attacks of irrational rage, then pulled himself together, drank less, worked hard, rose early, and went early to bed. The improvement did not last. At the beginning of September, he and Valentine complained of food poisoning. They blamed it on the local oysters. Jean Hugo took Valentine home to his mas, an hour or so away at Lunel, b
ut her condition deteriorated. On December 10, she had to be rushed to hospital for a peritonitis operation. It saved her life.

  A different illness would soon kill Radiguet.46 After returning to Paris on October 4, he distanced himself, insofar as he could, from Cocteau and his jealous scenes. Threatened with military service in December, Radiguet embarked on a downward spiral of “debts, alcohol, insomnia, heaps of dirty linen, moving from hotel to hotel, from crime scene to crime scene” with Bronia Perlmutter.47 One night when he and Bronia were out with Cocteau and Auric, Radiguet took Auric aside and told him he was going to marry Bronia. She was no more in love with him than he was with her, but he liked women and had no intention, as he said, of becoming “a forty-year-old man called Madame Jean Cocteau.” Meanwhile, his health was deteriorating; also his morale. He had been shattered by the successive suicides, a month apart, of two of his close friends, Emmanuel and Philippe Daudet, the dysfunctional fourteen-year-old son of the founder of the fascist Action Française, Léon Daudet. Philippe had blown his brains out in a taxi as he drove past the Saint-Lazare prison where a girlfriend was incarcerated.48

  By the beginning of December, Radiguet was running a high fever. Cocteau’s fashionable quack, Dr. Capmas, who had failed to save Apollinaire, failed to save Radiguet. The patient had une grippe (flu), Capmas said, and should drink a lot of grog. Sensible as ever, Chanel sent over her own doctor, who diagnosed typhoid. Ever since his sister’s death from diphtheria almost thirty years earlier, Picasso had had a mortal terror of disease and stayed away. Misia rushed Radiguet to a clinic, but it was too late. Abuse of alcohol and drugs had weakened a system that had never been very strong. There was no saving him. When his mother was sent for, she, too, turned out to have caught typhoid and ended up in isolation at the clinic. Poor, forlorn Bronia—“that very tiresome Dutch woman,” as the Abbé Mugnier described her49—was glared at by Cocteau’s disapproving mother for cuckolding her son. On the eleventh, Radiguet began to hallucinate, but he still had moments of lucidity. “Tomorrow, I’ll be dead,” he told Cocteau. When Cocteau protested, he repeated, “Yes, yes, I know I’ll be dead … executed by God’s firing squad.”50