The give-and-take between Picasso and Matisse has been the subject of so much discussion in recent years that there is little to add. Picasso grabbed whatever he needed from his rival and occasionally communicated with him covertly via his work.64 Matisse also took whatever he needed from Picasso (notably from cubism) but, unlike his rival, he was embarrassingly petulant about this give and take. Three days before Picasso’s show opened, he moaned to his daughter Marguerite that he had “not seen Picasso for years. I don’t care to see him again … he is a bandit waiting in ambush.”65 The painting of María d’Albaicín mentioned in Chapter 22 is based on the trite publicity photograph of the beautiful flamenco dancer reclining on an oriental rug and holding a tambourine behind her head like a halo as she smiles roguishly into the camera. In Picasso’s painting, the skirt is striped and the left arm rests on a cushion, as in the photograph. A principal difference is the redeployment of the tambourine as the dancer’s stomach. It was a message to Matisse, but Picasso did not intend his Odalisque as a Matissean parody. Stravinsky, who was very close to Picasso at this period, put the dilemma of a great artist vis-à-vis his peers very succinctly. “When composers show me their music, all I can say is that I would have written it quite differently. Whatever interests me, whatever I love, I wish to make my own.” Picasso had far too much respect for Matisse to ridicule him. As Bois puts it, Picasso wanted to administer a rebuke and tease “Matisse out of his self-imposed role as Old Master in Nice and back into the ring of modernity.
Picasso attached enormous importance to this show. He made a point of visiting the gallery every day until it closed. He would always have a curious detachment about his own work, as if it had been executed by someone else. The purpose of his visits was not to glory in his accomplishments but to solve the unsolvable mystery of how he had arrived at this or that particular point. Without a precise idea of his bearings he was unable to go on to make new discoveries. It was time for a pause. Gertrude Stein’s book on Picasso—for all its bias, self-promotion, and silliness— can sometimes be surprisingly perceptive. The inaccuracies in the quote below conceal a nugget of truth:
[F]or the first time in his life [Picasso] did not draw or paint…. An enormous production is as necessary as doing nothing in order to find one’s self again.… During these six months the only thing he did was a picture made of a rag cut by a string, during the great moment of cubism he made such things, at that time it gave him great joy to do it… but now it was a tragedy. This picture was beautiful, this picture was sad and it was the only one.
In fact “the rag cut by a string” dates from the time Picasso was working on such major works as the Milliner’s Workshop and the Artist and Model. Elsewhere Stein implies she had 1927 in mind;66676869 evidently she has 1926 and 1927 hopelessly muddled. Nevertheless, she makes up for this and other confusions when she characterizes Picasso as “a man who always has need of emptying himself, of completely emptying himself, it is necessary that he should be greatly stimulated so that he could be active enough to empty himself completely”70 Picasso would “never empty himself completely,” but after the mammoth harvest of the previous summer and the following spring, as well as the sense of heroic achievement generated by the Rosenberg show, he felt fully entitled to a few quiet but by no means inactive months.
25
Summer at La Haie Blanche (1926)
On July 10, the Picassos packed up the rue la Boétie apartment and headed south. This time they took their own car and booked into the Hôtel Majestic at Cannes. They had not rented a house ahead of time and had to look around for whatever was available. On July 15, they rented a villa at Juan-les-Pins from Mlle. Blanche Hay—hence the villa’s name, La Haie Blanche.1 It appears to have been a handsome, balustraded house half hidden in a tangle of pine trees and shrubbery. In some of Russell Greeley’s snapshots, Picasso—a Peeping Tom like so many Andalu-sians—peers at the neighborhood through a telescope.2
As he had done on previous summers, Picasso recorded his new surroundings. A drawing reveals the salon to have been somewhat oriental: a divan piled with cushions, a Moroccan table, small shaded lamps on the chimneypiece, and Olga standing in the middle of the room in a long dress.3 Sketchbook drawings4 suggest that Picasso contemplated doing a painting of a nude—as her body whittled down to five stavelike lines—stretched out on the steps of the house, an overgrown garden to right and left.
Picasso. Olga at La Haie Blanche, September 1926. India ink on paper, 29.1×38.8 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Picasso. Artist and Model, 1926. Black pencil on paper, 29×38 cm. Whereabouts unknown.
It is impossible to be precise about this summer’s production because much of it is supposed to have been stolen from the roof of the artist’s car during a stop for lunch on the way back to Paris. Asked about this theft sometime in the mid-1950s, Picasso joked that “the thieves must have been disappointed in their loot and probably chucked it into a ditch.”5 The story appears to have been played up—possibly made up—to account for this trip’s scant output. In reply to a journalist who asked what he had been doing, Picasso replied, “Heads.” “Portraits?” “No, heads, simply what I call heads. Perhaps you might not see them this way, they are … what is called cubist.”
The “cubist” paintings to which Picasso refers are bifurcated heads—variations on his double-profile images done earlier in the year.67 At first sight seemingly female, given their vertical vaginalike eyes, at least one of these heads, on closer examination, turns out to be male. In some of them, Paulo appears as bizarrely twisted Harlequins.8 In another, done later in the year, as Gert Schiff has pointed out, the one with short hair and bib and blobs of red paint on his cheeks is of Paulo or one of the Murphy kids, got up for a costume party as a clown.9 There are also a couple of drawings of a naked girl with very distinctive features—the unidentifiable blonde?10 Picasso might well have installed her nearby, as he would his next mistress.
If the theft was indeed apocryphal these powerful tribal faces with their relocated features are virtually all Picasso did this summer and fall, with one notable exception: a largish (130 x 97 cm) anthropomorphic still life, The Atelier, which was presumably done at Juan-les-Pins, given the pale blue patches of sea and sky and the unfamiliar bedroom setting.11 I see this painting as an allegory of painter’s block. Picasso pictures himself as an easel with nothing on it but a palette, unsullied by paint, as if to announce that he had stopped painting. And he pictures Olga no less negatively alongside him as a pair of tights. In the preparatory drawing, there is a clumsily darned patch on the tights of the right leg, the one that had been the cause of her giving up dancing. The placement of the palette on the easel in this revelatory painting suggests that Picasso had derived inspiration for the only painting of any importance done this summer from a celebrated simile in Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. Greatly revered by the surrealists, this simile likened the beauty of a young man to “the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table.”12 Picasso has adapted Lautréamont’s metaphor to his and Olga’s circumstances; however, his confrontation between the easel and the tights on a washstand is too straightforwardly symbolic to be dubbed surrealist.
Left: Picasso. Head, 1926. Oil on canvas, 41×33 cm. Private collection. Right: Picasso. Bust of a Woman, 1926. Charcoal and oil on canvas, 81×64.7 cm. Musée d’Art Moderne, Strasbourg.
It took the beau monde a mere three years to follow the footsteps of Picasso and the Murphys and make the Riviera their summer playground. In 1926 there were two hospitable new follies for the Picassos to visit: Russell Greeley and François de Gouy d’Arcy’s Château de Clavary, outside Grasse, and the Noailles’ Mas Saint-Bernard at Hyères. On May 15, Greeley and Gouy received their first houseguest, Max Jacob. Later in the summer, Picasso would drive up to supervise the installation of his black-and-white mosaic floor,13 a circle of interlocking profiles that would be the centerpiece of the fumoir, a room for smoking opium rather than to
bacco. Ever the perfectionist, Gouy upholstered the smokers’ oriental divans in flowered chintz, copied from Liotard’s Countess of Coventry in Turkish Dress.14
Back terrace of Chateau de Clavary with Germaine Everling, Russell Greeley, Marthe Chenal, Nina Hamnett, Francis Picabia, and Francois de Gouy d’Arcy, c. 1925-26. Collection of Kimberly Greeley Brown, Courtesy Kenneth Wayne.
By the fashionable standards of the day, Clavary was small—no more than three or four guest rooms—but it was extremely luxurious. Gouy was an obsessive maître de maison and a gourmet, whose famously skilled cook kept a supply of caviar ready for Stravinsky’s visits. Gouy saw himself not so much as a collector than as a patron of the arts in the eighteenth-century manner. He had Jean Hugo fresco some of the walls and Italian artisans do trompe l’oeil scenes on the staircase. Later he would commission Max Ernst to create a surrealist grotto in the park. The garden was full of surprises: a trellis that concealed a fountain, a marble specimen table, a fig tree made of cement. There was also an artificial lake and an island rimmed with papyrus. Mornings, Greeley and Jean Hugo would swim there while Gouy looked on, glass in hand, laughing at them. Elsewhere in the garden, Nina Hamnett would be teaching Poulenc ribald English sea chanteys, while other guests dressed up the ubiquitous statues of gods and goddesses in hats, coats, umbrellas, and sunglasses. Picasso may have had these scarecrows in mind twenty years later when he set about assembling sculptures of his daughter Paloma and her mother out of old shoes and baskets and lids of things picked up in the street. Views from the property were, indeed still are, superb: the Mediterranean coast to the south, the Alpes-Maritimes to the north, olive groves and fields of jasmine all around. Jean Hugo remembered the songs of the girls picking jasmine and forest fires blazing away in the distance.15
That first year at Clavary, the stream of visitors included the Picassos, Picabias, Stravinskys, Murphys, Van Dongens, Marie Laurencin, Man Ray, Rebecca West, Nina Hamnett, Tony Gandarillas, Christopher Wood, Mary Garden (the Scottish-American Mélisande), René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Honegger, Auric, and Poulenc—everyone except Beaumont, whom Gouy loathed for some arcane genealogical reason. At one of his dinners after a bullfight in the 1950s, Jean Hugo regaled Picasso with stories about Clavary that he was including in his fascinating memoir about high Bohemia in the 1920s and 1930s in the south of France. After World War II, the grounds at Clavary were used as a dump for the mountains of old clothes—rotting shoes, overcoats, and uniforms—which the Abbé Pierre had never got around to distributing to the poor. This discouraged potential buyers of the property, including Douglas Cooper. In the end, Clavary was bought by Peter Wilson, the auctioneer who did his best to lure Picasso back to the house.
François de Gouy d’Arcy, Jean Hugo, Olga, Russell Greeley, and Picasso in Juan-les-Pins, 1926.
Much the same group foregathered at the forty-bedroom Mas Saint-Bernard, which the Noailles had recently built and would go on perfecting and adding to for the next ten years. Marie-Laure could not remember for sure when Picasso first visited them, but thought it was the summer of 1926. Out of curiosity the artist drove over to see this spectacular modernist folly which Robert Mallet-Stevens had designed. Predictably, he disliked the place; the concept of a house as an enormous machine à habiter was anathema to him.
Although the Noailles had had the courage to acquire one of the most original and challenging of Picasso’s recent paintings—the great sand-encrusted still life of the previous summer—and were in the process of replacing the penny-pinching Doucet as leading backers of modernism, Picasso never warmed to them. He particularly disliked Marie-Laure. Despite her great wit, heart, and acumen, she became too outrageous, too flagrantly “camp” for Picasso’s taste. The debutante he had portrayed so blandly in 1921 was turning into an unpredictable exhibitionist who loved to shock, as in the pass she made at Picasso: “You be Goya and I’ll be the Duchess of Alba.” Recalling this thirty years later, the artist said that she would have done better to cite Goya’s hideous Queen María Luisa of Spain. By that time, however, Marie-Laure, who was half-Jewish, had earned Picasso’s undying enmity by having a romance with an Austrian officer during the Occupation, followed by a long affair with Oscar Domínguez, the surrealist Canary Islander who faked Picassos on the side.
When the Picassos arrived at Juan-les-Pins, the Murphys were off in Spain with their new best friends, Ernest and Hadley Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer, an attractive Vogue editor who would soon replace Hadley as the writer’s wife. They had gone to Pamplona for the Fiesta of San Fermín and the running of the bulls. Hemingway was new to bullfighting, but he already behaved, Picasso said, as if his afición went deeper than anyone else’s. At Pamplona Hemingway had shamed a terrified Gerald into entering a training ring with him and facing up to a young bull.
As an Andalusian, Picasso found Hemingway’s appropriation of Andalusian machismo offensive. To make his point, Picasso later described how Hemingway had called on him in Paris soon after the Liberation. Told the artist was out, Hemingway asked the concierge whether he could leave a note for him. Yes, but wouldn’t he like to leave some cigarettes? Hemingway went down to his car and returned—to the terror of the concierge—with a box of hand grenades.1617 That’s Hemingway for you, Picasso said. On another occasion, summer of 1959, Cooper and I went to a bullfight at Nîmes with Picasso: one of a series of mano a mano contests between Luis Miguel Dominguín and his brother-in-law Antonio Ordoñez. Hemingway was covering these historic corridas for Life magazine and was playing the role of aficionado to the hilt from behind the barrera. As the band struck up the “Marseillaise” to open the proceedings, Picasso burst out laughing and pointed down at Hemingway. The author of Death in the Afternoon was standing rigidly at attention, his right hand up to his peaked cap in a salute. Noticing that nobody else was saluting, slowly and surreptitiously he lowered his hand and stuffed it in his pocket. “Quel con,” Picasso said.
At the beginning of August the Picassos took Man Ray, who was staying at Ville-franche with his mistress, the celebrated “Kiki of Montparnasse,” to see the Murphys and photograph them and their children. The Murphys, who liked to turn arrivals and departures into special occasions, were all set to welcome the honeymooning Donald Ogden Stewarts at the local railroad station. They had dressed up eight-year-old Honoria in the Harlequin costume that Paulo wore in his father’s 1924 portrait and had outgrown. Sara played a drum and Baoth a guitar. The sight of little Honoria in this familiar costume and Paulo in fancy dress prompted the bizarre styl-izations of the Harlequin heads that Picasso worked on this summer. The Murphys had also planned a formal party for the Stewarts and their other houseguests, the Robert Benchleys and Alexander Woollcott; however, letters from Sara to Picasso tell a story of successive postponements due to the bride’s exhaustion. “Brides … just aren’t as sturdy as they used to be,” Sara wrote Picasso. “What is it they all seem to have?”18
The indisposition of the bride and the news that Hemingway had returned from Spain and was leaving Hadley for Pauline put an end to plans for the party. Sara Murphy’s life-enhancing wand no longer seemed to work. All of a sudden luxe, calme et volupté gave way to angst. Zelda Fitzgerald’s alienation was symptomatic of the malaise at the core of twenties rapture. One evening while dining at the Colombe d’Or—a renowned Saint-Paul-de-Vence restaurant that still caters to Riviera celebrities—the Murphys told Scott that the fat, frowsy woman with purplish hair at a neighboring table was Isadora Duncan. Fitzgerald rushed over to sit at her feet. “My centurion,” Duncan said, and ran her hands through his hair, suggesting that he come up and see her later. At this Zelda leapt from her chair, sprang across Gerald, and flung herself off a parapet into the night.19 Stone steps broke her fall and saved her from death in the valley below. Blood-smeared but relatively unhurt and very, very cool, Zelda miraculously reappeared.
Fear of another “Fitzgerald evening” discouraged friends, the Picassos above all, from frequenting the Villa America. The artist f
elt more at ease with the opiomanes at Clavary than with the Murphys’ alcoholic stars. When he failed to find the time to go and see Gerald’s recent paintings before he and Sara left for America, their friendship cooled. This might explain why that winter Gerald was observed by Archibald MacLeish to cut Picasso dead at a concert.20 My own feeling is that Gerald had recognized himself in the Pipes of Pan. The two ménages would see little of each other the following year. Since there had been no real quarrel, there could be no real reconciliation. They simply drifted apart. After 1930, the Murphys’ motto—“Living well is the best revenge”—would cease to have much relevance to their existence. Losses on the stock market curtailed their sybaritic lifestyle. They rented the Villa America and spent more time in the States. Gerald had to take over Mark Cross, the family business, which he did efficiently and profitably. Then tragedy struck. Both their adored sons died in their teens, Baoth in 1935 and Patrick in 1937. In his letter of condolence to the Murphys after Patrick’s death, Fitzgerald invoked Henry James: “the golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden.”21 Fitzgerald of all people should have realized that if the bowl had indeed been golden, it would not have broken.
During the summer of 1926, Picasso resumed going to bullfights—locally at Fréjus and, farther off, at Nîmes, which is where he treated Michel Leiris to his first corrida. For Leiris it was a defining event; it sparked a passion that would bind him to Picasso and at the same time generate some fine taurine writing, which is rather more Mithraic than the sports-reportage style of Hemingway’s “how-to” manual, Death in the Afternoon. The corrida at Nîmes also reawakened Picasso’s afición.
A Life of Picasso Page 40