The Ram’s Head conforms to the Spanish convention of bodegón painting: a kitchen array of fruit, vegetables, as well as fur, feather, and fin. Spanish masters— principally Zurbarán and Sánchez Cotán—would give these humble subjects a quasi-sacrificial dimension by arranging them as if on an altar. Picasso had already followed their example—notably in the early cubist Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table.43 This time, however, his intentions are anything but sacred. We seem to be in a hellish kitchen. The artist likens the menacing mouth of the scorpion fish and the spiky sea urchin to a vagina dentata. Everything looks ready to bite, cut, sting, or poison. Like the shamanic fetishes Picasso would do the following March, this is an exorcis-tic painting, a protection against Olga’s demons, which had been acting up earlier in the year. Although he gives no source for his information, Cabanne claims that Olga “was getting more and more difficult. The little ballerina had now become a violent, tyrannical woman, hating everyone, accusing her husband of unfaithfulness, Kahnweiler of shortchanging them, seeing enemies everywhere. There were more and more frequent painful family scenes; sometimes he actually thought she was losing her mind.”4344 Jacqueline Picasso told me her husband had recounted similar stories.
So much for allegory. The definition and disposition of the objects owe much to Miró—specifically to his festive 1920 still life with a rabbit, rooster, and fish on a platter on a square tabletop tilted temptingly out at us.45 This was the painting that “really got Picasso interested in my work,” Miró said.46 Picasso did not stay on in Paris for his compatriot’s first show at the Galerie Pierre, June 12-27, 1925, but he had already seen everything in his studio. Miró’s fusion of cubism with Catalan rep-resentationalism was very much to the taste of Picasso, who would soon help himself to the artist’s new pictorial language. And although he would often belittle Miró’s childlike, petit-bourgeois side—“toujours la trotinette” (always the scooter), he used to say47—Picasso never belittled his work, until it lost its edge and began ominously to bloat, twenty years later, after a prolonged visit to America.
Still Life with Guitar and Oranges (private collection) at Villa Belle Rose, Juan-les-Pins, 1925
The Ram’s Head painting was originally conceived in stark contrasts of black and white, to which a few patches of color were added. It displays many of the same features as its predecessor, Studio with Plaster Head. The ram’s dead eyes stare out at us as balefully as the similarly placed eye of the bust. Likewise, the hard-edged head of the scorpion fish harks back to the carpenter’s square; and the scallop shells recall the clenched fingers of the plaster arms. Back in Paris, Picasso would do a much larger, emptier version of the Still Life with Ram’s Head in grisaille.48 The mournful colors evoke a seventeenth-century Spanish Vanitas, possibly a reference to Satie’s recent death: the ram’s head is likened to a lyre.49
A second Juan-les-Pins sketchbook50 (dated August 20–September 13) charts an abrupt change of course. Besides a number of bifurcated heads—configurations which dominate the artist’s imagery for the next year or so—there are sketches for all manner of subjects: standing figures, anthropomorphic monsters, fantastical still lifes, and a croquis for a decorative project: an interlocking circle of four black-and-white profiles. This was the first idea for a mosaic commissioned by Jean Hugo’s hospitable friends, François de Gouy and Russell Greeley, for their château de poche, Clavary, near Grasse.51
By the end of Picasso’s stay at Juan-les-Pins, allegorical magic had given way to cosmological concepts—the elements, no less. The large still lifes he completed before returning to Paris are composed of the same basics—the guitar, mandolin, and fruit dish—that he had repeatedly exploited for their metamorphic possibilities, but this time their cosmological potential is what he was after. Two of these paintings involved sand, a material Picasso had used in previous summers, but never to such great effect as now. In the more tentative and presumably earlier of these works52 Picasso has simply incised the outline of a mandolin and dish on a table into sandy pigment, the color of the night sky. Beaubourg’s Still Life includes the same objects plus an additional instrument on a rather more substantial table.53 The sound hole in the right-hand instrument doubles as the hole in a palette (palette/guitar: twin begetters of art). This time the paint is much sandier and therefore much more palpable. The tactile subtlety and muted colors of the surface hark back to Braque, who pioneered the use of additives in paint. In view of the impossibility of getting the sandy matière to adhere to a canvas on an easel, the artist presumably executed this painting flat on a tabletop or on the floor. This makes us feel we are looking down on a stretch of beach—stained with tar in places—which the surf is about to erase—something that Picasso enjoyed watching happen to the drawings he used to make in the wet sand with a stick. That it was painted soon after The Kiss and the Still Life with Plaster Head (all the same size) is a measure of how rich and varied this summer had been.
This cosmological still life would be bought from Rosenberg by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles and hung high from heavy cords contrived by Jean Michel Frank in a place of honor at the top of their exceedingly grand staircase. By virtue of its elemental simplicity and solemnity, this painting would mock the rococo grandeur of the nearby ballroom, where the Noailles gave dazzling parties for a very mixed bunch: the gratin, café society, and assorted painters, poets, and musicians, not to mention the chic gay world of which Marie-Laure was an honorary member.
When the great paintings of this summer were exhibited at Rosenberg’s gallery the following summer, in a show devoted to Picasso’s work of the previous twenty years, Picasso was seen to have taken still life to previously unclimbed heights and unfathomed profundities. The finest of these works make considerable demands on the viewer. However, there was one remarkable exception, Still Life with Fishing Net:554 a fruit dish brimming over with grapes, a glass tumbler, and a solitary fig on a table beautifully incised with a gauzy veil of fishing net. This work reveals what a seductive painter Picasso could be when he wanted to, without recourse to decorative, Matissean trappings. So gorgeous and, one would imagine, so instantly saleable was Still Life with Fishing Net that Rosenberg decided to keep it for himself. It was the quintessence of what the dealer hoped all too vainly that Picasso would produce more of. Although most of Rosenberg’s private collection of Picassos has been dispersed, Still Life with Fishing Net has remained in his family—and is still in the possession of the dealer’s granddaughter.
24
Masterpiece Studio (1925-26)
Picasso returned to Paris at the end of September 1925, the proprietor at last of the fourth and fifth floors of 23, rue la Boétie. He could also have acquired the apartment below—that is to say the third floor—but he was not prepared to pay the extra twenty-five thousand francs a year the landlord asked. Rosenberg told him that he or his brother-in-law, Jacques Helft, might be interested.1 In the end, a tailor took it.2 Although Rosenberg had acted on his behalf, Picasso had taken against him and failed to communicate during the summer. “I am beginning to be seriously worried,” Rosenberg wrote. “Never have you left me so long without news. Write to reassure me.”3 Picasso does not appear to have done so.
To convert an enfilade of conventional reception rooms into studios, Picasso took off most of the doors, knocked down a few walls, but left the ornate cornices, moldings, and chair rails, also some of the old wallpaper in place. He brought in a few favorite bits of furniture, including the chair embroidered by Olga that he used for portraits, and his vast arsenal of materials. Now that he had a whole floor to himself—with its own front door entrance by invitation only, even to Olga—Picasso was able to return to his promiscuous ways. He could see all he wanted of old Bohemian friends and entertain new girls picked up in his quest for I’amour fou. Leiris frequently accompanied him on his nocturnal rambles. Picasso usually made out. Leiris usually failed—ending up at “orgies childishly begged for and always botched.”4 They both loved the black bars, which Jo
sephine Baker’s spectacular success in the Revue Nègre had launched in Paris. Their favorite ones were the Bal Nègre on rue Blomet, where Miró and Masson had studios, and Le Grand Duc, where the charismatic Bricktop (Ada Smith), a paleish, heavily freckled black woman with a gravelly voice, would hold sway for half a century. Sometime in the 1950s, Picasso asked if the woman with the freckles was still going. She was.
The artist also put a defiant sign on his studio door, Je ne suis pas un gentleman, at least so he told me, but nobody remembered seeing it. He never employed an assistant unless a specific project required one; he also refused to let maids up to the studio floor. Domestic business was handled by Olga, but confidential business was entrusted to his banker, the discreet and trustworthy Max Pellequer.5 In keeping with his impersonation of a conventional bourgeois husband, Picasso continued to sleep downstairs in the same bedroom, though not the same bed as his wife. There was also a bed upstairs; as his work would soon confirm, the studio also served as a sexual arena in his work as well as his life.
Brassaï’s description of the studios, as they were a few years later, says it all:
I had expected an artist’s studio, and this was an apartment converted into a kind of warehouse. Certainly no characteristically middle class dwelling was ever so uncharacteristically furnished. There were four or five rooms—each with a marble fireplace surmounted by a mirror—entirely emptied of customary furniture and littered with stacks of paintings, cartons, wrapped packages, pails of all sizes, many of them containing the molds for [Picasso’s] statues, piles of books, reams of paper, odds and ends of everything, placed wherever there was an inch of space, along the walls and even spread across the floors, all covered with a thick layer of dust. The doors between all the rooms were open—they might even have been taken off— transforming this large apartment into a single studio cut up into a multiple series of corners for the multiple activities of its owner. The floors were dull and lusterless, long since deprived of any polish, coated here and there with splotches of paint, and strewn with a carpet of cigarette butts. Picasso had stood his easel in the largest and best-lit room—what once had surely been the living room—and this was the only room that contained any furniture at all. The window faced south, and offered a beautiful view of the rooftops of Paris, bristling with a forest of red and black chimneys, with the slender, far off silhouette of the Eiffel Tower rising between them. Madame Picasso never came up to this apartment. With the exception of a few friends, Picasso admitted no one to it. So the dust would fall where it would and remain there undisturbed, with no fear of the feather dusters of cleaning women.
Brassaï has also described Olga’s area:
The extraordinary thing about it was that, except for one mantelpiece on which there was some evidence of [Picasso’s] fantasies, nothing whatever bore his stamp. Even his own canvases of the cubist period—classics by this time—carefully framed and hanging on the walls beside Cézanne, Renoir, and Corot, seemed to belong in the apartment of some rich collector, instead of being at home with Picasso himself. The bourgeois apartment was completely alien to his habitual way of life. None of those extraordinary pieces of furniture he is so fond of, none of the totally unexpected objects with which he loves to surround himself, no piles of anything, none of the confused jumble his fantasy usually created.… Olga was jealous of the domain she considered hers alone, and she stood careful guard over it, lest Picasso mark it with the powerful imprint of his personality.67
Despite the acquisition of the fifth floor, Olga had to fight to keep the entire fourth floor as her realm. Her mother had written in February urging her to insist on a room of her own and set aside some money.8 Picasso hated to relinquish rooms where he had lived and worked. He preferred to move on and leave studio after studio stuffed with treasure, bric-à-brac, and dross—time capsules sacred to this or that period of his life. Averse to having his mess in her area, Olga eventually managed to take over the former studio and turn it back into a salon, leaving her husband a smallish room for storage. Twenty years later, Françoise Gilot was amazed at the sight of this accumulation, which Picasso had left behind after moving out of the apartment during the war.9
This was … where he kept everything that was to be saved [Gilot wrote]. But since Pablo had never thrown anything away—whether an empty matchbox or a little watercolor by Seurat—the range of its contents was enormous. Old newspapers and magazines, notebooks of drawings he had made, and copies by the dozen of various books he had illustrated formed a wall almost to the ceiling. I picked up a group of letters and saw that they included some from friends like Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob as well as a note from the laundress that he had once found amusing. Suspended on the face of this wall was a charming seventeenth-century Italian puppet, strung together with wires and dressed as Harlequin, about four feet high. Behind it here and there, wedged into a mass, I saw paintings. I looked into a box. It was full of gold pieces.10
When, toward the end of October 1925, Clive Bell arrived on his customary fall visit to Paris, Picasso declined to see him. Bell was reduced to hanging around the rue la Boétie, outside number 23, pretending to window-shop. And, sure enough, the artist let him in. Despite breaking with the beau monde, he was still avid for news of it: “I heard my name called [Bell wrote Mary Hutchinson], looked up and there was Picasso in a brown sweater on the balcony. I went upstairs for ten minutes and saw one or two pictures and then Madame in high good looks—but surely her hair was not always a dark brown? Picasso has lost most of his, and is very fat indeed, but as charming as ever.”11
Bell’s cattiness reflects his displeasure at the brevity of the visit. He was not shown the new works in the new studio. Just as well. He would have disliked them. To rein-gratiate himself, Bell invited the Picassos, a young Englishman, Peter Johnstone, later Lord Derwent, and Robert Le Masle—a former friend of Cocteau’s, who was in disgrace for having stolen some letters from him12—to dine at the Boeuf sur le Toit.13 Picasso had not visited the Boeuf in ages and had forgotten about the works he had lent Moysès to jazz up the place when it first opened. He now reclaimed them. Bell joked to Mary, “that the panels left blank by the abstractions of Picasso … are to be filled by the twelve apostles painted by” the born-again Cocteau.14
The dinner was not a success. Le Masle annoyed Picasso by badgering him to do his portrait.15 Bell drank too much, as Derwent would later describe in a memoir (under the pseudonym George Vandon) about his life in Paris in the 1920s. “Ortiz [Zarate], the fat grave Spaniard [sic], with his Catalan twinkle of sarcasm (only beaten by that of Picasso), and that evening at the Boeuf when you, my dear Clive, too far advanced in your cups, beflowered [Picasso] with sugary compliments— what a look in that black eye!”16
Derwent, who was an old friend of Tony and Juana Gandarillas, Bell’s other mistress, and would later marry their daughter, had reason to resent his host. He resented Bell not so much for cuckolding the homosexual Gandarillas, or for sponging off his ravishing, very rich wife—nightly dinners at the Ritz, suppers of plovers’ eggs at her house on Cheyne Walk—but for bad-mouthing her to his disapproving Bloomsbury friends.17 A further irony: while Bell was doing his best to persuade Picasso to do a portrait of Mary Hutchinson, Eugenia Errázuriz was doing her best to have him paint her niece Juana. Neither got a portrait.
To promote his manifesto Le Surréalisme et la peinture, which appeared in July 1925, Breton had organized a show of paintings at the Galerie Pierre. The show has become a landmark in the history of the movement; it has also been seen as “a sign of [Picasso’s] fascination for the surrealist movement.”18 In fact, Picasso was doing his best to disclaim the surrealist label. To make this clear, he did not attend the opening and lent nothing to Breton’s show. Although he had befriended Breton, he was wary of him and fearful of being identified with what was becoming an overtly Marxist movement. Despite the hype of wishful-thinking historians, the Galerie Pierre show was a very modest affair: only nineteen paintings, i
ncluding Klee and Arp, nothing by Picabia or Duchamp.19 It was held in a small gallery at 13, rue Bonaparte, newly opened by Pierre Loeb, an enterprising dealer greatly respected by avant-garde artists. It lasted a mere eleven days, from midnight November 14 to November 25.19 Breton’s gimmick of holding the vernissage at midnight attracted more people than the gallery could hold, but the show aroused less attention than Tzara’s earlier dadaist manifestations.20 Nevertheless, it was an auspicious start. In the long run, it would be Breton’s artists rather than his poets who established surrealism as a worldwide phenomenon.
Had Picasso “thrown in his lot with the surrealists,” as Breton tried to give the impression that he had,21 he would have advertised the fact by contributing recent works to the show. Instead, he saw to it that the two paintings by him in the show— the quintessentially cubist Man with a Guitar (1912-13) and the Montrouge in the Snow (December 1917)22—were lent by Jacques Doucet and therefore did not compromise his independent stance. The inclusion of a cubist masterpiece at least enabled Breton to claim Picasso as a respected antecedent. As for the inclusion of the Christmassy Montrouge in the Snow—painted to make his Russian fiancée feel at home—he could hardly have chosen anything less surreal. A third painting, the pretty little Head of a Woman (1924)—illustrated but not listed in the catalog23— likewise made little sense in the context of the show. Unable to discern much common ground in these paintings, Breton and Desnos resorted to whimsy in their preface and imagined themselves snuggling up inside the house at Montrouge. As for the Man with a Guitar, they envisaged him as a bogeyman emerging “in his immensity from the fog [to] the groaning [gémissements] of the river’s embankment.”
A Life of Picasso Page 38