Picasso had no hesitation about calling on Breton’s help: protection from anti-cubist dadaists, the services of his claque, and the support of his journals. He also helped himself to Breton’s concept that beauty should be convulsive. Beyond allowing Breton to reproduce his latest work in surrealist publications, Picasso did little in return. Breton’s hosannas were all very well, but Picasso did not altogether appreciate being hailed as the surrealists’ progenitor. Besides, Breton was too manipulative, too much of a tyrant for a genius to work with. Picasso made his reservations about Bretonian surrealism very clear twenty years later, when he blamed Dora Maar’s collapse on her surrealist past: “One doesn’t go to pieces all of a sudden without an underlying cause,” Picasso said.
It’s like a fire that smoulders for a long time and then, when the wind picks it up, begins to rage. Don’t forget that the leading surrealists, the ones who survived the heyday of the movement—Breton, Eluard, Aragon—have very strong characters. The weaker ones who trailed after them haven’t always fared as well: Crevel committed suicide, Artaud went mad, and there are plenty of other cases. As an ideology, it sowed disaster pretty generally. The sources of Surrealism are a rather dubious mixture. It’s not strange that with a hodgepodge like that, so many lost their way.24
Once settled into his new studio, Picasso continued to work on still lifes with defining contours scratched into the wet paint, but smaller in scale than the Juan-les-Pins ones. His need to come up with new works for the show that Rosenberg had rescheduled for the following June25 resulted in several fine still lifes, which relate to the two great ones he did at La Vigie in 1925. This time he sets his usual still life objects—mandolin, guitar, fruit dish, plaster cast—against a window with a huge, self-referential knob. He also switched to figures: decorative and emblematic of the arts. Picasso uses a recognizable model for them (Woman in a Pink Dress, Woman with a Mandolin, and The Sculptress)26 The model is certainly not Olga; she was a blonde and probably the artist’s mistress. We have no way of knowing. Because she is fair-haired, this delicate, wide-eyed woman has repeatedly been confused with Marie-Thérèse, whom Picasso would not meet for another eighteen months. Moreover, Marie-Thérèse was an adolescent bundle of pneumatic bliss with a big nose; the unidentifiable blonde has sharply defined, adult features. As well as the paintings, there are several drawings of her,27 and she may well have been the inspiration for the girl embedded in the paint of the 1924 Reina Sofía still life.
Far left: Picasso. The Sculptress, 1925. Oil on canvas, 130×97 cm. Private collection.
Left: Picasso. Paulo Dressed as a Torero, 1925. Oil on canvas, 162×97 cm. Private collection.
In November 1925, Picasso took a break from doing paintings for Rosenberg and did a sugary portrait of Paulo dressed as a torero: probably a Christmas present for Olga, who would use any pretext to get her son into fancy dress. A home movie made a few years later shows Paulo in this or another torero outfit being charged by his nanny impersonating a bull. Snapshots taken over the next five years reveal the boy dressed up as a jockey, a harlequin, a Pierrot, and most elaborately as a maréchal de France strutting about the Place de la Concorde, while a chauffeur holds the door of the Hispano-Suiza open for him. On Christmas Day, 1925, Picasso embarked on a new sketchbook28 and proceeded to fill it with some thirty drawings, many of them projects for cubist still lifes. Some have trompe l’oeil frames which make them look as if they are hanging on a wallpapered wall. Surprisingly, none of these beautiful little croquis ended up as a painting. In his zeal to constantly renew cubism, Picasso would periodically come up with a batch of sketches filled with enough ideas for a lifetime. He also needed to keep his cubist hand in, just as he used virtuoso displays of draftsmanship to keep his Ingresque hand in.
Shortly before Paulo’s birthday on February 4, 1926, Picasso did a lithograph of his nanny reading to him.29 Once again Paulo is in fancy dress, this time as a dix-huitième gentleman in a lace jabot and powdered wig. Another lithograph depicts the child at play. In drawings done a few days later Paulo presides over his birthday toys: a bicycle and a rocking horse;30 on the left a shadowy woman is sewing; on the right the boy’s mother enters the room. The three characters appear to be entangled, each in his or her own coils. Picasso evidently planned to do a nursery composition. And then, toward the end of February, Olga suffered one of her breakdowns. Whatever the cause, the crisis was severe enough to evoke the exorcist in Picasso. It also prompted him to turn his original project inside out. Instead of evoking domestic life inside the apartment, he addresses himself to a very different scene immediately outside the apartment. Picasso’s voyeuristic eye had been caught by the action across the street from his studio: a roomful of seamstresses treadling away rhythmically, some might say erotically, at their sewing machines.
Mid-March, Picasso embarked on the enormous (172 x 256 cm) canvas known as the Milliner s Workshop.31Its composition is based on the nursery studies. The model for the two central figures seems to have been the same blond girl who inspired the large paintings he did before Christmas. However, one cannot be entirely sure. Picasso has endowed his seamstress with such an emphatically bifurcated head that he may well have had no particular girl in mind. This point is of interest only insofar as Rosalind Krauss and others have misidentified the girl in the Milliner s Workshop as Marie-Thérèse Walter, who did not enter Picasso’s life for another year.3132 Krauss’s statement that “Picasso dreamed a type and then he found her”33 has a fairy-story ring to it that comes as a surprise from someone usually averse to this approach. Krauss is not the only victim of Dr. Herbert T. Schwarz, a Canadian doctor, who, as we will see in Chapter 26, made a terrible botch of his foray into Marie-Thérèse’s life story.
Picasso. Pen and India ink study of a framed painting hung on patterned wallpaper, December 1925. Sketchbook page, 11×15 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
After originally revolving around his son, Paulo, the Milliner s Workshop ended up revolving around Picasso’s own childhood. Seen darkly through a window across the street, the shadowy seamstresses have an amorphous look—redolent of his upbringing in a house full of women at work: besides his mother and the maid, two aunts who earned their living sewing gold braid on stationmasters’ kepis. Other memories, this time from his eighteenth year, seem to have flashed back into Picasso’s mind: the months he had spent in 1899 in a tiny studio lent him by the mother of the Cardona brothers—fellow students at La Llotja, the Barcelona art school. Señora Cardona had a corset factory, and allowed Picasso to hang out in her atelier observing “the gestures of the corset-makers and the motions of the machines. Then he would return to his room and paint.”34 The murky windows opposite his studio beamed these memories back at him.
Above: Picasso. Milliner s Workshop, 1926. Oil on canvas, 172×256 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Left: Picasso. Interior Scene, 1926. Lithograph, 22.3×28 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Since the Milliner’s Workshop is executed in virtual grisaille, Gasman believes that this is the “large black, grey and white painting” in which Picasso claimed to have foreseen the death of Juan Gris a year later. “I didn’t know what it represented, but I saw Gris on his deathbed, and it was my picture.”35 Gasman may well be right, but McCully feels that Picasso had the simplified grisaille version of the Ram’s Head still life in mind.3637 Unlike the Milliner’s Workshop, it is drenched in death. Picasso’s claims to have prophetic powers usually turn out to stem from the grit of guilt, which is at the core of many of his darker paintings.
In his other monumental painting of this spring, Picasso returned to the Artist and His Model,38 a theme that would eventually dominate his imagery. This great work celebrates the acquisition of a new studio, complete with a new model. Its inspiration also derives from Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu: the story of a fictional artist, Master Frenhofer, who tantalizes his friends, Poussin and Porbus, by claiming to have worked in secret for ten years on hi
s masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse, a flawlessly beautiful painting of a flawlessly beautiful woman, imbued with “that indescribable something … that envelops the body like a haze.” When shown the painting, Poussin and Porbus are appalled to see nothing “but… a multitude of fantastical lines that go to make a dead wall of paint. … In a corner of the canvas … a bare foot emerg[es] from the chaos of color, half tints and vague shadows. … Its living delicate beauty held them spellbound…. ‘There,’ Porbus continued, as he touched the canvas, ‘lies the utmost limit of our art on earth.’ ”39
The Seated Man of 1915-16, Picasso’s earlier tribute to Balzac’s story, had also included the all-important foot, but it is barely discernible. This time, the foot emerging from the “multitude of fantastical lines” is huge,40 and very recognizable, unlike the phallic foot and leg of the artist figure right next to it. This studio painting is the first of Picasso’s portrayals of the creative act and the procreative act as metaphors for each other. To make his point, as he had done the summer before in The Kiss, Picasso uses the same vaginal sign for mouths and eyes, his as well as hers. The painter in Artist and His Model mixes colors on his palette, while seemingly performing oral sex on her. Note, too, how Picasso has used color independently of line and form by appropriating Léger’s couleurs libres: abstract planes of color which play no representational role but give an intricate composition such as this a ground-swell of support. Over the next two years, Picasso will ring many a change on this device.
Earlier, I mentioned how Picasso had resorted to exorcism in the hope of thwarting Olga’s demons. This resumption of interest in shamanistic procedures had been triggered by Leiris, who was becoming more and more involved in ethnography. Early in March, Picasso cobbled together a series of fetishes—two large (130 X 96 cm) and ten smaller ones—out of rags, nails, and other junk. These fetishes are all ostensibly guitars—anthropomorphic ones. The most celebrated consists of a mopping-up cloth that Picasso had spotted on the floor while taking a bath. After cutting a round hole in the cloth, he hammered it onto a canvas from the back so that the points of the nails protrude menacingly from the front. The only other elements are a newspaper cutting, one column wide, some string, and some lengths of cord. The hang of the string is crucial to our perception of the guitar as a horizontal or a vertical. Picasso even managed to disagree with himself on this point.
When this Guitar41 was first exhibited at the 1955 retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the organizer, Maurice Jardot (Kahnweiler’s right-hand man), hung it horizontally, but pointed out in the catalog that it might function as a vertical. Summoned a week or two after the opening to tell Picasso about the show, Cooper and I asked him for clarification. To me he gave a huge sigh and said that of course the Guitar was horizontal: “Any idiot can see that.” And then he turned to Cooper and told him that if he saw it as a vertical it was indeed a vertical. Had it not been published as such? Paradox was not the issue. Picasso subversively wanted to spark a never-ending controversy. The present director of the Musée Picasso reproduces this Guitar as a vertical in the Paris edition of her Papiers Journaux catalog and as a horizontal in the Dublin edition.42 The artist would have relished the irony. As Pen-rose has described when visiting Picasso’s apartment, “I happened to notice that a large Renoir hanging over the fireplace was crooked. ‘It’s better like that,’ he said. ‘If you want to kill a picture, all you have to do is hang it beautifully on a nail and soon you will see nothing of it but the frame. When it’s out of place you see it better.’ ”43
I stand by what Picasso told me. Anyone who sees the Guitar as a vertical misses the subtlety of its carefully calibrated balance.44 A preparatory sketch,45 signed horizontally, confirms that this is how it was conceived. Seen as a vertical, the strip of newspaper, tinted a reddish brown, fails to register as a shadow and thus fails to generate the crucial illusion of space between the guitar and the wall nails.46 As for the Guitar—cruelest of Picasso’s fetishes—it would shred the fingers of conceptual players. The artist told Penrose that he had also considered “embedding razor-blades around the edges so that whoever went to lift it would cut their hands.”47 To Dora Maar he was more specific: the razor blades were intended to “discourage col- lectors”48—not that he had any intention of selling this work. Those nails are Picasso’s quills.
Picasso. Guitar, 1926. Washcloth, newspaper, string, and nails on painted canvas, 96.5×130 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
The other large rag guitar is unquestionably vertical and less menacing. According to Aragon, this rag was “a dirty shirt” that Picasso had sewn onto the canvas;49 “and since everything he does turns into guitars, it became a guitar.”50 The rag in question shows no sign of ever being a shirt; presumably it was Picasso who told Aragon that it had been. Shirt or not, what makes this rag truly self-referential is that it was sewn by the artist himself, as crudely as if he had been an Alaskan shaman sewing his powers into a talismanic tunic.
Like the two major Guitars, the other smaller fetishes51 that date from the early spring of 1926 also seem to have been conceived as protection against Olga’s demons. In true shamanic fashion Picasso has utilized materials closely associated with his wife—strips of tulle torn from the tutus she always traveled with. Entangled in the tulle are the skeletons of guitars contrived out of sticks and string as well as buttons and, ominously, lead shot.
When Cocteau got wind of Picasso’s fetishes, he could not resist coming up with some of his own, and, sorcerer’s apprentice that he was, he exhibited them in December.52 Cocteau’s artifacts were merely modish; however, he had a characteristically sharp comment on Picasso’s (scribbled in the margin of a letter to Max Jacob): “those canvases [that Picasso] sticks with crucified shirts and bits of string are an attempt to assassinate painting.”53 This anticipates a statement Picasso made to Pen- rose in 1965 about his late work: “What I am doing now is the destruction of modern painting. We have already destroyed the old masters. We must now destroy the modern ones.”54
Picasso had not had a show since 1924,55 so the one that opened at Rosenberg’s gallery on June 15, 1926, aroused enormous interest. The show was heralded by a supportive and perceptive article by Christian Zervos, Picasso’s intellectual Greek admirer.56 In 1919 Zervos had published a thesis on an eleventh-century Greek neo-platonist, Michel Psellos, whose ideas are thought by Gasman to have been passed on by the author to Picasso.57 After a stint as secretary to Anatole France, he decided to become a publisher. Thanks to the damages he had received after being run over by an automobile, he was able in 1926 to found the lavishly illustrated Cahiers d’Art, which would keep anyone interested in modern art abreast of the latest developments in the work of the Paris school. Although he had reservations about Picasso as a man, Zervos worshipped him as an artist; and Cahiers d’Art would do more to disseminate his reputation than any other publications of the period.58 Surrealists grumbled about his bias against surrealism, but this would be redressed by his associate editor, Tériade (Efstratios Eleftheriades), who would soon set up on his own and launch the surrealist magazine Minotaure (1933) and, later, the luxurious Verve (1937).
Picasso wanted his choice of some fifty-eight paintings, mostly large (size 60),59 for Rosenberg’s 1926 exhibition to establish that he had renounced neoclassicism but not surrendered to surrealism. FitzGerald, who has provided the most thorough account of this exhibition, errs only when he sees Picasso embracing “the newest surrealist departures.” This was exactly the perception that Picasso had been at pains to discourage, as the surrealists’ reaction to the Rosenberg show confirms. Breton’s journal, which came out the day the Picasso show opened, pointedly makes no reference to it whatsoever. Breton simply published, almost full-page, a work that was conspicuously absent from Rosenberg’s walls, the fetish with the shirt606162—a sly hint that Picasso was not living up to his subversive image.
Besides catching up on Picasso’s new work, Parisian gallerygoers wanted to see what had become of
Rosenberg’s premises after two years of total reconstruction. The place had been discreetly modernized. Gone was the belle époque panoply— ornate light fittings, alabaster staircases, and walls draped in ruched silk. The new galleries were neither modernist nor art deco; they were architecturally respectable and designed to show off expensive paintings of all styles and periods to their best advantage. The walls were light-colored and the floors were parquet rather than marble. Newly designed frames—the result of discussions with Picasso, Braque, and other gallery artists—would make a tremendous difference to this and all Rosenberg’s subsequent shows. Even when pickled or otherwise patinated, the rich-looking Régence frames, which Degas and the impressionists had inveighed against forty years earlier, were still being used by dealers to make pictures look expensive. Most modern artists hated them. Rosenberg had set his confreres an excellent example by framing contemporary paintings in a simple, uniform molding that could be adapted to works of all sizes and styles. The surface, too, was uniform—plain, highly burnished gilt. The new frames gave a sense of order to the very disparate works in the Picasso show.
Left: Picasso. Woman with a Tambourine (Odalisque), 1925. Oil on canvas, 97×130 cm. Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.
Right: María d’Albaicín as Scheherazade. Bibliothèque de l’Opera, Paris.
Except for La Danse, which Picasso kept back for himself, all the works had been purchased by Rosenberg. In 1925 he had paid Picasso 437,000 francs for twenty-eight paintings, two pastels, and two drawings.63 To defray the costs of reconstruction, Rosenberg needed to sell as much as he could for as much as he could. He succeeded. The following year, the dealer would mount a retrospective of Picasso’s drawings, but he would not put on a major exhibit of his paintings for another ten years.
A Life of Picasso Page 39