The romance of Picasso’s seduction of Marie-Thérèse Walter has blinded people to the fact that Picasso continued to live and work at the rue la Boétie with a wife who was still totally obsessed by him and who took the role of Madame Picasso—elegant consort, zealous mother, impeccable maîtresse de maison—very much to heart. Olga had no intention of relinquishing this role, nor did Picasso, who still suffered from a residual bourgeois streak, want her to do so. Granted, Olga suffered from gynecological problems that left her prone to mental ones, but much as Picasso would fulminate about her affliction, her attacks would prompt some of his most disturbed and disturbing images of women.
Picasso. Bathers Outside a Beach Cabana (Marie-Thérèse on the left, Olga on the right), May 19, 1929. Oil on canvas, 33×41.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Like many another two-timing husband, Picasso soon found himself leading two separate lives: as an overtly respectable père de famille—weekends at smart Normandy resorts4950—and as a secluded Bohemian with a mistress, whom none of his friends, except possibly for Leiris and Tzara, was allowed to meet. This pattern would be reflected in Picasso’s imagery. Marie-Thérèse’s images would be suffused with errant sexuality; whereas those of Olga, who appears far more often in his work than people realize, would be suffused with fear, anger, and despair—the consequences of Picasso’s shamanic effort to exorcise her psychological as well as physical maladies.
Two years into his affair with Marie-Thérèse, Picasso would make the distinction between her and Olga very clear when he portrays them as naked bathers on a stormy beach: Marie-Thérèse, lithe and trim, emerging from a beach cabana, while Olga—only thirty-seven, although Picasso portrays her as flabby-breasted and boney-ribbed—waits menacingly outside. To make this distinction even clearer, Picasso would usually portray his ballerina wife, who never traveled without her tutu, in a travesty of the dancers’ fifth position, hands linked in an arc above her head. Over the next eight years, these two women counterbalance each other in his art as well as in his life. Picasso derived a certain perverse satisfaction from being a paradox. The pervasive sexuality that Marie-Thérèse would provoke in the studio as well as between the sheets couterbalanced the twin-bedded boredom of life with Olga. Desire for Marie-Thérèse would engender some of Picasso’s most romantic and erotic works, but by virtue of their Goyesque darkness, the images fueled by Olga’s problems would be more disturbingly powerful.
27
Summer of Metamorphosis
For Picasso, the Eros of the joyous spring of 1927 would soon be saddened by the death of Juan Gris. Gris had long been plagued by lung problems. In August 1925 he had told Kahnweiler, his closest friend as well as his dealer, that he was exhausted and going to winter in the south. Toulon, where he and his beautiful wife, Josette, had taken a house, was bad for his lungs, but it turned out to be a good place to work by day and indulge his penchant for the Charleston by night. Depressed and in need of psychic guidance, Gris had joined the Freemasons and was also delving into the study of Paracelsus and palmistry. Far from improving, his health deteriorated. By February 1926, he was running a temperature, “spitting a little blood,” and obliged to take long rests.1 He and Josette rushed back home to Boulogne-sur-Seine. In July, Gris’s seventeen-year-old son Georges González, his sister Antonieta, and her son Guillermo arrived from Madrid to keep him company and dissuade him from becoming a French citizen. Georges eventually sided with his father over this matter and decided to stay on with him in France.
Although his doctors had advised him to spend the winter of 1926-27 recuperating in the mountains rather than by the sea, Gris again chose the Mediterranean—a villa at Hyères, near Toulon—and in late November installed his wife and son there. Again, it was a disaster. While nursing his son, who had tonsillitis, Gris caught bronchitis, which developed into emphysema and asthma. Severe asthma attacks in January 1927 necessitated a return to Paris, “in deplorable condition, more dead than alive.”2 And there at Boulogne-sur-Seine, this underestimated master died at the age of forty on May 11, 1927. His neighbors, the Kahnweilers, raced over to help Josette; so did Picasso and Olga, followed by the rest of the artist’s tight little group. The funeral took place on May 13. There were no religious observances and no eulogies, despite a cortège of the leading writers, poets, playwrights, and painters of the Parisian avant-garde. Presiding over these bleak proceedings were the artist’s wife and son, Picasso, Kahnweiler, Jacques Lipchitz, and Maurice Raynal.
At the graveside, Braque was not happy to find himself next to Gertrude Stein. He would never forgive her for rejecting him in favor of Gris, whom he had come to respect but still regarded as a usurper of cubism. “As she looked out into the crowd of mourners that had gathered, Gertrude felt that they all looked somehow familiar, though she could not place them. She asked Braque afterwards ‘Who are all these people, there are so many and they are so familiar and I do not know who any of them are.’ Braque said: ‘Oh they are all the people you used to see at the vernissage of the independent and the autumn salon and you saw their faces twice a year, year after year.’ ”3
After paying his last respects to Gris—a painful ordeal for someone terrified of death, especially the death of a fellow Spaniard and painter—Picasso spent the rest of the day with Gertrude at her rue de Fleurus pavilion. At one point she rounded on him, saying, “You have no right to mourn.” Picasso replied, “You have no right to say that to me.” Gertrude banged on angrily, “You never realized his meaning because you do not have it.” “You know very well I did,” Picasso replied.4
Picasso did have every right to mourn. Gris had always considered himself his pupil: he had signed his letters “ton élève et ami,” and expressed the hope that his master “was not dissatisfied with his pupil.”5 Their friendship dated back to the Bateau Lavoir, where Gris had lived and barely survived by selling illustrations to satirical magazines like L’Assiette au Beurre. Under Picasso’s aegis, Gris had transformed himself from a clever cartoonist into a cubist of genius, who managed to harness geometrical and mathematical calculation to modernism without resorting to academic theorizing like the other Salon cubists dismissed by Apollinaire as “jackdaws in peacocks’ feathers.” In 1912, to show off his newfound cubist mastery and honor his friend and master, Gris had unwisely painted a reverential portrait entitled Hommage à Picasso.6 7 “Far from being flattered, [Picasso] was extremely irritated and Gris … mortified.”8
Worse was to come. Impressed by Gris’s initial paintings, Kahnweiler had put him under contract. Picasso was outraged. How dare Kahnweiler sign up the apprentice without consulting the sorcerer! “Two Spaniards in such a small gallery was a bit much,” Kahnweiler’s biographer comments.9 The real reason was Picasso’s morbid fear of his genius rubbing off on other people. Gris would also pay dearly for daring to pontificate about cubism—on one occasion in front of Picasso and Braque.10 When the outbreak of war left Gris destitute, Picasso’s innate generosity won out over his competitiveness and he sent him money. With most of his tertulia away in the trenches, Picasso had need of old friends, especially Spanish-speaking ones, and he took Gris back into favor. In Madrid in 1917, he had even tried and failed to pay a call on Gris’s family. The relationship soured once again when Picasso chucked the Bohemian banquet Gris and Max Jacob had organized in his honor after the first night of Parade.11 And it understandably turned to enmity when Picasso pressured Diaghilev into giving him the job of doing the Cuadro flamenco décor after promising it to Gris.
Picasso seldom put lesser artists down. Time and again, he would discreetly give them money, buy their work or get dealers interested, and even marry them off. Gris, however, was not a lesser artist. He had absorbed the lessons of cubism at Picasso’s elbow and had gone on to take cubism a stage further by dint of calculations, the like of which Picasso and Braque had always distrusted. Ironically, Gris’s discoveries were so impressive that Picasso did not hesitate to take advantage of them. After all, Gris had learned virtua
lly everything from him. Gertrude was wrong. Guilt and maybe an occasional twinge of envy had entitled Picasso to grieve for the man he had done so much to form and so much, thoughtlessly, to harm. Thirty years later, at the Château de Castille, Picasso told Cooper that he regretted never having acquired a work by Gris, and asked Cooper to sell him his 1916 Portrait of Josette—a masterpiece whose structure is reflected in the rigor of Picasso’s later (1917-18) synthetic cubist style. Cooper declined; he would leave the painting to the Prado. I remember watching Picasso’s eyes devour Cooper’s Gris, while the sitter, of whom Picasso was very fond, looked on. Surrounded by Cooper’s incomparable collection of cubist works by Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Gris, I could not help realizing, once and for all, that Gris was cubism’s third man.
At the end of April, Clive Bell appeared for his usual spring visit. He had split with Mary Hutchinson (now heavily involved in a three-way affair with Aldous and Maria Huxley), but he still regaled her with accounts of Bohemian high life. Knowing that Bell would spread the word, Picasso invited him to a déjeuner de reconciliation with Cocteau. The artist had a further surprise for Bell: “On descending into the rue la Boétie, I found waiting outside a superb black Panhard with the door held open by the most elegant chauffeur imaginable, awaiting the orders of la belle Madame Picasso. So Olga has her car and her man.”12 As usual, Bell got it wrong.
On June 15, 1927, Rosenberg opened an exhibition of 106 drawings that Picasso had done over the previous ten years. The show was divided into sections—Dance and Dancers, Harlequins, Pierrots and Saltimbanques, Artist in His Studio, and so forth—in which technical virtuosity and Ingresque finish took precedence over cubist invention, metamorphism, and sex. There were no new paintings: the theft of the previous summer’s production and the unseemly, unsaleable nature of so much of Picasso’s new work meant that Rosenberg would not have had many current paintings in stock. Picasso would not have shown him any of the Marie-Thérèses. When the Paris show was over, Rosenberg shipped what was left of it to Wilden-stein’s in New York and, in October, to Flechtheim’s in Berlin.
This 1927 show would return to the limelight in 2005, when Anne Baldassari hung photocopies of the works in Rosenberg’s drawing show in a separate section of the Bacon-Picasso exhibition that she organized at the Musée Picasso.13 Baldassari based her claim, that these Picasso drawings had exerted a formative influence on Bacon’s work when he saw them in Paris that spring, on a statement he made to the British critic David Sylvester. However, as Bacon told Lucian Freud, he was not interested in “all that Ingres stuff.”14 To Freud as well as myself Bacon said that it was the farouche paintings of 1932–33, exhibited at Rosenberg’s in London in April 1937—as well as reproductions in Minotaure and Cahiers d’Art—that had opened his eyes to the violence and sexuality of Picasso’s work and jump-started his own sadomasochistic vision.
The day after Rosenberg’s drawing show closed, July 11, 1927, Picasso and his family drove down to the Côte d’Azur. The previous year he had returned to the Antibes area but had avoided the Murphys’ exhausting entourage. Indeed, he gave the Villa America and the whole Antibes area a wide berth.15 Instead, he installed himself and his family in the Hôtel Majestic at Cannes, where the Beaumonts went every summer, and set about looking for a villa in the town. Picasso wanted accommodation for his rambunctious son and Russian nanny, and for himself away from his wife, who was once again souffrante. Edith de Beaumont, who was going to do a cure at Salsamaggiore—a spa near Parma specializing in women’s problems such as Olga’s—proposed that the Picassos join them there.16
Picasso. Bather, Cannes, 1927. Pencil on paper, 30.5×23.2 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
The Picassos were in luck. They found a “superb villa” with “an atelier to dream about, occupying the whole of the top floor.” Known both as the Chalet Madrid and as the Chalet Capron,17 it nestles in a wooded area on the outskirts of Cannes, just below the belle époque villa La Californie, where he would live in the 1950s. By that time the Chalet Madrid had turned into the Hôtel la Madrilène, where Penrose used to stay while working on his Picasso biography. Chalet Madrid would have been as much to Olga’s liking as her husband’s. It was elegant and secluded and around the corner from the Russian church: a solace when she received news from Russia that the mother she had not seen for ten years had died on September 17. “[Olga] est dans un grand douleur” Picasso wrote Gertrude Stein.18
In the end, the Picassos decided against going to Salsamaggiore. Beaumont’s rhapsodic report of September 2 confirms how wise they were to have stayed in Cannes. “This is the quintessential Italy—Italy at its purest, its richest, liveliest, most Fascist.”19 In regretting their absence, Beaumont evokes the fun they had—fun that Picasso would in fact have loathed. “The journey would have distracted you after that mauvais moment; then the salt waters would have done you a lot of good. Lastly, I would have loved to have seen the prodigious race of women Picasso would have engendered had he spent a few days in this hotel!”20 The mauvais moment? Olga had presumably suffered another of her gynecological crises.
Picasso. Bather at a Beach Cabana, Cannes, 1927. Pencil on paper, 30×23 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Instead of hiding Marie-Thérèse away in a neighbor’s pension de jeunes filles, as he would the following summer, Picasso dashed up to Paris to see her.21 The trip left him more obsessed than ever. Back in Cannes, he filled two carnets with one of the most astonishing of all his graphic feats: a series of highly finished biomorphic drawings of Marie-Thérèse’s pumped-up body in the guise of his own engorged penis—hybrids composed of erectile tissue.22 Picasso visualizes the ithyphallic figure of his mistress alone on a sandy beach sunning her rubbery limbs, ballooning breasts, and glans penis of a head. In one of the finest of these drawings, he shrinks her head to the size of a pea set high in the sky to give her height; she trails a beach towel and inserts a tiny key into the door of a beach cabana. Princess X (1916)—Brancusi’s penile sculpture of his mistress, Princess Marie Bonaparte, which Picasso would have seen at the Salon d’Automne in 1919—comes to mind as an influence, but we should also take into account Picasso’s ribald drawing of a femme-phallus with another woman lurking in the figure’s scrotum that he had done in 1901.23 These masturbatory images were deeply rooted in his psyche.
Besides permitting Picasso to indulge in the fantasy that his penis and his girl had become one, these magnificent drawings constitute the first ideas for a monument to Apollinaire. The artist had proposed doing this long before the poet’s death. In June 1914, he had sent Apollinaire a postcard from Avignon of the Apotheosis of Mistral, a celebrated monument to the celebrated Provençal poet, on the back of which he had written, “I will do an apotheosis of you.”24 After Apollinaire’s death, he looked forward to fulfilling his promise. And, indeed, what more appropriate apotheosis of this polymorphous poet than a woman in the form of a penis? Of course, Picasso realized that the widow and the Apollinaire committee might denounce his proposal as a mockery of the poet and a desecration of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, but he was determined to shake them up. He also contemplated shaking up the city fathers of Cannes with the outrageous notion of setting up a row of gigantic femmes-phallus on the Croisette overlooking the Mediterranean.25 That, too, was out of the question. Ultimately, the artist would have to face the fact that the Apollinaire committee would not tolerate anything but the most conventional of monuments. Nevertheless, in the process of fighting with them, he would become one of the greatest modern sculptors.
Amonument to Apollinaire had first been mooted back in December 1920, when the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau announced the formation of a Comité Apollinaire and launched an appeal for contributions to pay for a memorial to the poet in Père-Lachaise. A pamphlet had also been issued by the journal L’Action, listing subscribers and identifying Picasso as the sculptor.26 Members of the committee assumed he would come up with a nice classical maquette; in fact, he did not give the project another thought for seven
years, by which time his classicism had become much less representational, much more blatantly sexual, and no longer compatible with a traditional portrait bust.
Most years, Apollinaire’s widow and various friends and supporters, including Picasso, Olga, Serge Férat, and Baroness d’Oettingen, gathered together on November 9 at Père-Lachaise to commemorate the anniversary of the poet’s death, as admirers do to this day. In 1924 the group had organized an auction to raise further funds and get the monument going. André Billy—a conservative homme de lettres who would exploit his friendship with the poet to his own advantage—had put himself at the head of the Comité Apollinaire. His priority, he said, was to establish Apollinaire as the modern embodiment of French classicism. To ensure this outcome, Billy packed the committee with likeminded cronies and kept out most of the poet’s progressive friends and admirers, notably Tzara and the dadaists, Breton and the surrealists. The young writers to whom Apollinaire was a god were outraged at Billy’s exclusionary tactics, his condemnation of Picasso’s “shocking” ideas, and his insistence that only a cenotaph or bust could dignify the poet’s grave. Picasso made no secret of his contempt for Billy’s intransigence; no secret either of his own superstitious fear of the contaminating trappings of death. Nevertheless, at the Comité Apollinaire’s 1926 meeting he promised to have a maquette to show them by November 1927.
Billy and Picasso were no less at odds in their views of Apollinaire’s place in history. Picasso refused to see him as a traditionally lyric classicist. He saw him as a rebel and iconoclast, much as he saw himself; the only fault he found with Apollinaire was his art criticism. He thought his book on cubism pointless. “I am appalled by all the gossip,” he wrote Kahnweiler.27 Braque confirmed this view: Apollinaire, he said, “was a great poet and a man to whom I was very attached, but… the only value of his book on cubism is that, far from enlightening people, it confuses them.” Apollinaire knew little about painting, Picasso told Malraux; however, he had an instinct for la chose vraie and, like the other Bateau Lavoir poets, he was a seer.28 As for Apollinaire’s supposedly “cubist” Calligrammes, Picasso liked them, as did Braque, but they agreed that, despite their format, these poems had little relevance to the cubism that they had created.
A Life of Picasso Page 43