A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Picasso. Study for Mercure curtain with Harlequin playing guitar and Pierrot playing violin, 1924. Pastel on gray paper, 25×32 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  At the time, Mercure appeared to be a failure, but it left Diaghilev, as described by Serge Lifar on opening night, “pale, agitated, nervous.”12 A dangerous “threat to Russian ballet,” he said, “the only thing missing is my name.”13 The impresario would put that to rights in 1927 when he arranged for his company to give two performances of Mercure in London. Once again, it was not a success. After that, this ballet, the most provocative of all Picasso’s works for the theater, including Parade, was never danced again in its original form.14 Except for pastel studies for the curtain—a left-handed Pierrot about to play a violin and a right-handed Harlequin playing a guitar— and a few sketches and photographs, which hung for many years in Beaumont’s bathroom, little has survived.15 However, if Mercure is studied in the light of statements by Picasso and Satie and contemporary accounts, the ballet emerges as a major milestone of avant-garde theater. No less important, the constructions that were such a novel feature of Mercure paved the way for the open work sculptures that Picasso would embark on four years later. Nobody saw this more clearly than Aragon who wrote in Le Journal Littéraire (June 1924) that “Mercure caught me unaware. Nothing stronger has ever been brought to the stage. … It is also the revelation of an entirely new style for Picasso, one that owes nothing to either cubism or realism, and which transcends cubism just as cubism transcended realism.”

  Man Ray. Photograph of Eugenia Errázuriz, Picasso, and Olga at the Beaumont ball after the premiere of Mercure, 1924. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Breton had been too busy jeering to realize how innovative and adventurous Mercure was, let alone how Picasso and Satie had worked together as one. There could be no question of praising the one at the expense of the other, but this did not stop Breton from publishing a letter of passionate support of Picasso, signed by him and several other surrealists.

  It is … our duty to put on record our deep and wholehearted admiration for Picasso, who … goes on creating a troubling modernity at the highest level of expression. Once again, in Mercure, he has shown a full measure of his daring and his genius, and has met with a total lack of understanding. This event… proves that Picasso, far more than any of those around him, is today the eternal personification of youth and the absolute master of the situation.1617

  Satie derided Breton’s unctuous letter as “assez curieux et un peu (con ”—a laughing matter. As for Picasso, he welcomed Breton’s gesture as an act of fealty. It came at a tricky time for him. Littérature, the avant-garde magazine that had been a vehicle for modernist principles since 1919, closed down with a numéro démordisant (June 22, 1924), the day after Breton’s letter appeared. Breton was about to correct the galleys of his first surrealist manifesto, which would be published on October 15. It would be replaced in December by a new review, La Révolution Sur-réaliste, to be edited by Benjamin Péret and Pierre Naville. For Picasso, Breton’s backing was all-important in the face of the possible but unlikely event of his leadership of the avant-garde being challenged by the iconoclastic Marcel Duchamp or that even wilder card, Picabia. In return, Picasso was always ready to do portraits and frontispieces for books by surrealist poets; to allow his work to appear in surrealist publications and provide those he liked with handouts when they were broke. At the same time Picasso took care to hold himself aloof from the movement. He never attended their meetings, never signed their manifestos, and never subscribed to the views expressed in Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la peinture in 1925.

  Cocteau with (from left) Lydia Sokolova (as the Perlouse), Anton Dolin (as the Beau Gosse), Léon Woïdzikovsky (as the Golfer), and Bronislava Nijinska (as the Tennis Champion), in Le Train bleu, 1924. Getty Images.

  The same day that Breton’s “Hommage à Picasso” letter appeared in the press, Diaghilev unveiled his new ballet, Le Train bleu: scenario by Cocteau, décor by Henri Laurens, costumes by Chanel, choreography by Nijinska, and a magnificent drop curtain by Picasso after the gouache of two maenads racing along the beach at Dinard in 1922.18 This curtain had been so sensitively executed by Prince Schervachidze—a generous patron of the arts under the Tsar, a scene painter in exile—that the artist signed it and dedicated it to Diaghilev, who took to using it as a logo for the Ballets Russes.19 Le Train bleu had a scenario by Cocteau that featured Diaghilev’s new Irish dancer and favorite, Patrick Ray (Russianized to Anton Dolin), to his best advantage. The impresario had decreed that Dolin play the acrobatic Beau Gosse (“gorgeous guy”) in this ballet named after the glamorous new express train that took Parisians to sea and sun and la vie sportive on the Côte d’Azur.

  Apart from supervising the drop curtain, Picasso had nothing much to do with Le Train bleu. Nevertheless, he attended a number of rehearsals, which by this time usually bored him. Was he, one wonders, interested in one of the dancers? He was also obliged to be in attendance when Diaghilev invited his patrons to watch the company practice. On one occasion, the Picasso family joined the hereditary Princess Charlotte of Monaco, her husband, Prince Pierre de Polignac, the latter’s American sister-in-law, Winnie de Polignac, as well as the Duchesse d’Ayen, the Marquise de Ganay (Georges Bemberg’s sister), Lord Berners, Auric, Milhaud, and Poulenc to watch the company rehearse Le Train bleu. Little Paulo was so excited by the jumps Nijinska was teaching the dancers that he asked his father if she was “ever going to descend.”20 When Dolin appeared onstage, “Diaghilev adjusted his monocle and watched him closely, beating time with his foot…. Nijinska lit another cigarette.”21

  Le Train bleu narrowly missed being a flop. Cocteau made Nijinska cry with his nagging. When doing lifts, partners had difficulty getting a grip on the knitted bathing suits that Chanel had designed for them. Also, the large pearl earrings— soon to become a popular fashion accessory—that the couturière had devised for Sokolova made it as difficult for her to hear the music as her special rubber slippers made it difficult to dance. Worst of all, the pas de deux that Nijinska had choreographed for Dolin and herself did not work. At the very last moment, as the stage was being readied for the first performance, Nijinska took Dolin off and rechoreo-graphed their dance, capitalizing on the craze for the body beautiful. The pas de deux was a triumph and made Dolin an instant star. With its Prince of Wales-like golfer in plus-fours, its bathing belle in pink georgette, its gorgeous poules (tarts) in Chanel “flapper” dresses, and its sexy gigolos in swimsuits, Le Train bleu epitomized the period and the Côte d’Azur and spawned a series of ballets which were essentially about little else but fashion.22

  The Train bleu curtain was Picasso’s last contribution to Diaghilev’s company. He had had enough. His feelings for the ballet and the beau monde were much the same as the ones Stravinsky expressed in a letter to his friend C. F. Ramuz:

  I go sometimes to the Ballets Russes, sometimes to the Cigale … and everywhere one sees nothing but the snobbery and nastiness of horrible people who flutter about, and who (happily) play no part in your life, princesses who do nothing but ask you to lunch, honest bourgeois who listen to [Chabrier’s] L’Education Man-quée as if it were The Rite of Spring. … In the long run one is seized with disgust and could easily become a pessimist, which is what I most fear in the world.23

  Olga, c. 1924. Photograph probably taken by Picasso.

  21

  Still Lifes at La Vigie (Summer 1924)

  On or around July 20, 1924, the Picassos, with Paulo and his nanny, and the Murphys with their three children, left Paris for the Riviera. The Murphys’ daughter, Honoria, says that when the train stopped at Marseilles for half an hour, they got off to stretch their legs. Picasso had a way of becoming attached to a place, any place, in no time at all, and he said, “Let’s stay here.”1 In obedience to the master’s whim, they spent a night or two at the Hôtel de Noailles. Honoria assumed that the Picassos spent the summer at Marseilles. She misremembers. They all wen
t on to Antibes.

  After a day or two at the Hôtel du Cap, looking for somewhere to spend the rest of the summer, the Picassos found a villa not far from the one they had taken in 1920, but grander and architecturally more fanciful. A mini-château rather than a villa, it was called La Vigie (the lookout house) and its garden overlooked the beach. Picasso did the usual drawings of his summer abode:2 its Gothic windows and turrets; its ornate striped awning over the balustraded entrance giving onto the beach; its machicolated watchtower sticking out of the Aleppo pines that gave the resort its name. The house—now greatly transformed—was spacious. It had several guest rooms and a garage across the road that Picasso, who had left his car in Paris, took over as a studio,3 much as he had done at Fontainebleau in 1921. The bare walls of the garage proved all too tempting. To the annoyance of the owner, the artist could not resist painting them. Unswayed by Picasso’s argument that his “fresco” was worth a lot of money, the owner insisted that the artist pay to have the wall restored to its original state.4 It was not photographed.

  Now that most Riviera hotels stayed open in the summer, the jeunesse dorée was abandoning northern resorts like Deauville and Le Touquet for the Midi. Antibes and Juan-les-Pins had become very “in,” though not as yet touristy. Some of Picasso’s friends had followed his example. New arrivals included the Stravinskys. They had taken a house at Nice, but since all four of their children had caught diphtheria, Picasso kept away; he insisted the composer visit him. Another musical couple in the neighborhood, who had become close friends, were the Pierre Bertins: the attractive husband was an avant-garde actor, singer, and theatrical director; the attractive wife was the well-known avant-garde pianist Marcelle Meyer. The first person to play the four-hand version of Parade with Satie in 1917, Meyer would later try to teach Paulo to play the piano.5

  As expected, the Beaumonts materialized. After promising to join them at the Hôtel du Cap, they had chosen Cannes instead, but paid frequent visits to Juan-les-Pins and Antibes.6 To judge by two sketches that look much like Valentine,7 the Hugos may have driven over from their mas in the Languedoc. Diaghilev was installed at Monte Carlo with his company, which kept Olga happy. Cocteau was spending the summer with Auric and other opium smokers at Villefranche in a villa called Le Calme. The Picassos kept away from this louche group. Gertrude Stein and Alice declined Olga’s invitation to join them.8

  Olga in front of the beach entrance to La Vigie, Juan-les-Pins, 1924.

  Once again the Murphys made the Hôtel du Cap their headquarters. No longer under the same roof, as they had been the year before, the two families saw less of each other. Many of the Murphys’ American friends from previous summers had returned. Picasso was pleased to see the Dos Passoses, the Archibald MacLeishes (who had taken a villa nearby), Donald Ogden Stewart, and Gilbert Seldes—critic and editor of The Dial—with his new wife, Amanda. Picasso liked the Seldeses and gave them one of his Nessus and Dejanira drawings as a wedding present.9 The artist told me he was beginning to tire of them en masse—too rowdy, no common language, too many cocktails.

  The Scott Fitzgeralds were a recurrent problem. They had taken a villa at Vales-cure, but spent much of their time at the Hôtel du Cap, where Picasso remembered seeing rather too much of them.10 Zelda—“intensely private and publicly outrageous”11—was in a bad way. A blatant affair with a trainee pilot at a local air base was the cause. Alcoholic animosity fed the flames. To sober up after late night parties, Zelda would go to Eden Roc, slip out of her evening dress and dive into the darkness of the sea from thirty-five-foot-high rocks. Bella figura obliged Fitzgerald to follow suit; he hated that. One night, Zelda overdosed on sleeping pills. Sara tried to administer an olive oil emetic, but Zelda recoiled: “Don’t make me drink that, please. If you drink too much oil you turn into a Jew.”12 Picasso found Zelda strange. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald had become fascinated by Sara and spent hours trying to draw her out. He constantly cross-examined her about her relationship with Gerald, whose homosexuality he could not resist putting to the test—mischievously introducing him to young men. Ten years later, when the author’s masterpiece Tender Is the Night came out, Sara would be mortified to discover the motive for his interrogation. Fitzgerald had recast the Murphys in his and Zelda’s image. To be perceived as spoiled expatriates at the nadir of the Depression would be a source of sorrow for Sara: retribution, perhaps, for having lived too well. “You can’t hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella” was the Daily Workers verdict on this great roman à clef.13

  Picasso. La Vigie, 1924. Oil on canvas, 22×27 cm. Private collection.

  Eventually, the gregarious Murphys tired of hotel life and bought a small tumbledown “chalet” a short walk from La Garoupe. Besides a panoramic view of the coast, it had outbuildings (including a donkey stable which became a studio), a small farm, and a vast idyllic terraced garden, which the former owner—a colonial official— had planted with exotic trees and shrubs. Over the next year or so, Gerald, who had trained as a landscape architect, would enhance the garden and enlarge and remodel the house, which they would call Villa America.

  Thanks to Calvin Tomkins’s perceptive and deservedly popular book about the Murphys, Living Well Is the Best Revenge, the Villa America has come to occupy a uniquely glamorous place in transatlantic cultural history. For Picasso, it was the novelty and camaraderie of that first summer at the Hôtel du Cap that counted; it would never be repeated.

  Picasso started work the day he moved into La Vigie: a difficult-to-decipher drawing in purple ink is dated July 23, 1924.14 Cowling sees three sunbathers.15 She may well be right. The artist has done his best to bamboozle us; there do not seem to be enough hands, feet, eyes, mouths, breasts, armpit hair, and sexual organs to go around. Body parts are strewn over what looks like a beach towel, so randomly that one is hard put to conjure them back into figures. Top right, Picasso portrays the blazing sun; top left, he uses wavy lines for the sea and dots below for the sand.16 The following day, he did another drawing17—.a still life with guitar and fruit dish— and again scrupulously dated it. Since he dated little else this summer, he apparently wanted to establish these two images as starting points for his next phase of work. The haphazard rearrangement of body parts in the July 23 drawing would not become a fixation with Picasso for another year. The July 24 croquis of a guitar and fruit dish, on the other hand, sets the pattern for this summer’s still lifes.

  Picasso. Three Bathers, July 23, 1924. Violet ink on paper, 15.6×20.1 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Preliminary sketches for three of the great still lifes18 that make this summer so memorable recall the Saint-Raphaël Guéridons of 1919, except that the theatrical setting—open windows, looped-back curtains, ornate railings—has been omitted. Instead Picasso evokes the Mediterranean by incorporating shorthand signs for sea, sky, sand, and stars into the fabric of his still lifes: as, for instance, when he gives a guitar a fishy look by extending its neck into a tail and repositioning the sound hole to suggest the fish’s gills. In the first major work to emerge from these studies, the Stedelijk Museum’s hieroglyphic Still Life with Mandolin,19 Picasso renders the mandolin as if it were a fish caught in a net, and sets it off against a tablecloth with a wavy pattern and panels of shorthand pictorial notation, dotted with stars and divided into areas of night blue and day blue to give the painting a night-and-day resonance.

  The second of these large still lifes (the one with the mandolin in the National Gallery of Ireland)20 is shrill and assertive—a bit like its first owner, Sara’s impossible sister, Hoytie Wiborg, who had recently returned from America with a present of neckties made of “mouchoirs de négresses” for Picasso.21 The star-studded fruit dish and the wonky bottle look as if they have been fighting each other. The electrical brightness of these objects against the darkness of the foliage establishes this as a night painting, set out of doors. To steady this unsteady still life, Picasso plants it on an ornate base that matches the striped and scallop-edged canopy over the front e
ntrance to La Vigie.

  The third and most complex of these still lifes—the Guggenheim Museum’s Mandolin and Guitar—is one of the largest (180.9 x 220.8 cm) he ever did.22 This grand coup de théâtre exemplifies a new, more supple and expressive form of late cubism. Cowling sees the painting as a response—above all in its scale—to Matisse’s even larger pseudo-cubist version (1915) of the Louvre’s sizable Still Life, “La Desserte” by the seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Davidsz de Heem.23 She is certainly right. Picasso regarded Matisse’s Still Life after de Heem24 as a travesty of cubism and would have wanted to correct his rival’s misunderstanding of his and Braque’s language and demonstrate how he would have done it.

  Picasso. Still Life with Mandolin, 1924. Oil on canvas, 97.5×130 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

  Cowling sees the Guggenheim still life in a sexual light. She likens the strings of the mandolin and guitar to “a woman’s hairy genitals [and/or] her anus” and “the bottle as a man’s genitals and its eye-like base as his anus.”25 Picasso’s still lifes of this period are indeed anthropomorphic, but they do not as yet abound in genitalian puns and other encoded references as she suggests, though they soon will. The guitar strings, to my mind, are guitar strings. Mandolin and Guitar is not about sex; it is about the farcical nature of the commedia dell’arte.