A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Picasso told us to regard his still lifes as “parables.”26 So let us apply his words to the Guggenheim still life, starting with the three puzzling fruits at the very heart of it—usually said to be apples, although they look like oranges.27 Over the next two years these three fruit will manifest themselves again and again in various forms in still life after still life. So far as I know, nobody has been able to decode them. I believe them to be a reference to Love for Three Oranges, Prokofiev’s revolutionary commedia dell’arte opera, which was first performed in December 1921 at the Chicago Auditorium and was still much in the news. This opera’s international success sparked enormous controversy in the musical circles frequented by Picasso. Prokofiev’s rival, Stravinsky, inveighed against it but failed to persuade Diaghilev to share his view. Love for Three Oranges enjoyed tremendous popularity. Scott Fitzgerald even used a passage from it as background music for the nightmare of the Gerald Murphy character, Dick Diver, in Tender Is the Night28

  Prokofiev’s plot would have been much to Picasso’s taste. The composer had adapted it from a play by Vsevolod Meyerhold, the modernist Russian dramaturge, who had adapted it from a farcical satire by the eighteenth-century Venetian dramatist Carlo Gozzi. Gozzi had set out to ridicule his two leading rivals: Carlo Goldoni for Frenchifying the bawdy old commedia dell’arte vernacular, and Pietro Chiari for turning classic drama into fustian melodrama. To mock them both, Gozzi dramatized “the most ridiculous story in the world,” Love for Three Oranges. Its success in 1761 was soon forgotten. Its rediscovery, 150 years later, had so impressed Meyerhold that he named his theater magazine as well as his experimental theater company after it, as Picasso probably knew. He is likely to have met Meyerhold when the latter visited Paris in 1914 and became a friend of Apollinaire’s.29 Les Mamelles de Tirésias reflects many of Meyerhold’s ideas, including ones inspired by the iconoclastic Gozzi.

  What had intrigued Meyerhold and Prokofiev, and would certainly have intrigued Apollinaire, was Gozzi’s use of absurdist farce—could anything be more absurd than three princesses imprisoned inside three oranges—to satirize the aesthetic issues of his time. The participation of rival factions of clowns and commedia dell’arte characters, like Truffaldino the jester and Pantalone the courtier, would have delighted Picasso. He would have seen how they applied to the dadaist clowns and commedia dell’arte surrealists in their attempts to take over the avant-garde in the early 1920s. Diaghilev, who admired Prokofiev and commissioned ballets from him, may have contemplated putting on a production of the opera. Matisse’s most recent biographer says the impresario asked Matisse to do a drawing of Prokofiev for the program of Love for Three Oranges.30 This was in fact for the program of Prokofiev’s ballet Chout, but it does not rule out the possibility that Diaghilev contemplated putting on the opera with décor by Picasso, who would have been an obvious choice for a commedia dell’arte spoof. This is only a hypothesis, but the way the tablecloth is diapered like a Harlequin’s costume, and the way the baggy white shapes of the instruments resemble the baggy white shapes of Picasso’s Pulcinellas, confirm that this is a commedia dell’arte still life.

  Also, the more one scrutinizes Mandolin and Guitar, the more one realizes that it is booby-trapped with visual jokes—including perspectival ones, like those to be found in the eye-teasing engravings of M. C. Escher. Take the seemingly matter-of-fact railings: in a row outside the window, which are echoed in a second row between the legs of the table. Are they fencing us in or fencing us out? Same with the window on the left. At first sight, it seems quite normal. Look again and you will see that the top pane faces away from you, while the bottom one faces directly at you. Picasso plays similar games elsewhere in the painting, not least in the crisscross triangles above the window.31 Just as he had used perspective against itself in cubist works to bring things back within reach, Picasso uses perspective against itself to perplex us—anything to hold our attention. As Apollinaire observed, “Surprise is the great new source of energy.”32

  Musical Instruments on a Table (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid) and Musical Instruments on a Table (Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel) in Picasso’s La Vigie studio, 1924.

  As well as painting these complex still lifes, Picasso embarked on two no less sizable but much more minimalist ones. These appear in the photographs of works in various stages of completion on the walls of the La Vigie garage. Hitherto, these breakthrough paintings have been dated 1925, 1926, even 1927. The photographs now enable us to assign them definitively to the summer of 1924. The painting on the right is now in the Beyeler Foundation.33 Its rust browns and blacks evoke an earthy, autumnal look, and the darkness at the bottom exerts a heavy earthward pull. The bluish-greenish painting on the left—now in the Reina Sofía Museum34—has a skyward pull. The all-important patch of blue below the table legs gives this still life the air of an altar floating in the empyrean. It is serene and meditative. There is also a secretive, one might say confessional, aspect to the painting: an almost invisible image of the head and upper body of a girl is buried just below the surface of the guitar on the right. Daix, who discovered this secret, maintains that it is a likeness of Marie-Thérèse Walter,35 whom Picasso would not meet for another three years. This image therefore refers to someone else—a mistress on the side—conceivably a dancer. Nobody in the artist’s entourage comes to mind, and so the identity of this unknown woman whom Picasso wanted to commemorate and, at the same time, conceal in art as well as in life remains a mystery.

  As well as these monumental still lifes Picasso did some full-face portraits of Olga at La Vigie: a black-and-white, night-and-day image split down the middle and another, which can be seen on the studio wall, with sand added to the paint as in the previous summer’s sandy portrait of Sara Murphy. Snapshots of the family visiting friends reflect Picasso’s pleasure at being back on the Riviera, playing on the sand with his son, while the cicadas drowned out the wash of the sea. He even did a fine, old-masterish drawing3637 of the local fisherwoman making her way up the beach with the morning’s catch in a basket. Just as he had done daytime and nighttime versions of his still lifes, Picasso did daytime and nighttime versions of the watchtower amid the pine trees. To differentiate yet again between day and night, he added a vaginal sun sign to a patch of red paint for daytime and a moon and the usual stars to a patch of pitch-black paint for nighttime.38

  The usual stars! These had originated in the “Night” scene in Mercure. After bringing stars in one form or another out of the sky onto the set of Mercure, Picasso sets them back in the firmament in a sequence of sketchbook drawings known as “Constellations.”39 The splendor of the meridional sky—Braque said that “the sky always looked so much higher” than the sky in the north40—inspired Picasso to create his own constellations: ink dots connected by fine pen lines that turn the zodiac into guitars and mandolins and the crotchet-dotted staves of musical scores.

  There was also a philosophical side to these constellations. The association of stars in the night sky and music suggests that Picasso was aware of the “music of the spheres”—a notion that had its roots in Pythagorean teaching. Pythagoreans believed that the disposition of the heavenly bodies was ordained by mathematical laws of musical harmony. The music of the spheres concept crops up in Shakespeare as well as in the ideas of modernist composers41—among them Picasso’s friend Edgard Varèse. The Bateau Lavoir’s mathematician, Maurice Princet—all too briefly Alice Derain’s first husband—would also have been aware of these Pythagorean beliefs. The number of night-and-day references in his Juan-les-Pins imagery suggests that Picasso knew about the Pythagorean discovery that the earth revolved on its own axis—a discovery that made it possible to comprehend the alternation of night and day.

  I would also like to cite Gombrich’s assertion about the zodiac: “the hold that these images in the sky still have on the imagination of western man [suggests] that projection was one of the roots of art.”42 This notion of projection—that is, the v
iewer’s active involvement in a visual experience—had been taken up by the surrealists. As soon as Breton saw these constellations, he grabbed them for the first number of his new journal, La Révolution Surréaliste. Later (1931), Picasso would use “constellations” to illustrate Vollard’s édition de luxe of Balzac’s Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. They too would play a role in his first open work sculptures of 1928.

  The summer of 1924 proved to be almost as productive and innovative as the summer at Fontainebleau. The previous year, he had been too distracted by the Mur-phys’ alfresco beach life at Eden Roc and La Garoupe to focus on serious work. This year, Picasso had sufficient space, privacy, and peace of mind to make a prodigious forward leap.

  Picasso. Constellations, summer 1924. Pen and India ink on sketchbook page, 31.5×23.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  22

  La Danse (1925)

  At the very end of September, the Picassos returned to Paris. Instead of moving out of the rue la Boétie, he had made up his mind to take the floor above. This arrangement, which would triple his rent, was anything but a fait accompli. Another year’s haggling would pass before Rosenberg managed to nail the deal: 25,000 francs a year for the two apartments.

  A month later, Clive Bell arrived on his customary fall visit. When he called on the artist, he was shown “three enormous more or less abstract works” (three of the Juan-les-Pins still lifes).1 In Bell’s vocabulary, “abstract” was not a compliment; he no longer had any understanding of Picasso’s work. His letters to Mary Hutchinson are filled with bitchy Parisian gossip: a visit to Marie Laurencin, whose malice “astonished and ravished” him. “Such snapping and biting… how Jeanne Salmon had once been on the trottoir… and the link between her and André was opium … the duchesses never pay artists. One fine lady came up for judgment after another … then on to Olga Picasso’s snobbishness, her bad effect on Picasso.”2 On previous visits, Alice Derain’s fiendishness about the Picassos had disgusted Bell. Now he enjoyed it, but he continued to court the artist as assiduously as ever.

  The Murphys had asked Bell to a dinner for “the great Bolshevik poet,” Vladimir Mayakovski, which included the Fernand Légers, though not the Picassos. Olga would not have liked it, nor did Bell. On a visit to Picasso’s studio in 1922, Mayakovski had apparently urged Picasso “to go along with a pot of paint one night and decorate the walls [of the Chambre des Députés] while they aren’t looking. … I saw a glint of alarm in Madame Picasso’s eye.”3 Bell told Mary Hutchinson that Mayakovski “can’t speak a word of French and seems a lout and has to be approached through his mistress, a pretty yellow round-headed Frenchified little thing…. After dinner … the poet danced a pas seul and went through some parlour evolutions all of which seemed supremely ridiculous.”4 And then the Murphys sang the folk songs and Negro spirituals that Gerald had learned at the Yale Glee Club.

  On December 4 Picasso attended the opening of Reldche with scenario and décor by Picabia, music by Satie, choreography by Borlin.5 Having worked closely and happily with Satie, he was eager to see how the composer had fared with the dadaist Reldche. It turned out to be as iconoclastic as Mercure, though not quite as sardonic or brilliant. Once again, Satie served up a subtly subversive, deceptively simplistic score, which he categorized as “obscene” on the grounds that it derived from two famously bawdy ditties, “Cadette Rousselle” and “Le Père Dupanloup.” There were quotes, too, from Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.” The collaborators had roles in the actual performance. Satie and Picabia drove around “the stage in Borlin’s five-horsepower motor-scooter chair, gleefully waving to the jeering … cheering crowd they had so magnificently ridiculed.”6 De Maré had thoughtfully provided the audience with whistles, the better to jeer with.

  After only twelve performances, a strip of paper printed with the word reldche, meaning “closure” (no performance), was pasted across ballet posters, emblazoned ironically with the very same word. Reldche had been almost universally panned, as de Maré and his collaborators had intended—at least so they said. To celebrate this flop, whose considerable costs would contribute to the end of the Ballets Suédois, de Maré gave a New Year’s Eve dinner at the Boeuf sur le Toit.

  Satie’s cirrhosis had reached a terminal phase. At first, he continued to commute from Arcueil to see Braque or Derain or Milhaud, but this became too taxing and he moved back to central Paris: first to a hotel, later to the Hôpital Saint-Joseph, where Beaumont had endowed a ward. Satie’s friends vied with each other in their support. Milhaud and the woman he was about to marry paid daily visits; Brancusi, a devoted admirer, brought yogurt and chicken soup that he made in his studio; Valentine Hugo arrived with suitable handkerchiefs; Maritain with a suitable priest, described by the invalid as “looking like a Modigliani, black on a blue background.”7 When pleurisy caused Satie’s temperature to soar, Picasso and the painter Survage would change his sweat-soaked sheets. It is a measure of his regard for Satie that Picasso was able to overcome his fear of illness.

  Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were “Ah! The cows …” The funeral took place five days later. Like several other friends, Picasso had already left Paris for the summer. He chose not to return to Arcueil for the funeral; it would have been too painful. He had come to trust and love Satie, not least for the intricacy and perversity of his wit, more than anyone since Apollinaire. One of Satie’s friends described the congregation: “only the smart, leisured, homosexual set was well represented. But the … good people of Arcueil, café companions and others, followed the cortège.”8 As for the former associates whom Satie had denounced for betraying him, Poulenc stayed away; Auric appeared “stricken [with] the same hangdog expression he wore at the première of Les Matelots… very close to tears [and] Cocteau sobbed rather noisily”9 Brancusi was devastated. He promised to do a sculpture for the grave and Beaumont promised to pay for it, but nothing would ever come of this. Later in the summer, Picasso would commemorate Satie’s death covertly in a dark, ambiguous still life.10

  The wretched apartment at Arcueil, which Satie would never allow his friends to visit, turned out to be filthy: a weird combination of meticulous order and quirkish mess. Dozens of umbrellas still in their wrappings lurked in corners. If Satie ever took one out in the rain, he was careful to keep it dry under his overcoat. “The piano pedals had been repaired with string and behind the instrument long lost manuscripts were found…. Milhaud tells us that the wall of the house opposite was emblazoned with the words, ‘this house is haunted by the devil.’ ”11

  Death was much in the air that spring and summer of 1925, leaving Picasso with a lot to exorcise. Some months before Satie’s end, the death of someone Picasso had known much longer, but avoided in recent years, Ramon Pichot, cast an even darker shadow on his life and work. The guilt and grief that this loss entailed inspired that allegorical masterpiece La Danse.12 Shortly before Christmas 1924, Picasso had been summoned to Montmartre to the sickbed of this Catalan painter turned rare-book dealer, who had been his most supportive friend in early years.13

  Pichot had lent Picasso his Barcelona studio in 1900. With his sister, the Wagnerian singer Maria Gay, Pichot had also arranged for Picasso and Fernande Olivier to spend the summer of 1910— a period of crisis for cubism—with them at Cadaquès, where the Pichots had a house. Unfortunately, when Picasso broke up with Fernande in 1912, Pichot had loyally sided with the old love against the new one, Eva Gouel, and was instantly dropped from the artist’s tertulia.

  Picasso. ha Danse (1925) shown in 1960 with Lee Miller, Picasso’s wife Jacqueline, Roland Penrose, and the artist at Notre-Dame-de-Vie. Photograph by Lee Miller. Lee Miller Archives, England.

  But now Pichot was dying from the combined effects of syphilis, tuberculosis, and a weak heart—dying, what is more, in La Maison Rose, the Montmartre house that Pichot’s mother had bought for him when he married Ger-maine Gargallo: Picasso’s former mistress and the unwitting cause of Casagemas’s suicide.14 Pichot had gone through most of
his money and Germaine had been running La Maison Rose as a bistro. Always ready to forgive his Catalan friends anything they did, short of faking his work, Picasso hurried over to provide whatever help he could. Pichot rallied and then there was a relapse. He died on March 1, 1925. Germaine lived on until 1948, sporadically provided for by Picasso. The demons unleashed by this deathbed reconciliation could only be exorcised in paint, as they had been after Casagemas’s suicide in the greatest of Blue period paintings, La Vie.

  La Danse had started life as a balletic Three Graces: a subject Picasso had addressed in 1923 at the height of his classical phase for the decorative panels commissioned by Beaumont.15 Since then, Picasso’s attitude toward classicism had turned increasingly to parody, as in Mercure’s campy Bath of the Graces. Over the next three months, he would transform his Three Graces into what is now known as La Danse—a title that Picasso disowned, since “the painting is above all connected with his misery on hearing of the death of his old friend.”1617 “It should be called The Death of Pichot,” he said.18

  Before reworking this vast canvas (215 x 142 cm), Picasso accepted an invitation from Diaghilev to take his family to Monte Carlo to celebrate Russian Easter. Kochno was sent to Paris to escort them onto the Blue Train and install them. Diaghilev, who was frantically trying to raise money for his more than usually penniless company, wanted Picasso to collaborate on another sellout ballet like Tricorne. However, Picasso had turned against the ballet; it was too distracting and time-wasting. Nevertheless, he agreed to draw some of the dancers for the commemorative program. He also did an Ingresque portrait of Enrico Cecchetti,19 the venerable maître de ballet whom Diaghilev had lured to Monte Carlo to shape up his torpid dancers. The new young star Dani-lova was so heavy her partner, Dolin, said he felt like “a piano mover.”