A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  As for the surrealist poets—novelists, journalists, ghostwriters, who were in thrall to Breton—Picasso confided “on several occasions” to Leiris that he rated Aragon, Soupault, and the surrealists in general as “the equivalent of André Salmon”—that is to say, second-rate.1617 To Kahnweiler, Picasso claimed that surrealist poetry was the sort that “appeals to pale young girls rather than girls in good health on the grounds that moonlight is more poetic than sunlight etc…. Dada followed a better route.”18

  Picasso particularly derided the surrealists for their faith in automatic writing as a shortcut to the subconscious. “Just look at this automatic poetry,” he told Otero years later, as he brandished the original manuscript of Breton and Eluard’s L’lm-maculée Conception, its pages covered with authors’ corrections. “This poetry is as automatic as I am an Egyptian-style painter, as [the Douanier] Rousseau used to say.”19 It was not that Picasso thought automatic writing intrinsically silly, though that too, so much as intrinsically factitious—at least in surrealist hands. Picasso felt even more strongly about automatic drawing. “Some friends and I,” he told Tériade,

  decided to draw in the dark in a manner completely automatic. The first time, I exclaimed … “I know what I’m making—the head of a woman.” When we turned on the lights, we saw that it was in fact the head of a woman which I might have drawn in full daylight. We turned off the lights again and began again, and this time … I was absolutely unaware of what I was making. When the lights were on again, I saw that it was exactly the same head of a woman as before, but in reverse.20

  Picasso’s disdain did not deter him from appropriating whatever surrealist effects—eerie lighting, blasphemous references, sexual fetishism—he felt he could improve upon, that is to say Picassify. Twenty-five years later, Picasso put it even more clearly. Angered at being so often characterized as a surrealist, he used the occasion of his Paris retrospective in 1955 to authorize Kahnweiler to clarify his position vis-à-vis the movement. He had never been influenced, he said, by the surrealists, except during a “brief period of darkness and despair (in 1933) before his final break with Olga.”21 Averse to appearing indebted to anyone except the long-dead Apollinaire, Picasso would always be at pains to reiterate that he had refrained from joining Breton’s movement; and that its emphasis on the subconscious and dreams and its dogmatic canonization of Freud and Marx, not to mention the sectarian squabbles and arbitrary expulsions, had little to do with Apollinare’s, or more importantly, his perception of sur-realism. Although he admitted to having been on friendly enough terms with Breton until 1939, Picasso said he regarded his almighti-ness as a joke. He was also a weirdo, he told Roberto Otero, in the course of showing him a collection of erotic letters he had purchased from an ex-mistress of Breton’s— probably Valentine Hugo, who had left her husband for him. Pointing to some messy stains on one of the letters, Picasso asked Otero, “What do you think this is?” “Hydrochloric acid?” he suggested. “No, it’s sperm … That’s how Breton was. I told you before. A weird type.”22

  Out of loyalty to his and Apollinaire’s vision, Picasso managed to elude Breton’s surrealist embrace in the 1920s and early 1930s. However, for all his disclaimers, he did not entirely elude his shadow. Picasso would not have made such an issue of this if he did not also have doubts. According to Gasman, their concepts were not all that far apart, especially in their contradictions, their antithetical polarity. “The psychological-Freudian and the metaphysical-mystical in Breton’s contradictory interpretations of ‘surreality’ were unmistakably echoed by Picasso in his crucial 1937 statement to Malraux that ‘they’re all the same thing.’ ”23 Gasman also quotes a statement Picasso made to Penrose, around the time of his denial to Kahnweiler, that “the Surrealists … were right. Reality is more than the thing itself. I always look for its super-reality.”24 However, this surely does not entitle us to apply the word “surrealist” indiscriminately to Picasso’s work of the 1920s and early 1930s.

  The disastrous meeting with Billy and his confreres ruled out a large-scale bronze version of the Bather. However, Picasso had a couple of casts made from the clay maquette, one of which shows traces of gilding.25 Given the use of burnished gilt surfaces by modernist sculptors—Brancusi, for one—he may have contemplated burnishing the never-to-be-executed bronze version of the Bather. The maquette was put aside, but the committee’s rejection had strengthened Picasso’s determination to come up with a revolutionary new sculpture—one that would interact with space instead of merely occupying it.

  The starting point for this new venture is to be found in a carnet that Picasso had used earlier in the year after attending a corrida at Fréjus. These croquis defy interpretation. They can be read as a horse (with or without a picador), or a bull, or a cross between the two, or, maybe, a posse of pinheaded toreros distracting a bull by twirling their capes. Little by little, Picasso eliminates the tauromachic references and comes up instead with cagelike configurations of stick figures playing ball, distilled from the following summer’s paintings of Marie-Thérèse and her girlfriends playing on the beach at Dinard. The airiness of the concept derives from a passage in Apollinaire’s Le Poète assassiné, when the Benin Bird—Picasso hated the name that Apollinaire had invented for him2627—made a suggestion. The memorial to the poet Croniamantal should take the form of a statue made of nothing but poetry and glory. Tristouse (Marie Laurencin) had another suggestion: the memorial should suggest a void—a hole in the ground tailored to Croniamantal’s measurements. In his new sculpture, Picasso would opt for a hole in space rather than the ground—a void that would be filled up, he hoped, “with Apollinaire’s spirit.”

  A new sculpture, Picasso realized, would require a new technique; and for help with this he turned to an old friend from Barcelona days, Julio González. The most gifted member of a family of Catalan metalworkers, González had moved to Paris around 1900 and renounced sculpture for painting. During World War I he had worked in the Renault factory. While there, he was awarded a diploma in oxyacety-lene welding. Given his skills and technical expertise, González was much in demand by Brancusi and other sculptors to do polishing and make armatures and plinths. He also helped his sisters produce fashion accessories—buttons, buckles, costume jewelry—in his workshop. Picasso and González had had a long-standing disagreement dating back to the death of González’s adored brother in 1908, but in coming face to face on the boulevard Raspail in 1921, they had had a dramatic reconciliation.28 After this, they saw a lot of each other. When Picasso cracked open the traditional carapace of sculpture and let the air blow through it, he and González set about welding whatever bits and pieces the nature of the piece demanded.

  Actually, González had sent Picasso an urgent message as early as January 1928, announcing that he needed to discuss “something very important concerning the matter from the other day,” and that Picasso should drop by his studio at 11, rue de Médéah any afternoon from three to six.29 Nothing had transpired. A black- bordered letter from González, dated May 13, announcing that his mother had died, confirms that they had not yet got down to work. “If, as I assume, you intend to have me work with you,” González continued, “please be kind enough to let me have an advance.”30 Picasso mailed González a check, and they forthwith embarked on the most fruitful collaboration in twentieth-century art since cubism. It would be an exceedingly friendly one—no recriminations, as there had been with Gris. Picasso would always prefer working with craftsmen—scene painters, weavers, printers, potters, metalworkers—rather than with fellow artists, especially now that he was coming to see his work as shamanic. Leiris’s preoccupation with tribal fetishes had rubbed off on Picasso; from now on his concept of sculpture increasingly resembled a witch doctor’s.

  Above: Marcel Duchamp. Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), Paris, 1924. Motor-driven, mixed-media construction, 148.6×60.9 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  Right: Picasso. Head, 1928. Painted brass and iron, 18×11×75
cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Dated sketches in the carnets confirm that the first piece Picasso and González worked on was the small, metal Head—a bit like a miniature archery target mounted on a tripod. This piece has been compared to Duchamp’s Rotary Demisphere (1924), painted with concentric spirals, which pulsated with “copulatory motions” when its electric motor was switched on; however, it is anything but kinetic. (Duchamp’s piece had been commissioned by Doucet and photographed by Man Ray for 391 in 1924.) Like Duchamp’s target heads as well as Picabia’s, Picasso’s represent a woman. In all, he made three little targets in iron and brass, each riveted and soldered, each painted differently31 Appropriately, he gave one of them to Gertrude Stein, who had often been the target for his potshots. If Picasso never got around to doing a large-scale sculptural target, it is doubtless because people might have been reminded of Duchamp’s Demisphère. I do not think Picasso’s target was intended for the Apollinaire memorial. It appears to have been a tryout of a new technique as well as a new technician.

  Target heads had in fact started life in paint rather than metal, as a representation of himself in the vast Painter and His Model that Picasso had been working on since February. This complex painting,32 for which there are numerous studies, has been said to reveal that he had resumed his dialogue with Matisse, but there is a great deal more to Painter and His Model than that. I see it as a brilliant modernist synthesis of Léger, Gris, and even Mondrian, and also of his own synthetic cubist past and his metal-rod sculptures. Besides summarizing and improving upon specific avant-garde trends, Painter and His Model is about Picasso’s concept of representationalism and the actual act of painting. Once again the artist leaves us guessing as to the nature as well as the identity of the model. Is she a bust on a plinth or a live woman? If a woman, is she blond-haired Marie-Thérèse whose profile is materializing on the canvas, a skinny, dark-haired Olga, or a blend of both? And why is the artist seated on the chair usually reserved for models? There are of course no answers to these questions; there would be no magic if there were.

  29

  The Beach at Dinard (1928)

  At the beginning of 1928, Picasso embarked on what at first appears to have been an unimportant sideline: tapestries. In fact, his earliest exercise in this field, a powerful collage of a Minotaur,1 is exceedingly relevant to the artist’s development, above all to his reuse of papier collé, which had triggered synthetic cubism.

  The impetus for this new venture came from Marie Cuttoli—the entrepreneurial, art patron wife of a powerful senator from Algiers—who had started, as early as 1910, to cajole Algerian weavers into improving the quality and design of their carpets. She marketed them under the name of Myrbor, the name of the Algerian village where the weavers worked. Madame Cuttoli’s carpets were so well received at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in 1925 that she opened a Galerie Myrbor in Paris. She hoped to do for the French what she had done for the Algerians: rescue the tapestry industry, first the state-owned Gobelin factory in Paris, later Aubusson and Beauvais. Cheap machine-made ripoffs had ruined the market for fine tapestries; so had a steady deterioration into fustian, not to mention improvements in the heating of large houses. Miraculously, the quality of the workmanship had held up.

  In 1927, Madame Cuttoli commissioned tapestry cartoons from Picasso, Braque, Léger, Miró, and other major artists. Delighted to follow in the steps of Goya, Picasso went ahead and by January 1, 1928, had executed his Minotaur. Cuttoli’s letter of January 29 reveals that although he had not as yet shown her the maquette, Picasso was anxious to get it woven.2 For reasons that are unclear, the weaving would not begin until 1934. Meanwhile, Madame Cuttoli set about becoming an active collector; her acquisition of Braque’s Grand nu (1908) from Aragon strengthened her hand with artists as well as poets.3

  Picasso would also have welcomed the prospect of having a new backer, who was adept at pulling political strings. In this respect Madame Cuttoli would prove very useful. The agents of the Préfecture de Police, who had kept an eye on Picasso ever since he had first settled in Paris, had recently stepped up their surveillance. For consorting with the increasingly politicized surrealists, Picasso was suspected—on no evidence whatsoever—of being an anarchist or a Marxist, even though he was determined at all costs to stay above the fray and avoid any political affiliation.4 Until civil war broke out in Spain, pacifism was his only cause.

  Picasso. Minotaur (collage for tapestry), 1928. Charcoal and pasted cut papers, 139×230 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

  Expertise in theatrical design— above all, at judging the effects of line and color seen at a distance—had made for an instinctive understanding of tapestry design. Unfortunately, whereas Diaghilev’s scene painters could execute a décor in a matter of days, Madame Cuttoli’s weavers needed months, even years, to execute a tapestry: this first commission required six years, before the looms were ready for weaving. So relieved was Picasso to see his Minotaur tapestry finally being woven in 1934-35 that he immediately embarked on an even more elaborate papier collé design: Marie-Thérèse in conversation with one of her sisters, entitled Confidences5 (though not by Picasso). The degree of imagination and inventiveness that he lavished on this sideline demonstrates how seriously he felt about it. That Madame Cuttoli had commissioned Matisse to do a Tahitian tapestry, Papeete, in 1935, would also have put Picasso on his mettle. Matisse surprisingly conceded that his rival had bettered him. As he told Father Rayssiguier, Picasso had far more success with Madame Cuttoli than he had. Papeete “was very badly made.”

  Picasso’s seemingly simple design, a stylized bull’s head rearing upward and a long bull’s penis—blue, tipped with tan—emerging from a pair of splayed human legs, was a problem.67 Comparison of the original tapestry (Musé Picasso, Antibes) with the cartoon, which is in Beaubourg, reveals that the latter has faded disastrously. The “ribbon” no longer registers as bright-blue moiré. Unless you see the original, you miss the point that the Minotaur’s blue moiré penis is a pun on the ribbon of the Saint-Esprit: the ancien régime’s highest order of chivalry that figures in so many eighteenth-century state portraits. By conferring the sacred cordon bleu on the Minotaur’s self-referential genitalia, Picasso explicitly mocks the genre of armorial tapestry.

  Three months after the first, Picasso did a second, squarer version of the Minotaur cartoon, probably at Madame Cuttoli’s request. This second Minotaur8 was never woven. Tapestry-related sketches89 reveal that he tried out some less self-referential hybrids: a man with the head of a horse, an eagle with a woman’s breasts and bull’s legs, and a bird with the head of a girl—emblematic of Marie-Thérèse and later of Dora Maar. Picasso would envisage himself as a skyscraper, a jug, a heraldic arrow, a cabana, and much else, but above all he identifies with the Minotaur, as the Cuttoli tapestry announces—a Minotaur to whom in his fantasy his mistresses would sacrifice themselves.

  The maquette for the last and by far the most important of Picasso’s tapestry designs is the vast (some ten by fifteen feet) Femmes à leur toilette,100 which he would execute in 1938 to take the place, as Brassaï said, of Guernica on the wall of his rue des Grands Augustins studio.11 Although poorly displayed in the bowels of the Musée Picasso, this great set piece—an amazing assemblage of multipatterned, multicolored wallpapers—confirms that Picasso’s interest in tapestry had less to do with rescuing an obsolescent craft than in exploiting the technique of papier collé on an enormous scale in a spectacular new way. Because of the war, Madame Cuttoli never succeeded in having the maquette woven. It was only after its belated first appearance in the Picasso retrospective at the Grand Palais (1966–67) that André Malraux was so astounded by it that he arranged for two tapestries to be made.12 When shown one of them in 1970, Picasso was delighted but disinclined to sign a document making it over to the Musées nationaux. He was nudging ninety and unwilling to sign anything that pertained to the settlement of his estate.

  In
April 1928, Olga fell ill again. On the fif teenth they stopped at Lisieux so that she could offer up a prayer to the miracle-working Sainte Thérèse. Her condition only worsened. In May and June, she repeatedly visited Dr. Petit’s clinic for treatment. On July 12, when the Picassos, accompanied by Paulo and his English governess, set off for Dinard, Olga was apparently suffering from hemorrhages. On the following day they were even worse. A month later, the same thing would happen. As in 1929, the Picassos stayed in the Hôtel des Terrasses, next to the High-Life Casino, while looking for a villa. The house they found, the Villa des Roches on the passage du Tertre Mignon, was big and a bit bleak—nothing like as attractive as their 1922 rental, the Villa Picasso. Bathers. Project for a monument, 1928. Beauregard. However, it was in a residential area to the north of the town and gave directly onto the Saint-Enogat beach.

  Picasso. Bathers. Project for a monument, 1928. Pen and India ink and tinted wash on sketchbook to the north of the town and gave directly onto page, 30.2×22 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. the Saint-Enogat beach.

  For the first ten days or so in Dinard, Picasso lay low and seemingly did no work. And then, on July 27, he resumed drawing where he had left off in Paris. Spies believes that he had torn the last page, dated July 8, out of the Carnet Paris which he had been using and taken it to Dinard as a starting point for the dramatically contorted bathers he now began to paint.13 Unlike the femmes-phallus in the Cannes drawings which appear to be made of “erectile tissue,” the matière of the Dinard ones is less highly charged: driftwood, pebbles, and bones that have been smoothed by the sea. “Pebbles are so beautiful,” Picasso told Brassaï, apropos the pebbles he liked to engrave, “that one is tempted to work on all of them. The sea has already done it so well, giving them forms so pure, so complete that all that is needed is a flick of the finger to make them into works of art…. One I don’t dare touch: the nose and sockets hollowed out by the sea [have] formed a skull.”14