Picasso. Marie-Thérèse in a Beret, c. 1930. Pencil on paper, 63×48 cm. Private collection.
According to Schwarz, Jeanne, “a highly regarded specialist in her field,”12 had the noblest of motives for letting him come out with her story: she wanted to tell the truth; she also wanted to upbraid Marie-Thérèse for her “unwarranted secrecy so long after [her seduction].”13 In fact, Jeanne’s sibling had been truthful—candid rather than reticent. She had said little to Gasman about Jeanne because she “cordially disliked” her.14 This dislike dated back to the time of Jeanne’s marriage and was apparently mutual, which is why Jeanne waited until both Picasso and Marie-Thérèse were dead before coming out with her tall tale. Another conspicuous hole in Schwarz’s book is the absence of the girl who does appear alongside Marie-Thérèse in many of Picasso’s post-1930 paintings: the dark-haired second sister, Geneviève (also called Volroff), whom Marie-Thérèse adored and Picasso fancied and liked to have around.
As for Jeanne’s grandiose tales about the Walter girls’ paternity, which had impressed Schwarz, let us turn to Marie-Thérèse’s art-historian granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, who has cleared up most of the facts. Although Marie-Thérèse had always wanted to believe she was the daughter of a painter, her father turns out to have been “a rich Parisian industrialist of Swedish origin … a married man and father of three children”15 called Léon Volroff. He had employed Marie-Thérèse’s mother as his secretary and, subsequently, made her his mistress. Emilie-Marguerite Walter—known to the family as Mémé—had been the daughter of a prosperous plumber, Burkard Frederic Walter (born at Heidelberg in 1833). After fleeing to France in the 1850s to escape the draft, Walter became a French citizen and settled in Maisons-Alfort. Around 1900, his daughter married a man called Victor Schwarz. He was such an abusive drunkard that Emilie-Marguerite divorced him and took up with Volroff, who fathered her four children—a son as well as three daughters.
Marie-Thérèse was the youngest of the Walter/Volroff children—seemingly a happy enough family. The whiff of permissiveness and the absence of a legitimate father facilitated Picasso’s seduction of Marie-Thérèse. At first, Madame Walter made a show of parental propriety, but she was soon welcoming the famous artist as a friend—“Pic,” the girls called him. She allowed him to use the potting shed in their garden to paint in and, presumably, carry on with Marie-Thérèse.1617 Picasso would have known about this reach of the Marne from Radiguet, whose best-known novel, Le Diable au corps, has a similar setting.
Besides confirming that Marie-Thérèse was not in Paris but away at school in Germany in January 1925, Diana Widmaier Picasso has published a letter in Picasso’s handwriting—dated July 13, 1944, Marie-Thérèse’s thirty-fifth birthday— celebrating “the 17th anniversary of your birth in me.”18 In the same article, she reports that the ninety-five-year-old Jeanne had finally come up with the truth. All of a sudden she had recalled that Picasso was forty-six—actually he was forty-five—in January 1927 when he met Marie-Thérèse; so their meeting had to have taken place in 1927. Rather than rely on Jeanne’s mendacious memory, let us turn to Marie-Thérèse. Gasman has discovered a note in her writing, added upside down to the manuscript of one of Picasso’s poems: “Just to say that I have loved you for nine years. I love you and give you everything I have.”19 It is dated January 8, 1936.
The first time Marie-Thérèse came to the rue la Boétie studio (January 11, 1927), Picasso did little more than observe her face and body very closely, so as to fix her image in his mind. As she left, he told her to come back the following day. “From then on it would always be tomorrow; and I had to tell my mother that I had got a job.” “I was very shy and never dared look [Picasso] in the eye. I never asked him the slightest question. I posed for him. He worked very hard…. He told me that I had saved his life, but I had no idea what he meant.”20 She had indeed saved him: from the psychic stress of his marriage and the bourgeois restraints that it imposed.
Picasso’s passion for Marie-Thérèse has inevitably been seen in the context of the surrealists’ cult of I’amour fou: the theme of Breton’s popular book Nadja21 True, both stories start with a pickup, but Breton’s girl was very different from Marie-Thérèse in looks, character, morale, and destiny. Nadja reads like one of Freud’s case histories. It concerns Breton’s relationship with a working-class waif from Lille. Léona-Camille-Ghislaine D., or Nadja, as she preferred to be known, survived by selling her body and, occasionally, drugs to “admirers.”22 Intrigued by Nadja’s shabby clothes, “curious make-up … faint smile,” and strange eyes, which reflected “obscure distress … and luminous pride,”23 Breton had discovered her on the grands boulevards in the course of one of his afternoon “cruises.” Within a week of their first meeting (October 4, 1926), he was infatuated. In her jolie-laide weirdness, mystery, and psychopathic impulses, Nadja reminded some of Breton’s associates of their bête noire, Gala Eluard, who had recently seduced Max Ernst and would soon marry Dalí.
As soon as Nadja fell in love with him, Breton’s feelings for this schizophrenic victim waned, and he set about exploiting the literary possibilities of this “free genius … one of those spirits of the air,”24 for the greater glory of surrealism. At the same time that Picasso’s passions were being reignited by Marie-Thérèse—January 1927—Breton was doing his best to unload Nadja; the better to write about I’amour fou rather than consummate it. To his relief, she broke with him; she was not quite twenty-five. Soon after, Nadja began hallucinating and had to be confined in an asylum. Breton’s “subsequent protests of surprise at the news of her breakdown, anger at the psychiatric profession, and refusal to visit her in the hospital all masked a deep guilt over her fate.”25 Guilt too, I would imagine, for misrepresenting Nadja’s all too evident schizophrenia and exploiting it in the interest of surrealist poetics not to mention cash.
Although Breton’s book was not published until 1928, Picasso would have known all about Nadja. At the time of the affair, the surrealists were obsessed by it. However, it would be a mistake to see Picasso’s seduction of Marie-Thérèse in the light of Nadja Let us see it, instead, in the darkness of his lifelong grief at the death of his beloved younger sister, Conchita, all those years before in Corunna, the consequence of breaking his vow to God.2627 Conchita’s rebirth as Marie-Thérèse would enable Picasso to see himself as the Minotaur of legend—part bull, part man—to whom one young woman after another would be expected to sacrifice herself. Since Picasso confided the “secret” of his vow to all his mistresses, Marie-Thérèse would have had an inkling of the sacrificial role expected of her. It helped that she had a spiritual side and was sweet-natured—“il faut savoir être gentille” (“It is necessary to know how to be kind”), she told Gasman.28 It helped too that she was also very submissive. Far from questioning her lover’s sadistic demands, Marie-Thérèse did her best to comply with them. As for his work, she had little understanding of it beyond the fact that it was by him and about her and commemorated their love, so she revered it.
After their second meeting, Picasso insisted on seeing Marie-Thérèse every day. In the spring he would take her for walks along the banks of the Marne to a secret trysting place. As he would discover, she loved sports, indeed would soon develop into a sturdy athletic woman.29 Most of all, she enjoyed swimming and boating on the Marne, and even managed to persuade Picasso to go kayaking with her, hence the strange, paddlelike arms in some of his images of her swimming. She was also good at skating. Her lover would suffer pangs of jealousy at the sight of young men admiring her as she circled the rink. In his role of “good daddy,” prior to being a bad one, Picasso would take Marie-Thérèse to circuses and amusement parks, sometimes accompanied by the six-year-old Paulo, who seems to have been sufficiently loyal to his father not to betray him to his mother. They would go shopping, especially for toys, which Marie-Thérèse complained she had been deprived of as a child. And, just as he would later do for their daughter, Maya, Picasso amused her by doi
ng drawings and comical cutouts for her.
Picasso wasted no time in training Marie-Thérèse to please him sexually, “initiating the novice … into sexual practices freed from all taboos.”30 He started by showing her some of his early erotica, such as a drawing of the Catalan painter Nonell on the receiving end of oral sex.31 Some of Marie-Thérèse’s most vivid memories, she told Gasman, were of Picasso’s sadomasochistic preferences: “at the beginning of their liaison, he ‘asked’ her to comply with his fantasies…. she herself was so naïve at the time that his demands made her laugh.”32 However, laughter was frowned upon; Picasso’s black humor left little room for girlish giggles. He is said to have enjoyed keeping Marie-Thérèse tearful, yet aroused enough for him to enjoy the perverse pleasure of denying her the release of orgasm.33 When asked why Picasso liked to make her cry, she admitted that “it was a matter of sadism but also of art which is serious.”34 He had introduced her, as he would most of his women, to the writings of the Marquis de Sade.35 Picasso never treated Marie-Thérèse as a surrogate wife; he treated her as a kid sister or daughter, with whom he was having a passionate incestuous affair. Indeed, in 1934 he would picture himself as Oedipus (Sophocles’ not Freud’s): a blinded Minotaur led around by Marie-Thérèse—the ghost of his dead sister—holding a dove.
Picasso’s “lovemaking [was] at times intimidating and terrible,” Marie-Thérèse told Gasman, “[but] in the end a completely fulfilling experience…. [He] was very ‘virile.’ ”36 Inflicting pain was not his “thing;” what excited him was having total psychological power over her, as his imagery often reveals. As Picasso told Eluard, “You know, in my love affairs there has always been a lot of gnashing and suffering: two bodies entangled in barbed wire, rubbing against each other, tearing themselves to bits.”37 This has the ring of a competitive boast to a fellow disciple of the “divine marquis.” The only real problem with Marie-Thérèse was how to conceal her from Olga and the rest of the world. Picasso allegorized her in the form of guitars, jugs, and fruit dishes but he would also do so in the form of his own penis or her vagina. He even envisions her as another woman. Ten years later, Picasso would portray Marie-Thérèse, who was uninterested in fashion, in one of the chic outfits he had bought for Dora Maar. This painting, as we will see in Chapter 39, represents a Japanese model, who has been mistaken for Marie-Thérèse.
Jeanne’s blunder as to the date of the Gare Saint-Lazare meeting has blinded historians to the immediacy and intensity of Marie-Thérèse’s impact on Picasso’s work. Fortunately, a sequence of extraordinarily inventive drawings in a sketchbook38 covering the first four months of their affair allows us to see how this all-enveloping love for her affected his work. Predictably, one of the first of these drawings—the only one to be dated—was done on January 11, the day of Marie-Thérèse’s initial visit to the studio. Not yet sure of what to make of the girl’s features, Picasso shuffled them around. A bit later, he portrayed her representationally as two different girls in one of the finest of his Chef-d’œuvre inconnu engravings:39 as a boyish page in jerkin and tights and as a classical maiden with a wreath in her hair. Both girls are in attendance on a bearded artist— Picasso in the role of Balzac’s Frenhofer. A week or two into their affair, Picasso envisions his new girl as a monster—a pinheaded, elephant-legged, buttock-breasted specter of erotic menace in a series of biomorphic drawings.40 One of these will become the figure of the model in a key painting, Artist and His Model,41 which he would do in the spring. This huge work (a few centimeters short of the Demoiselles d’Avignon) is something of a chef-d’œuvre inconnu in that it has been hidden away for many years in Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art. At first sight, it looks like a reprise—in its cat’s-cradle structure and black-and-cream tonality—of the great Artist and His Model of the year before. But the Tehran painting surpasses its predecessor in its impact and monumentality Note the two shadowy Peter Pan collar shapes; emblems of Marie-Thérèse that hold this intricate linear maze together. Picasso has encoded his secret love in a masterpiece, the better to advertise it, secure in the knowledge that only he and possibly Marie-Thérèse know what the painting is really about. Marie-Thérèse’s presence in his life inspired Picasso to unleash his sexuality and harness it to his imagery. For the rest of Picasso’s life sex would permeate his work almost as cubism did.
Picasso. Painter with Two Models Looking at a Canvas (Marie-Thérèse on the left), plate II in Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu d’Honoré de Balzac, 1927. Engraving, 19.4×27.7 cm. Collection Bernard Ruiz-Picasso
Marie-Thérèse loved to sleep and Picasso loved to paint her asleep, as witness two powerful portrayals of an emphatically outlined Marie-Thérèse sprawled naked in the embrace of a patterned armchair,42 her vaginalike mouth agape in what might be a snore. In one version, Picasso projects a free-form image of Marie-Thérèse’s body onto a shadowy background of two profiles in silhouette, a darker one of him gazing at a lighter one of her; in the other, smaller version, he has tightened things up and integrated them. The handling evokes Miró’s recent work—no surprise given Picasso’s recognition of Miró’s supremacy as an innovator, “You are the one who is opening a new door.”43 Both these sleepy heads have been visualized from an angle that allows us to look abruptly up at the girl’s knob of a nose, her tiny nostrils forming the painting’s pinnacle. By portraying Marie-Thérèse’s splayed body from the viewpoint of a sexual partner, Picasso draws us into his lovemaking. As he once joked, he had an eye at the end of his penis.
Left: Picasso. Marie-Thérèse Asleep in a Patterned Armchair, 1927. Oil on canvas, 130.4×97.1 cm. Private collection.
Right: Picasso. Seated Woman, 1927. Oil on wood, 130×97 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
At the same time, Picasso was working on a series of smaller Harlequin heads similar to the ones he had done of his son the previous summer. In one of them,44 Paulo wears Marie-Thérèse’s Peter Pan collar in place of his ruff; and sometimes it is in place of the Harlequin’s bicorne. Later in the series, his father turns Paulo into a bio-morphic Marie-Thérèse. He enjoyed playing God, reenacting the creation, and coming up with his own genetic system. All the more reason for students of his work to tread carefully: Picasso loved to tease and perplex. Anyone who believes he has cracked his code and knows for sure who is who in his imagery will sooner or later discover that the artist perversely switches his code and shuffles physiognomies and identities in order to confuse us. Picasso hated to be taken for granted.
The shadow of Olga sometimes falls on Marie-Thérèse. An example is MoMA’s imposing Seated Woman,45 which once belonged to Sara Murphy’s sister, Hoytie Wiborg. As grave as some of Corot’s guitar players, this figure conveys a feeling of melancholy Picasso has wedged his subject into a wainscoted corner and clenched her hands convulsively together so that her knuckles look hammered onto each other with carpenter’s nails. The big-nosed, crescent-moon profile recalls the heads in the Milliner’s Workshop of the previous year. The black hair and scared eyes recall Olga. A curious feature of this and other works of the same period is a pale but emphatic border, which not only frames the image but suggests that it is the painting of a painting—a picture within a picture.
Picasso. Guitar with Profile of Marie-Thérèse and Monogram, 1927. Oil on canvas, 27.1×34.9 cm. Alsdorf Collection.
Secrecy had always been a game Picasso enjoyed playing, but now that it had become obligatory, he took less pleasure in it. He did not dare to be seen with Marie-Thérèse in public—at cafés, restaurants, places of entertainment. Living at home as she did, Marie-Thérèse had similar problems. She had to keep up the pretense of having a job in Paris, but what was she to do with herself—go to skating rinks or swimming pools—when Picasso was busy with his work or his family? At first he rented an apartment around the corner from the Gare Saint-Lazare. A writer called Roy MacGregor-Hastie claims that Tzara offered them his apartment, but it sounds most unlikely46 MacGregor-Hastie is extremely unreliable.
To help evo
ke his mistress in his work, Picasso drew on metamorphosis and poetic rhymes and puns. As he had done with his beloved Eva in certain cubist paintings, he transforms Marie-Thérèse into a stringed instrument: often into the ideogram of a guitar hanging on a wall. This would become her monogram. To demonstrate his power over her, Picasso stabs this monogram through the middle with a hilted sword in the form of his initial P. In other paintings, he superimposes this guitarlike configuration over silhouetted profiles of himself and Marie-Thérèse, or uses it to embellish a fruit bowl, which links a pair of shadowy silhouettes—a dove standing for her. “The flight of a bird symbolized … the freedom of their relationship,” Picasso would tell Françoise Gilot. A bulbous doorknob—an object that implies handling and opening and closing—stands for him.4748 Significantly, Picasso gave Marie-Thérèse what is probably the most blatant of these allegorical works: a painting of a white silhouette of his controlling hand with her monogram on top of it.
So impressive is this avalanche of work—especially by comparison with the relative dearth of the previous summer and fall—that one can only attribute it to the rapture that Marie-Thérèse released in Picasso. Ruminating in old age about the psychic forces supposedly sparked by the buildup of repressed sexuality in adolescent girls, Picasso associated Marie-Thérèse with this force. She made Picasso feel more fulfilled than he had felt in years. Like the torrents of spring, she cleared away the logjam of rage, resentment, and misogyny that had built up in the course of his marriage.
A Life of Picasso Page 42