A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  At the end of September, when the lease on La Haie Blanche was up, Picasso decided to return to Paris by way of Barcelona and to see more bullfights.22 En route he stopped at Céret—a bastion in the history of cubism—to visit one of his oldest, dearest, funniest friends, the sculptor Manolo Hugué, and his wife, Totote, who would reemerge in the role of Celestina later in his life. Picasso and family, plus driver and nanny, then drove on to Barcelona, where they put up at the Ritz. The ostensible purpose of this trip was for Paulo to see the country of his forefathers and get to know his Spanish family, whom Olga summoned to tea at the Ritz. Picasso was primarily interested in attending bullfights and catching up with old friends. He unthinkingly allowed himself to be inveigled by one of these cronies—said to have been the editor of the Catalan-language paper La Publicitat23—into giving an informal press conference in a furniture showroom attached to the Ritz. This was something Picasso had never done before and, given the tragicomic mess he made of it, would never do again.

  Angel Ferran, La Publicitat ’s interviewer and later a sculptor, found Picasso pathologically averse to cooperating.24 Whenever Ferran questioned him about his work, Picasso would find a pretext for leaving the room: he needed to check on Paulo, who was not feeling well, or fetch him a hat. At these moments Olga took over. She ad-libbed about Satie and how the composer had once thanked Edith de Beaumont for a check: “Your thousand francs have not fallen upon deaf ears.” When Picasso returned to the press conference, he behaved even more “like a hedgehog,” complaining about previous interviewers who had asked him “terrible things like, ‘What do you understand to be art?’ ” Ferran padded out his article with a story recounted by a former member of the artist’s Barcelona tertulia about Picasso in Holland in 1905. Needing a painkiller and not speaking Dutch, Picasso had gone to a pharmacy and tried to draw what he required. To his consternation, he found “he did not know how to draw pain.” The artist ended up claiming, nonsensically, that this anecdote was at the origin of his “great rapport with Ingres.”

  To deflect further questions, Picasso embarked on a story about Cocteau and Marshal Foch of no particular interest except that it prompted another journalist— possibly a French one, as Picasso answered in French—to ask a loaded question: What did he think of Cocteau? Caught off guard, Picasso said in public what he had been saying for years in private, and in doing so dealt his old friend, intentionally or not, a heartbreaking blow:

  Cocteau is a machine à penser [a thinking machine]. His drawings are ever so graceful, his writings journalistic. If newspapers were written for intellectuals, Cocteau would serve up a fresh dish every day, an elegant trifle. If he could market his talent, we would be able to spend the rest of our lives buying Cocteau potions from a drugstore without ever depleting his stock of talent.25

  This quote was not included in La Publicitat; however, it mysteriously appeared the very same day in the literary gossip column of the Paris newspaper L’lntran-sigeant. The piece was headlined “Picasso’s Opinion of Jean Cocteau,” and subtitled, “Interviewed at Barcelona, where he is attending a bullfight, the father of cubism has declared …;” and it was signed, “Les Treize,” presumably an editorial pen name. Breton and the surrealists were overjoyed. One of them may well have had a hand in the leak.

  Mortified by his hero’s denunciation in a leading Paris newspaper, Cocteau cabled Picasso from Villefranche, begging him to put the blame on Picabia:

  Intransigeant published views about me which I know to be Picabia’s entitled Picasso’s opinion of Cocteau stop besides suffering terrible chagrin this will result in universal shame for me stop beg you send one line rectification to Divoire Intransigeant stop although this is not your habitual line of action do it to preserve our friendship in the eyes of the world beg you in the name of Paulo stop am sending copy of this cable to Barcelona Jean.26

  Cocteau could not have done more to harden Picasso’s heart against him. Dragging Picabia into it was bad enough, but invoking Paulo was unpardonable. Receiving no reply from Picasso, Cocteau wrote to L’Intransigeant himself:

  [T]hese amusing and offensive comments have already been made by Picabia. Picasso and Picabia have been traveling together in Spain. To me the confusion is self-evident. These words could not be Picasso’s. First, because they do not bear the mark of his extreme prudence, also because they would destroy a deep friendship. Picabia is at liberty to say whatever he likes about me. Knowing Picasso’s distaste for clarification and in view of our great friendship, I could not possibly allow this error on the part of a Spanish journalist to go uncorrected.27

  Two days later, Cocteau followed up his cable with a mawkish letter, which Picasso once again failed to answer:

  After the death of Radiguet, I believed myself incapable of suffering another such blow. I know that people always distort things and reason obliges me to believe that these cruel words are Picabia’s, however the deed is done. You, who never talk about people … have talked about whom else but me? About me, who adores you and is ready to die for you and yours. You have repudiated me in the eyes of the young, who listen to you as if to the Gospels. You have handed my enemies a deadly weapon. I suffer so much I want to kill myself. Without Mummy and the Church, I would have thrown myself out of the window28

  Cocteau was right, “Mummy” did indeed save the day. As Gertrude Stein relates in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

  The Picassos went to the theater and there in front of them seated was Jean Cocteau’s mother. At the first intermission they went up to her, and surrounded by all their mutual friends she said, my dear, you cannot imagine the relief to me and to Jean to know that it was not you that gave out that vile interview, do tell me that it was not.

  And as Picasso’s wife said, I as a mother could not let a mother suffer and I said of course it was not Picasso and Picasso said yes yes of course it was not, and so the public retraction was given.29

  Since Picabia denied any involvement—had he even been in Spain at the time?— nobody believed this “public retraction.” The pretense that Picabia was the culprit may have worked with Madame Cocteau but not with close friends, as a letter from Max Jacob to Cocteau confirms:

  Picasso says to himself, “There is no poet. Rimbaud is the only one. Jean is only a journalist—Apollinaire was an idiot and Reverdy has no idea what it is to be a catholic.” A newspaper interviewer arrived at just the right moment to record these precious thoughts. You have paid the price. Like Pascal, Picasso is a coiner of phrases: Pascal was careful not to publish any of his for two hundred years.30

  A week later, Cocteau wrote to reassure Jacob that he was recovering from his suicidal depression:

  [Picasso] rattles the buildings in his city. The roof tiles fall. I am proof against this. Picasso hates everything and hates himself. He wants to do the undoable and insists that others do the same. In short, this Spaniard wants to be a saint—and is in a fury because his psyche condemns him to take anything but a saintly path.… He is a poor judge of literature. He doesn’t understand that his revolt against painting had already been done in our field by Rimbaud, Ducasse [Lautréamont] etc … that blood has been shed—and that the present revolt is all about restoring order and love.31

  Had Picasso enjoyed a productive summer, he is unlikely to have treated Cocteau so shabbily. At fallow periods like this, his mood was apt to turn mean and dark. Cocteau might have seemed a good target for his spite, since this reborn Catholic had publicized his return to the sacraments with a theatrical display of self- promotional piety. This rebirth seemed all the more insincere given the orgiastic life that he had been enjoying at the Welcome Hotel in Villefranche, smoking opium with a “squadron” of gay fans,32 headed by his disciple, the creepy, unctuous seminarian Maurice Sachs.

  As Picasso knew all too well—he was there at the time—Sachs had recently caused a scandal at Juan-les-Pins by walking up and down the beach hand in hand with an eighteen-year-old American called Tom Pinkerton. Sachs had dressed
the boy in his soutane, lined in pink crepe-de-chine, by way of a beach robe. Pinkerton’s mother, “une affreuse Quakeresse,”33 reported the matter to the police as well as the ecclesiastical authorities, who talked of charging Sachs with pedophilia. Terrified of being contaminated by the scandal, Cocteau ordered his former favorite to return to his seminary and lie low, but Sachs refused to do so. Before leaving for Spain, Picasso had mischievously urged Sachs to disobey his mentor and stay put.34 Black humor, by which Breton and the surrealists set such store, was second nature to Picasso. He proceeded to treat Cocteau’s misery as a huge, black, enjoyably guilt-inducing joke—“Mummy and the Church,” indeed.

  On his return to Paris, Picasso found Clive Bell waiting for him. He summoned him to the rue la Boétie on October 25—a week after the paragraph appeared in L’Intransigeant—to tell him about “all his pictures [being] stolen from the roof of his car and I’affaire Cocteau”355 Picasso put himself in a favorable light. He told Bell that on arriving in Barcelona he had been surrounded

  by journalists inquiring what he thought about everything modern—Gide, Ana-tole France, Proust, MacOrlan, Matisse, Paul Morand—and Cocteau. Of course Picasso couldn’t resist being himself…. And of course the interview was translated and published…. Since then telegrams as long as letters have been flying in every direction from Villefranche … and, as telegrams from Spain are forwarded at the recipient’s expense, Picasso commence à trouver la chose moins drôle.36

  Cocteau’s vengeance was characteristically Delphic. Months before the Barcelona business, he had decided to emulate Picasso and become a collagiste—an occupation which did not interfere with the round-the-clock whoopee at the Welcome Hotel. His objets—“often very witty,” according to Severini37—were made of barbed wire, pipe cleaners, matches, candle grease, and bits of ribbon and cloth. Cocteau exhibited them at the Galerie des Quatre Chemins in December.38 “Picasso was the prime butt of these pranks.”39 However, it was not the exhibits that irritated Picasso; it was an aphorism in Cocteau’s catalog preface: “A farmer finds the arms of the Venus de Milo in one of his fields. To whom do they belong? To the farmer or the Venus de Milo?”

  This observation infuriated Picasso. Severini provides a Delphic clue as to why: “[because the artist] knew who the owner of the Venus de Milo’s arms was.”40 Since no such owner existed, he presumably meant Picasso. A jokey reference to the plaster casts and broken limbs in his recent still lifes would have bothered Picasso only if he felt it alluded to something discreditable in his past, such as his involvement in the theft of Iberian sculptures from the Louvre. In this context it is important to recall that when Picasso humiliated him publicly, Cocteau had retaliated with a vengeful invention to the effect that a push from Picasso had caused Olga’s accident in 1918.41

  Stories that Picasso refused “to have Cocteau in his house” for the next ten years are untrue.42 In his infinite masochism where Picasso was concerned, Cocteau immediately set about worming his way back into his favor. He sent Paulo a Christmas present and apologized for his inability—a sudden illness—to hang it on the Christmas tree himself.

  In 1926, Cocteau had published a compilation, as Le Rappel à I’ordre, of what he considered his most significant texts; it included Le Coq et I’arlequin, Le Secret Professional, and his ode to Picasso. For all Cocteau’s brilliance and wit, the texts had dated and seemed all too lightweight by comparison with Breton’s weighty pronouncements. After his off-the-cuff outburst in Barcelona, Picasso did not want to be perceived as siding with the surrealists, so he stayed above the fray. He did not rate any of the surrealist poets much higher than Cocteau; however, he took a passionate interest in the work of Breton’s principal surrealist painters: Masson, Klee— whom “he held in high esteem,” he told Daix43—and above all Miró, whose work was more of an inspiration to him than he liked to admit. Sometimes in and sometimes out of favor, Masson would have ingratiated himself to Picasso by publishing a letter in the October 1925 issue of La Révolution Surréaliste: “We … feel that life— whatever Western civilization has made of it—no longer has any right to exist, and that it is time to envelop ourselves in the night; within it we are able to find a new rai-son d’être. It is also necessary to take part in the class struggle.”44

  Another twenty years would go by before the last phrase would mean much to him. On the other hand, “a new raison d’être” was exactly what he needed: a new love, in the form of a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who would captivate Picasso and isolate him from both society and his old tertulia.

  26

  Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927)

  The year 1927 could not have started more propitiously for Picasso. At six o’clock in the evening of January 8, while cruising the grands boulevards in search of I’amour fou, the forty-five-year-old artist came upon the femme-enfant of his dreams: an adolescent blonde with piercing, cobalt blue eyes and a precociously voluptuous body—big breasts, sturdy thighs, well-cushioned knees, and buttocks like the Callipygian Venus. Physically, the girl was the antithesis of skinny Olga and the boyish, flat-chested flapper look that was de rigueur in the 1920s. Marie-Thérèse Léontine Walter1 was seventeen and a half years old. For the next nine years or so, she would be Picasso’s greatest love. Before her death in 1977 (fifty years after meeting Picasso), Marie-Thérèse, who was unusually truthful, allowed herself to be interviewed by Lydia Gasman in 1972 and Pierre Cabanne in 1977.2 Gasman was particularly successful in winning her confidence and persuading her to talk without constraint about the first meeting and the nature of her relationship with Picasso.3

  Marie-Thérèse told Gasman that after shopping at the Galeries Lafayette for a col Claudine—a “Peter Pan collar”—and matching cuffs,4 she had been accosted by Picasso. His broad smile, beautiful red-and-black tie, wide gold ring off an expensive umbrella, and huge mesmeric eyes instantly disarmed her. She remembered him saying, “You have an interesting face. I would like to do a portrait of you. I feel we are going to do great things together.” “I am Picasso,” he announced.5 The name meant nothing to Marie-Thérèse, so he took her to a bookstore and showed her a book about him—in Chinese or Japanese, she thought. The fact that he was a painter touched her, “because my mother had had a great romance with a painter. It seemed as if the same story were about to begin all over again.” Picasso’s comment that she was beautiful gave Marie-Thérèse particular pleasure. Hitherto her family had teased her for having an ugly “Greek” nose instead of a cute little Parisian retroussé one.

  “I want to see you again,” Picasso had said, “Monday at eleven o’clock at the Saint-Lazare Métro station.” Marie-Thérèse kept the appointment. “II m’a charmé,” she said67—when Picasso set out to charm, he was famously irresistible. In the course of her interviews with Gasman, Marie-Thérèse divulged that she had slept with Picasso within a week of meeting him. She had previously claimed to have resisted for six months. (She did not turn eighteen—the legal age of consent—until July 13, hence the need for a cover-up.) “It was only after six months that Papa took Mama by the hand” is how, many years later, she coyly put it to her little daughter Maya.8

  A year after Marie-Thérèse died, her elder sister, Jeanne Volroff,9 decided to grab a share of the limelight. Events played into her hands. An amateur art enthusiast, Dr. Herbert T. Schwarz, had become fascinated by Marie-Thérèse’s story and had started writing a book about her. In the course of his research, this flying doctor, fur trader, and collector of Eskimo artifacts, who lived on the shores of the Arctic Ocean in an Eskimo settlement called Tuktoyaktuk (Northwest Territories), tracked Jeanne down. They played into each other’s hands. Schwarz wanted a story for his book; Jeanne wanted to get even for fifty years of sibling rivalry. The book, which raised more questions than it answered, came out in 1988. Scholars, greedy for any information about Marie-Thérèse, were mostly taken in by his fairy tale. When Schwarz’s facts were questioned some fifteen years later, Jeanne, who was then in her late nineties
, claimed that he had duped her and put words into her mouth. Anyone who bothers to scrutinize Schwarz’s wretched book can only conclude that she had also duped him.

  The rigmarole that Jeanne told Schwarz has deceived so many writers on Picasso and been the cause of so many misstatements that it is necessary to set things straight. Marie-Thérèse always said that she was alone when Picasso accosted her. Jeanne, who was studying optometry in Paris at the time and in the habit of accompanying her younger sister to the Gare Saint-Lazare to catch a train back home, claimed that she was with her. Home was a riverside house at Maisons-Alfort, a suburb on the city’s southeastern periphery, where she and another sister lived with their single mother, Emilie-Marguerite Walter. Jeanne told Schwarz that Picasso had punched a hole in his newspaper so that he could watch, unobserved, as the girls kissed goodbye. Only then did he approach Marie-Thérèse, who supposedly brushed him off. “Flushed and agitated,” Picasso grabbed her by the arm and exclaimed, “Mademoiselle, I shall wait for you here every evening at six p.m. I must see you again.”10 Jeanne told Schwarz that it was her idea that she and Marie-Thérèse should both go to the Gare Saint-Lazare to check out the “old man,” and that they supposedly discovered him sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. It was also her idea that they return, day after day, to spy on him, until Jeanne dared Marie-Thérèse to approach him. None of this was true.

  Four years after Picasso’s death, Marie-Thérèse committed suicide. Not realizing that her sister had told her story to two exceedingly reliable authorities, Jeanne felt free to invent a leading role for herself. Her most dangerous lie was the story that the pickup had taken place in 1925—two years before the correct date of 1927— dangerous because it implied that Picasso had been a pedophile. Jeanne’s inventions were also maddening in that they left historians floundering in their efforts to get the artist’s life and work to jibe with her invented dates.11 Another consequence of the doctor from Tuktoyaktuk’s misplaced belief in Jeanne has been the misidentification of another fair-haired woman portrayed by Picasso in 1925 and 1926 as an adolescent Marie-Thérèse. These images depict a thinner, less girlish-looking woman whom I have referred to as the unidentified blonde.