Besides an obsession with primitive art, Picasso and Leiris shared a deep interest in shamanism and the concept of Eros and Thanatos, which, in Leiris’s case, manifested itself in an obsession with suicide and castration. Decades later Picasso was upset but not in the least surprised when, in May 1957, Leiris swallowed enough phenobarbital to put him in a coma for three days and necessitate a tracheotomy.9 Thanks to Zette, he would survive this and other near-fatal incidents and live to be eighty-nine.
Michel Leiris, c. 1925, from Leiris’s Miroir de I’Afrique, edited by Jean Jamin.
This summer, Picasso was too focused on his work to waste much time with the Murphys, but Olga and Paulo often spent the morning and afternoon with them. Sara and Gerald had just about finished rebuilding and redecorating the house they had bought two years before and renamed Villa America. The décor of this house was 1920s minimal: black tiled floors, white walls, black satin sofas, stainless steel furniture, as well as café chairs and tables that had been silvered. With a number of helpers, Gerald replanned the superb garden, which had a panoramic view of the coast.10 Picasso shared Gerald’s taste for ragtime and would frequently borrow his records—Jelly Roll Morton and later Louis Armstrong—and recalled Zelda Fitzgerald doing a solitary, self-absorbed dance to them. Gerald would be very irritated when the records were not returned.
There was a large staff at the Villa America: a cook and maid or two, a nanny, a Mam’zelle, a chauffeur, a farmer (the Murphys had their own cows and chickens), and a young cousin of Diaghilev’s, who served as a studio assistant, tutor, court jester, chef, and skipper of Gerald’s various boats. There were guest cottages, one of which, La Ferme des Orangers, was renamed “la Ferme Dérangée” by Robert Benchley11 John Dos Passos complained that the Villa America was too much. “Fond as I was of [the Murphys],” Dos Passos wrote, “I could stand it for about four days. It was like trying to live in heaven. I had to get back down to earth.”12 Except for the reference to heaven, Picasso would have agreed.
Many a morning, Sara would send a car for Paulo and his nanny to join her three children on the Plage de la Garoupe. Later, the Murphys and their guests would come down to the beach and swim and sunbathe before being served an excellent American-style lunch under a linden tree. Picasso enjoyed the sweet corn they grew; hitherto he had regarded it as cattle fodder. After lunch, the children would take a siesta in the garden. On one of these occasions,
The Murphys’ Villa America, c. 1925. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, © Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly, VAGA.
little Paulo enlivened the children’s siesta hour by gravely instructing them on the different parts of the anatomy, with particular attention to the ways boys are different from girls. After their naps there would be … a treasure hunt or a costume party. Or there might be a children’s art show, which the Murphys called the Salon de la Jeunesse, for which Picasso served as organizer and judge.13
Antibes had become so fashionable that, as Scott Fitzgerald joked, there was no one there except for himself and Zelda, the Rudolf Valentinos, the Murphys, Mis-tinguett, ex-premier Orlando of Italy, and Etienne de Beaumont. In addition, there were the Murphys’ bright young American friends—Donald Ogden Stewart, the Dos Passoses, MacLeishes, Benchleys, Philip Barrys, and, after 1926, Hemingway, who was changing wives. With Picasso as a magnet, “interesting” people gravitated to the Murphys—not that this calculation would have entered their hospitable heads.
At one of the Murphys’ alfresco dinners—one that the Picassos are likely to have attended—Fitzgerald behaved so churlishly that he was banned from the house. Enraged at Robert McAlmon’s suggestion that he was a closet homosexual, Fitzgerald sought to refute this by subjecting the gifted young pianist, painter, and writer Eugene McCown to a barrage of homophobic taunts. He then retired to the vegetable garden and threw ripe figs at the bare back of the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay until Archie MacLeish “knocked him cold.”14
The razzmatazz of life at the Villa America amused Picasso—up to a point. When his work was going full blast, as it was this summer, he became fiercely self-absorbed and easily angered, especially in the company of strangers and people who did not speak his languages. In this respect his fellow countrymen, especially painters, were all the more welcome. This summer, several of the so-called School of Paris Spaniards—Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, Francisco Bores, and Joaquín Peinado—came to pay their respects to Picasso, as a photograph of them all with Olga and Paulo outside Villa Belle Rose reveals.15
Ortiz had been introduced to Picasso by Falla. This fascinating but not especially gifted Andalusian had grown up in Granada and been a childhood friend of the great Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca (his child’s godfather). Ortiz had been so shattered by the death of his wife in childbirth that he had taken to sleeping with his arms wrapped around her death mask. To console Ortiz, Lorca took him on expeditions throughout Andalusia in quest of cante jondo—sounds that Lorca described as “naked and blood curdling.” They became so proficient that they could even communicate in cante jondo. This would make for a close bond with Picasso, who shared this passion. The rumor that he sometimes used Ortiz as an assistant is likely to be true.1617 Given the scale of his work this summer he would have needed help. At the time that the photograph with the Picassos was taken, Ortiz would arrange, at the behest of Lorca—who never came to France and therefore never met the artist—an introduction for Salvador Dalí to meet Picasso. After fleeing Spain, Ortiz was interned by the French in a concentration camp, Picasso rescued him, as he did many other refugees from fascism.
The most successful of the “School of Paris Spaniards” was Francisco Bores, who had moved to Paris in 1925. After flirting with the surrealists, he adopted his fellow countryman, Juan Gris, as his guide. By 1927 Bores had forged a sensitive cubistic style which appealed to collectors who preferred subjects to be, as it were, humma-ble. Picasso liked Bores but was never particularly close to him. He had more in common with the less successful Peinado, whose passionate afición was a match for his own. At the Salon d’Automne (1923), Picasso had “stopped suddenly before a painting and said to a friend: ‘That must be by a Spaniard.’ It turned out to be by Peinado, recently arrived from his native Ronda; [Picasso] asked that he come to see him and made him a member of his intimate circle.”18
At the outset of this triumphant summer, Picasso reestablished, if only temporarily, his on-again, off-again friendship with the immensely gifted, infinitely erratic Picabia. This French-Cuban-Spanish jack-of-all-styles turned dadaist pioneer had recently inherited a fortune from an uncle and built himself a large, ugly Mau-resque villa at Mougins, just west of Cannes. He painted it ochre and vermilion and filled it with some good cubist and dadaist art (Picabia’s wife, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, was a marchand amateur) as well as a vast stash of junk model sailboats, tourist trinkets, gaudy bibelots, and Spanish bondieuseries. He also filled his garages with a collection of expensive cars, Rolls-Royces for preference. Picabia called his house the Château de Mai; it was soon throbbing with guests, among them Picasso.
Their enjoyment of black humor and of women ensured that the two men got on extremely well. They were about the same height and build and, more to the point, widely perceived as the principal perpetrators of whatever was new and shocking in art. Since their names started with the same four letters, they were often confused with one another. Picasso used this coincidence to his advantage. He told friends that if involved in an embarrassing incident, he gave his name as Picabia. Léonce Rosenberg dubbed them les deux Picas. Picabia would simultaneously mock Picasso’s cubist paintings as “cathédrales de merde”19 and praise him (Paris, 1922) as “the only painter I like”;20 or find fault with his neoclassicism as he did in 1923—“his work is now more antique than Cormon’s; it is painting for antiques dealers”;21 or, as he did this summer, work in tandem with him.
Picabia’s anarchic fervor, his reckless disregard for loyalties or commitments or conside
rations of personal or artistic integrity, amused Picasso. When, as sometimes happened, expenditure on women, cars, yachts, houses, not to mention baccarat, left Picabia temporarily broke, he would churn out whatever schlock the market called for. His first wife says that when his fortune evaporated in the 1930s, Picabia contracted through a North African dealer to supply the king of Morocco’s palaces with soft-porn paintings—a devaluation of his own powers, one might have thought amounting to iconoclastic suicide. However, according to Gabrielle, even his schlock had une aura mystérieuse22
That Picasso and Picabia’s sons, Paulo and Lorenzo, were about the same age had helped to trigger this new camaraderie. The families would go swimming together— in Picabia’s pool or off one of his boats, and as snapshots reveal, end up picnicking on the beach. According to Picabia’s second “wife,”23 Germaine Everling, the two men shared “the same mordant wit and were attracted to the same outlandish curiosities;” quite independently, they would appear wearing almost identical clothes and shoes fitted with identical heels designed to add an extra inch of height.24 Away from the dada-surrealist war zone, they turned out to have more in common than either might have thought.
The outrageous, multivaginal Kiss255 that launched Picasso’s work this summer owes a very great deal to Picabia. Before determining what this magnificent obscenity is about, we need to figure out what it represents. A woman in a lattice-patterned dress is sitting on the beach with her back to the sea, her arms folded in front of her. Behind her a jug-eared man clutches her in his hairy, reddish arms, one around her shoulder, the other around her waist. His legs extend on either side of her and terminate on the right in the hob-nailed sole of a shoe, and on the left in a striped trouser leg and the other shoe. The man’s huge face and the woman’s smaller one look out at us fused in a kiss, phallic noses almost touching, vaginal eyes and mouths agape in an organic free-for-all. Yet another vagina—oculata rather than dentata—is set like a target between her huge feet. Others see this image differently. Cowling argues that it represents a mother clutching and kissing a child.26 And, indeed, the man’s left arm (upper right), with its tattoo of what may be a snake, looks a bit like a baby. This confusion is likely to have been intentional. Picasso loved to deceive his viewers— “Cubism was full of deception,” he told Penrose27—so as to keep people looking and guessing and looking again.
Above: Picabia, Olga, Picasso, and Germaine Everling at Château de Mai, 1925. Photograph by Poupard-Lieussou. Left: Picabia. Mardi Gras (The Kiss), 1925. Ripolin on canvas, 92×73 cm. Private collection.
Picabia had painted his Kiss28 a few months earlier than Picasso. It is one of a series of works, dubbed “Monster paintings” by Duchamp, that were inspired by the Mi-Carême Bacchanalia at Nice. “I am doing a lot of work [Picabia wrote his friend, Pierre de Massot in March] in a whirlwind of baccarat, a whirlwind of legs, a whirlwind of jazz. I am doing mid-Lenten paintings [i.e. Carnival ones] of lovers, confetti paintings in which the sheen of cheap silk is duplicated by Ripolin.”29 Fifty years before the advent of pop, Picabia has used the energy and tawdriness of the Carnival scene—tarnished finery, caked makeup, candy floss hair—to administer a succession of painful shocks to conventional art lovers. In La Lecture, another of his Monster paintings (later owned by Tzara),30 Picabia used large mouths slathered in Ripolin lipstick in place of the woman’s eyes and matching vaginas in place of earrings. These relocations left an all too evident mark on Picasso’s Kiss, as well as on some of the other genital faces of his it would spawn.
According to Gabrielle, Picabia thought that he had gone too far in these Monster paintings. Much as he loved to shock, he may have feared that modernists would look askance at a style and technique so perfectly attuned to the sleazy underbelly of the Riviera. Gabrielle blamed her former husband’s “disapproving entourage”—a euphemism for her successor, Germaine Everling—for persuading him to stash these paintings away. “He was going to destroy them,” Gabrielle said, “but I begged him to do nothing of the sort since they manifested some of the most astonishing aspects of his personality.”31 Picasso likewise hid his Kiss away from prying eyes.32 Dreading as he did accusations of plagiarism—usually from the very people who had plagiarized him—he would not have wanted to reveal his indebtedness to Picabia. We should also allow for the residual streak of bourgeois propriety that Olga had evoked in her husband’s persona. He would have wanted to spare his wife and child and Spanish family the embarrassment of this wonderfully visceral image.
The colossal strides made by Picasso in one masterpiece after another between June 10 and the end of September 1925 can be followed in two successive sketchbooks. The earlier of these,33 dated June 28-August 1, opens with drawings of a bather on a beach towel, which relate to The Kiss. Next come studies of an Empire clock that probably adorned a cheminée at the Villa Belle Rose. Picasso was attracted to the figure of Jupiter on top of it, poised to hurl a thunderbolt at anyone checking the time. This figure’s tiny arm brandishing his celestial weapon inspired the huge plaster arm clutching a thunderbolt that dominates one of this summer’s most celebrated paintings, MoMA’s allegorical still life, Studio with Plaster Head.34 Musical instruments have given way to a whole new dramatis personae of still-life objects, including plaster limbs, such as Picasso had drawn from as an adolescent art student.
Picasso. Study (detail) of the figure of Jupiter Tonans on top of a clock at Villa Belle Rose, Juan-les-Pins, June 1925. Pen and India ink on sketchbook page. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Asked about the cluster of little buildings interspersed with bits of sky at the back of this painting, Picasso said it was a toy theater he had made for his son.3435 In fact, it was a model for the set he had done, four years earlier, for Pul-cinella. Paulo is unlikely to have been allowed to play with this so-called toy; the dolls that his father would later make for his half-sister Paloma were considered too fragile for the rough-and-tumble of the nursery.36 As we will see, the flight of steps that Picasso has added to this model has a symbolic significance.
“What are we to make of the lone yellow and orange apple at the very heart of the composition?” William Rubin gives a surprising answer to his own question: “[Its] shape and scale suggests a breast.”37 A giant breast on the steps of a toy theater? It is not, of course, a breast; it is an orange: a reprise of the three oranges in the great Guggenheim still life of the previous year. The other two oranges take the rhyming form of concavities: one the plaster arm, the other inside the plaster leg, which are linked together by an olive branch. The concavities might refer to the fact that only one of the three oranges in Prokofiev’s opera gives birth to a living princess. The other two are stillborn.
As for the batonlike thunderbolt brandished by the clock figure, this is traditionally an emblem of divine love and power; however, like many of Picasso’s symbols, it can also stand for the reverse: vengefulness and cataclysmic violence. The carpenter’s square introduces a new element into the artist’s work: Freemasonry. Besides being a standard component of allegories of the arts, this tool is a principal attribute of the Masonic Master, “the great Architect of the Temple.”38 Freemasonry had fascinated Max Jacob and Apollinaire, and would later fascinate the surrealists. The carpenter’s square symbolizes the Masons’ cosmological belief that God is “the Light of the World,” “the Divine Architect of the Universe,” honorifics that Picasso would have identified with. We should also remember that Picasso and Braque had used the carpenter’s square as the cornerstone of many of their cubist compositions; and that later Malevich had stripped the carpenter’s square of its representational significance. In this Studio with Plaster Head, Picasso has given the tool back its meaning, enhanced with a mystical, masonic aura.
Gasman, who was the first to perceive the Masonic connection, thinks that in adding an arch and a flight of steps to the model theater Picasso sought to transform it into a Masonic temple.39 She thinks that he regarded Masonry as a source of mystery and sacred power. What fascinated hi
m was not the dogma but the hidden agenda of Freemasonry: that it had always been a secret society, also that the simple utensils used in Masonic rituals had a magical significance, like many of the utensils in his still lifes.
Lastly, what does the bust at the center of this ornate composition signify? Unlike other busts in Picasso’s recent still lifes, it is not generically classical; nor is it a specific incarnation of evil—Nero, Caligula, Cagliostro, the Marquis de Sade—as has been suggested. Once again, Picasso comes up with an image that means different things to different people: it could refer to his own miraculous mirada fuerte power, Breton’s arrogant glare, or Pichot’s ominous silhouette in La Danse. Picasso likened his complex still lifes to parables. The more layers of meanings a parable has, the better.
Back to the Juan-les-Pins sketchbook. Halfway through, Picasso, who had been schooled to portray martyrdoms, switched to doing horrendous drawings of a beheading. The guillotine conjures up the abattoir, which is the source for the main motif of the next “still life of cruelty,”40 Ram’s Head on a Table. As Meyer Schapiro, who has coined that phrase, has pointed out, rams’ heads figure in processions celebrating the execution of Louis XVI, a monarch who, as Gasman says, Picasso always associated with decapitation.41 The painting was done around the quatorze juillet celebrations, so it might well constitute an allusive link between the ram’s head and the monarch’s fate.42 Picasso used allusions—historical, personal, metaphysical, sexual—much as he used a hint of color or a pictorial pun to reinforce or, as he once said, “perfume” an image.
A Life of Picasso Page 37