A Life of Picasso
Page 44
What Picasso admired about Apollinaire was the amazing range of his imagination, the perversity of his wit, the darkness and the dazzle of his polymorphous genius, and his miraculous way with words. To épater Billy and his ilk, Picasso insisted that the poet’s greatest achievement was his outrageous pornographic fantasy Les Onze Mille Verges. Apollinaire’s subversive Sadeian side is what Picasso hoped to memorialize, but this does not mean we have to take his enthusiasm for his friend’s most scabrous book too seriously. The artist also greatly admired that miraculous poem “Zone,” which reads like a letter to him. Apropos the monument, we should take note of another poem of Apollinaire’s about a man without eyes, nose, or ears, “Le Musicien de Saint-Merry,” who anticipates Picasso’s femmes-phallus. Apollinaire’s fascination with androgyny was also a trait that Picasso was out to commemorate. The poet had eulogized his girlfriend Marie Laurencin at the start of their affair as “like a little sun. She is myself as woman.”29 Picasso, too, had an androgynous side. He would tell his mistress, Geneviève Laporte, that “every artist is a woman and ought to be une gouine [a dyke]. Pederasts cannot be true artists because they love men. To the extent that they are women, they relapse into normality.”30
The rubbery extensions of the bionic Marie-Thérèses also had their origins in a ubiquitous new eyesore. “Large red gods, large yellow gods, large green gods,” as Louis Aragon had pointed out in his recent novel, Le Paysan de Paris (first published in La Revue Européene in 1924–25), were replacing roadside shrines.31 Aragon was referring, of course, to gas pumps: “idols,” which he describes as having “a single, long supple arm, a luminous head without a face, a single foot and a circular gauge in place of a belly.”32 Picasso would have been familiar with the contents of this remarkable novel. And just as he had envisaged a woman as a guitar, to be animated by touch, he now saw the interaction of gas pump and automobile— the insertion and pumping that trigger ignition—in a similar sexual light. Picasso’s gas pump figures can also be seen in the light of Siegfried Giedion’s observation that an artist’s duty is to make “new parts of the world … accessible to feeling.”33 In citing Giedion Donald Mitchell claims that artists’ new realms of feelings bring to light “in their art, not simply by emoting or displaying themselves, but (and this is crucial) by a rigorous application of technique, formal construction, sustained discipline.”34
Another anthropomorphic link between Aragon’s writings and Picasso’s paintings is their perception of beach cabanas as sexual symbols. Gasman cites a passage in one of Aragon’s stories, Le Libertinage (1926), about a married woman’s affair with an adolescent boy: “the cabana turns out to be the secret cave-like site of adultery, orgy and incestuous feelings. … In Aragon’s story, the symbolic interior of the cabana exudes infinite power which enables [the lovers] to reach sexual ecstasy.”35
Cabanas will recur repeatedly in Picasso’s work of the late twenties and early thirties. Gasman relates this cabana obsession to the eleven-or twelve-year-old Picasso’s first glimpse of a woman’s pubic hair just outside a bathing hut on a Corunna beach (see page 89). This revelation would forever make him associate beach cabanas with the mystery of sex.36 The nature of this obsession will become ever more evident in next summer’s paintings and drawings of Marie-Thérèse at play on the beach at Dinard and a fixation in his later work.
Lastly, in the context of the Apollinaire monument, we should remember that from 1912 to 1916, Picasso had lived opposite the Jewish section of the Montpar-nasse cemetery, where Brancusi’s early masterpiece, euphemistically called The Kiss, had been installed over the tomb of Tatiana Rachevsky. The Kiss (1910)—two crouching nudes, with their arms wrapped so tightly around each other that they fuse into a single entity—was the first major modernist sculpture to appear in a Paris cemetery. It would have been very familiar to Picasso. The temptation to desecrate an even more celebrated cemetery with an even more profane sculpture would have been an irresistible challenge. Only a femme-phallus could transform the grimy aisles of Père-Lachaise into a priapic grove, where this latter-day Orpheus could live on in death.
Rosenberg’s letters to Picasso in Cannes reflect the dealer’s fears that his star artist was wasting his time on unprofitable projects. And with the previous year’s theft in mind, he begged him to safeguard his “Cannes production.” In view of the Chalet Madrid’s “splendid studio,” Rosenberg further admonished Picasso: “Careful, dear friend, that you don’t aspire to doing Bouguereaus,”37 and in another letter he tells him that his “superb studio” should inspire “de l’excellente peinture artiste français”38 Rosenberg’s persistent dealerism prompted the artist to do the opposite. The Chalet Madrid did not inspire de l’excellente peinture artiste fran-çais. Picasso later said that the one time he had a great space at his disposal, he had not painted chefs-d’oevre. He had evidently forgotten about the life-sized standing nudes he did this summer (mostly 130 x 90 cm), each one seemingly executed in one seismic burst of dripping grayish monochrome paint.39 Though far less volumetric than the femme-phallus drawings from which they derive, these figures hint at the kind of monumental sculptures he had in mind. In their sketchi-ness they also anticipate the deceptively slapdash juggernauts of Picasso’s final decade. For years, these great figures were overlooked. Rosenberg would not have seen their point, which is probably why they were never exhibited or put on the market and never published by Zervos. Their significance was not realized until Carmen Giménez accorded them a place of honor in the shows she organized.40 These fearsome daughters of the Demoiselles d Avignon anticipate the great sculptures soon to come, and the grim, gray Dora Maars of World War II.
Picasso. Standing Nude, Cannes, 1927. Oil on canvas, 136×103 cm. Collection Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
Before leaving Cannes, Picasso did two Woman in an Armchair paintings,41 in which the figure is skinnier, spikier, and sharper-colored than this summer’s Marie-Thérèses. The décor is parodically genteel. These are the first of a long series of menacing, ailing Olgas. Missing Marie-Thérèse, he turned on his sickly, mournful wife. Olga’s misfortunes came in handy. As he wrote Gertrude Stein,42 “I have had to get back to Paris earlier than intended”—back to Marie-Thérèse.
Picasso. Woman in an Armchair, 1927. Oil on canvas, 130×97 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
28
The Apollinaire Monument (1927-28)
The tragicomic saga of Picasso’s on-again, off-again memorial to Apollinaire would drag on for thirty more years before being resolved to nobody’s satisfaction, least of all Picasso’s. After returning to Paris in September 1927 with his femme-phallus drawings, he had six weeks in which to prepare the maquette that the committee had requested. They had set their mind on a nice bust. Picasso had no intention of doing anything so banal. As Apollinaire’s closest friend, he was convinced that he, and only he, had the right to decide what was appropriate, and it was in this spirit that he set to work on a maquette that had to be ready in time for the reunion around Apollinaire’s grave at Père-Lachaise.
The lack of a properly equipped sculpture studio confined the artist to clay— something he had not handled for thirty years or more. As the final version was destined for the open air, it would have to be enlarged and cast in bronze, although Picasso disliked that material—“too rich” and, when patinated, too glossy. Apollinaire had expressed similar reservations. His autobiographical roman à clef, Le Poète assassiné—the book that would inspire Picasso’s most memorable projects for the monument—reveals that he thought bronze made people look Negroid. In a typically bizarre episode in the novel, the poet-hero, Croniamantal, who loved to wander the streets of Paris, is accosted by the bronze bust of another “wanderer,” the poet François Coppé. The bust complains to Croniamantal/Apollinaire: “Wandering past me, the negro, Sam McVea / said I was much the blacker, to his extreme dismay.” Sam McVea—known in France as “the Napoleon of the ring”—had been Apollinaire, Picasso, and Braque’s favorite boxer in 1908-09. Le Poète ass
assiné abounds in similar jokey references to the life that they had all shared in the days when Apollinaire referred to Picasso’s Montmartre neighborhood as “Montmerde.”1
Instead of a bust, Picasso decided to use the previous summer’s drawings of Marie-Thérèse as a point of departure for his maquette. The resultant Bather confirms that he still knew how to handle clay.2 If the play between holes and volumes works so naturally, it is partly because he has taken a look at the copy of the art student’s bible, Gray’s Anatomy, which Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell had given him in 1913. Picasso has used ligaments and membranes to hold his body parts together, as smoothly as they do in Gray’s illustration of a side view of the pelvis, showing the great and lesser sacro-sciatic ligaments.3 As in his neoclassical figures, he has kept the Bathers center of gravity low and played tricks with scale, grotesquely inflating the Bathers left leg and foot and shrinking her right arm so as to endow the little figure with maximum gigantism. Peter Read’s description of this maquette says it all:
Above: Figure 166 from Gray’s Anatomy showing side view of the pelvis, by Henry Gray, F.R.S. Right: Picasso. Bather (Metamorphosis I), 1928. Bronze, 22.8×18.3×11 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
The head is pulled into a phallic column and cast back so that the open mouth becomes a vertical orifice. This position and expression combine with the swelling of tumescent tissue at the front of the figure to express the androgynous melding of male and female attributes in orgasmic abandon. Scaled up to monumental size and cast in bronze, the work would have appeared massively anthropomorphic, smooth and bulbous, exuding sensuality, one of those public sculptures which irresistibly attract a caress from the spectator’s hand.4
After the November 9 gathering around Apollinaire’s grave, most of the Comité Apollinaire adjourned to a bar on the Place Gambetta to discuss the memorial. The following day an announcement appeared in L’Intransigeant: “Next year on the occasion of the tenth anniversary, a monument designed by Picasso will be inaugurated.”5 A month later, with André Billy presiding, the leading members of the committee foregathered in Picasso’s studio to inspect the clay maquette and the previous year’s Cannes drawings, which they were also supposed to consider. The committee members were not just shocked, they were downright horrified—especially Billy.
Evidently, Billy had imposed his views on other committee members, notably Serge Férat and Hélène d’Oettingen. Although Férat had once held Picasso in such high esteem that he forgave him for making off with his mistress, he now declared himself unable to forgive his former hero for what he presumptuously termed his “betrayal of cubism.” More to the point, Serge and Hélène could not forgive Picasso for his coolness toward them. Bear in mind, too, that Hélène had kept Apollinaire for several weeks in her luxurious hôtel particulier; and had also slept with Picasso. The Russian Revolution had shocked Hélène out of her blind faith in modernism and turned her against all things revolutionary. Far from wanting to commemorate Apollinaire as the avant-garde hero she had admired in life, she now chose to revere him in death as “the national poet whose verses should be chanted like those of the ancient Greeks.” The poet would have shuddered.
Picasso had drifted apart from another key member of the Comité, André Salmon—one of his earliest Parisian friends and the instigator of his friendship with Apollinaire. Salmon’s Montmartre Bohemianism and the opium addiction he shared with his awful wife would have been unacceptable to Olga. But the publication in 1920 of Salmon’s sentimental roman à clef, La Négresse du Sacré Cœur—about Ray-monde, the adolescent orphan girl Picasso and Fernande had adopted in 1907 and returned to the orphanage (he found himself attracted to her)—had annoyed the artist. So had Salmon’s fulsome support of Derain67 and Vlaminck, who were also on the Apollinaire committee and anything but well disposed toward Picasso. An easygoing yes-man by nature, Salmon did nothing to support Picasso’s successive ma-quettes until 1930, when he wrote a gushing article about his welded sculpture in an attempt to reingratiate himself. It was too late. Sadly, Salmon’s three volumes of chatty reminiscences, all too appropriately entitled Souvenirs sans fin, published after World War II, would show little understanding of the modern movement that he had witnessed up close.
Billy’s most fervent ally on the committee was Apollinaire’s widow, Jacqueline, “La Jolie Russe,” the nice, ordinary girl the poet had married six months before he died. Picasso and Olga had been supportive of Jacqueline, but she had come to see herself as the keeper of her husband’s flame—also of his shrinelike apartment at Saint-Germain-des-Près. Unfortunately, the regilding of the poet’s escutcheon in the interest of official recognition—the Légion d’Honneur had been withheld because of his jail record8—required that a veil be drawn over the prose that Picasso most enjoyed. What is more, the widow had her reputation to consider. As a former girlfriend of Irène Lagut, she would not have wanted an androgynous Bather, pieced together out of buttocks and breasts and genitalia, cavorting on her husband’s grave. To exorcise the past, Jacqueline needed to invoke all the gloire she could. Picasso had no time for gloire. He wanted to celebrate his friend’s far from decorous genius with an effigy the likes of which had never been envisaged.
As was to be expected, the committee members unanimously turned down the Cannes drawings and the clay maquette. Serge and Hélène, who had prided themselves, fifteen years earlier, on riding the crest of every new wave, deluded themselves into believing that Picasso was out to foist a “disgusting” dadaist joke off on them. Billy makes this clear in his memoir, when he dismisses the femmes-phallus as “an album of abstract drawings, reminiscent of potatoes and other tubercules, which it would not be incorrect to describe as somewhat obscene. Obviously these drawings had not been done for a tomb. We were dismayed. Picasso was making fools of us. We departed in high dudgeon.”9
The diarist Paul Léautaud, who was a member of the committee though he had not attended the meeting, reports further fulmination on Billy’s part—this time against the clay Bather:
Picasso had come up with something bizarre, monstrous, mad, incomprehensible, somewhat obscene, a sort of lump from which, here and there sexual parts seem to protrude. [Billy] was convinced that in actual fact Picasso had not as yet done any work on the monument and that, faced with the committee meeting, he had dug out any old thing from his portfolios. He told me laughingly that “Apollinaire would have been delighted … to have that on his grave. … It would have jazzed up Père-Lachaise.”10
It would indeed. By harnessing his ongoing feeling of amour fou for Marie-Thérèse to his feelings of love and grief for Apollinaire, Picasso would have brought a monument to the dead to life. After devoting so much of himself to the project, he was outraged at having his submissions rejected by former associates, whom he now saw as traitors to the cause of modernism. On the other hand, there is no denying that in the years since his marriage, Picasso had rejected most of these former friends. This was not necessarily Olga’s fault. He seems sometimes to have used his wife as a pretext for dropping the hacks and hangers-on. This as well as rampant envy on the part of the painters on the committee enabled Billy to turn his followers against Picasso, who believed himself to have been closer in spirit to the poet than any of them, even the widow.
Meanwhile, Breton and his followers had been having the same problems with Billy that Picasso had. Billy’s desperate rearguard action against dadaists and surrealists for daring to claim Apollinaire as their founding father dates back to 1917, when he had tried and failed to steer Apollinaire away from young writers he regarded as dangerously subversive.11 For the full story of Billy’s endeavors to claim Apollinaire for the French literary establishment, while Breton and his followers claimed him as their Messiah, there is no better guide than Read’s excellent study, Picasso et Apollinaire.12 To believe Billy, Apollinaire’s future glory should depend on the association of his name with canons of classic beauty rather than sexual mayhem and iconoclast
ic excess. This belief boded ill for the future of the monument.
As well as being the antithesis of Billy’s, Picasso’s view of surrealism was the antithesis of Breton’s. As he told Kahnweiler in 1933, “the surrealists never understood what I intended when I invented this word [this was not entirely true], which Apollinaire later used in print—something more real than reality”13 “Resemblance is what I am after,” Picasso reiterated to André Warnod, “a resemblance deeper and more real than the real, that is what constitutes the sur-real.”14 In 1951, when discussing his great sculpture of a goat (a pregnant goat, whose anus he planned to plug with a squeaker), the artist claimed, “She’s more like a goat than a goat!”15
Leiris, who was closer intellectually to Picasso than anyone else, vaunted the artist’s sur-realism as opposed to surrealism in an article—all too clearly authorized by the artist—in Documents in February 1929. Now that he had been expelled—along with Bataille, Desnos, and Artaud—from the surrealist movement, Leiris was free to declare that Picasso did not belong with the surrealists. His painting was too “down to earth [terre à terre]: [it] never emanates from the foggy world of dreams, nor does it lend itself to symbolic exploitation—in other words, it is in no sense surrealist.”