A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  After the sad end to his sojourn at Dinard six years earlier, Picasso’s decision to return there might seem puzzling, were it not for Olga’s health. Dinard was salubrious: a nice family place, where the artist’s overprotected, soon to be recalcitrant son, could take part in organized sports with other suitable boys and girls, while his mother convalesced. Picasso had a more devious motive for spending the summer in the breezy north rather than the sunny south. It was easier to bring Marie-Thérèse secretly to Dinard than to the Riviera, where an unsupervised eighteen-year-old blonde would have been an easy target for predators. Dinard was so suited to Picasso’s needs that he would return the following summer to stash Marie-Thérèse away, yet again, and contemplate buying rather than renting a house. Like Proust’s narrator, he derived a perverse pleasure from controlling and concealing his prison-nière and subjecting her to the torture of his jealousy. Although Marie-Thérèse was innately faithful, she admitted to Gasman that he was innately unfaithful, even to her.15

  The highlight of Dinard’s 1928 season was the annual weekend de la mode, culminating in a “fabulous thé dansant ” and a beauty pageant of girls in bathing suits vying to be “Miss France.” As someone—albeit aged twelve—who stayed at the Hôtel des Terrasses a few years later, I can vouch for the deadly decorum of the place—not least the soirées musicales with “Depuis le jour” sung by an elderly Opéra Comique star—and can readily understand Picasso’s compulsion to perform lubricious acts of exorcism in a beach cabana. What ironical amusement he would have derived from appearing at the High-Life Casino gala, ever so slightly overplaying the fashionable, blazered air of a Parisian celebrity on holiday, arm in arm with his tranquilized wife doing her best to fill the role of the elegant Madame Picasso. The parodic little politesses, which Picasso sometimes affected in the face of people he did not know or was unable to communicate with were reminiscent of the movie star he most admired, Charlie Chaplin. Like Chaplin, Picasso knew how to signal exasperation or delight with a quizzical furrowing of his brows, a flash of his mirada fuerte eyes, or, on later occasions, a flick of a long-nailed little finger. We Spaniards let it grow, he said, to show we are not laborers. Picasso knew Chaplin and liked him well enough; however, as he complained to Penrose, he talked too much, which was a bore, as everything had to be translated. And how baffled he once was when the Chaplins, “all dressed up in furs in spite of the weather,” arrived in their car for an appointment, only to deliver “a letter saying that they couldn’t come in person and left.”16

  Left: Olga and Paulo in costume, Dinard, 1929.

  Right: Picasso. Olga in a Breton Costume, 1928. India ink on sketchbook page, 38×31 cm.

  Marina Picasso Collection, Galerie Jan Krugler & Cie, Geneva.

  For the sake of local piety, the catalog of the 1999 Picasso à Dinard exhibition would have us believe that the town enabled the artist to “rub shoulders with some of the most illustrious names in politics, the aristocracy, arts and letters [and that] they formed a faithful group.”17 This is the one thing Picasso would not have wanted. His privacy was precious to him. The only celebrities he would have tolerated were Olga’s friends Anton Dolin and Vera Nemchinova, who were on tour with their ballet company18 However, Picasso did make one new friend this summer: Georges Hugnet, a young protégé of Max Jacob’s, who was vacationing in a family house across the estuary at Saint-Malo. Picasso took a liking to the twenty-two-year- old poet and saw him almost every day. He would watch out for Hugnet from his window and whisk him off. “]e m’en vais avec Georges”19 he would tell Olga, as they went in search of the girl who was kept hidden from most of his friends. On returning to Paris, Hugnet would join the surrealists, only to be expelled by Breton. Later, Gertrude Stein took him up; then she, too, dropped him and wrote a smug piece about their bust-up entitled “When the Flowers of Friendship Faded, Friendship Faded.” Hugnet would remain a friend and eloquent supporter of Picasso.

  Another of Picasso’s regular guests was Christian Zervos. They had much to discuss: articles in Cahiers d’Art, but above all the catalogue raisonné of his work that the artist had set his heart on. On one of these visits, Zervos, whose current mistress was in a sanatorium, picked up a local girl (her grandmother lived at Dinard), Yvonne Marion, at the railway station. Picasso enjoyed playing Cupid, and he encouraged the affair, which would soon blossom into a highly successful business relationship and later (1932) into marriage. In 1929 Yvonne would open a gallery, the Galerie du Dragon, in the Cahiers d’Art office on the rue du Dragon; and there she would organize exhibitions of Picasso’s work, including the first show of his Dinard Bathers20

  Marie-Thérèse arrived in Dinard around August 5. Picasso had arranged for her to stay in a pension de jeunes filles, where she would be well supervised and well out of his wife’s sight. Olga, Paulo, and his governess kept to the Plage de Saint-Enogat, immediately below the villa. Picasso and Marie-Thérèse kept to the Plage de l’Ecluse, with its rows of concupiscent cabanas. Picasso probably rented a room for work and his trysts with Marie-Thérèse. It would have been more comfortable than the cabana and justified his daily absences to Olga.

  Beach cabanas at Dinard, c. 1928.

  With Marie-Thérèse by his side, Picasso no longer needed to conceptualize her. Each day, he would do several small paintings of her. At first, he depicted her as an assemblage of sticks, beach balls, and boomerangs, trying to enter his beach cabana, and then he gradually transformed her into a cutout, playing ball with other identical cutouts of herself.21 In one of the paintings,22 he portrays himself inside the cabana, crouching down, waiting to catch the ball she is about to throw him. And whereas the previous summer he envisions her as a bionic gas pump, extending a hose-pipe arm to unlock her cabana, this summer he portrays her two-dimensionally with a key in her hand—to his cabana. As Pen-rose points out in his notes,23 Picasso had a fetish about keys; they enabled him conceptually to lock Marie-Thérèse up and have his way with her. Hoping to film Marie-Thérèse at play, he had brought his movie camera with him, but no footage of Dinard has survived. There is, however, a cut of Olga lying in the sand in a very becoming bathing suit, while Paulo and his friends play leapfrog in the foreground.

  Picasso. Bathers, August 28, 1928. Oil on canvas, 35.8×19.6 cm. Whereabouts unknown.

  The twenty or more paintings of Marie-Thérèse tossing a ball around with her playmates, which Picasso executed over the next two or three weeks, may be small, but they are crammed with action, imbued with the cult of sun, sea, and sand, and they crackle with sexual energy. Sometimes he adopts the viewpoint of someone lying on the beach. As they burst out of their tiny formats these figures appear all the taller24 and turn into flat, pinheaded cutouts in striped bathing suits25 like the Douanier Rousseau’s Football Players26 The girls’ sticklike limbs rhyme with the rickety wooden frames of the deck chairs on the beach. Picasso was intrigued by the way deck chairs can switch from two-dimensional inertness to three-dimensional functionalism. In a painting of Marie-Thérèse naked on a beach towel,27 her lover has added a glint of golden pubic hair to confirm that this is indeed her and she is indeed his. Although absent from most of these paintings, the artist makes his Peeping Tom presence felt just outside the picture, devouring his gorgeous prey with his eyes. By contrast, drawings of a skinny bather with a tight, reproachful mouth28—Olga of course—are bereft of desire.

  Note how Picasso sets up pictorial rhymes between the jagged silhouettes of the offshore rocks and the jagged cutouts of the girls’ breasts and buttocks and straddled limbs. Note, too, how alert he is to changes in the weather and light; how sensitive he is to the way the wind picks up around the middle of August; and the pennants rustle and the towels and bathing suits flap on clotheslines. This wind threatens to waft the girls aloft, as if kites or birds, as in this summer’s crisp little painting of a bird (Marie-Thérèse, of course) caught in the branches of a tree.29 The artist had evidently been watching someone—Paulo or Marie-Thérèse—fly a kite on the bea
ch. Picasso was justifiably proud of having caught the light of Dinard in these paintings—so subtly different from the light he would catch in beach paintings done in the Dieppe area.

  In mid-August, Olga’s hemorrhages started up again more seriously than ever. By the fifteenth, they had become a daily occurrence and eventually so serious that the family returned to Paris on September 5. The following day, Olga entered Dr. Petit’s clinic. Friends and associates kept quiet, as they had in 1922, when Olga was rushed to a clinic after suffering what were probably the earliest symptoms of her malady. One of the few to have been informed about her condition was Eugenia Errázuriz,30 who had hoped to see the Picasso family at the end of the summer when they stopped off at Biarritz en route to Spain.31 But the trip had had to be canceled. Back in Paris, with Olga out of the way, Picasso was able to paint some of his most joyous images of Marie-Thérèse.

  Olga remained in Dr. Petit’s clinic for nearly a month after her operation on September 12. Picasso was attentive, to judge by a letter from González32 two days later: González had gone around to the rue la Boétie to see Picasso, only to be told that he was spending the day with his wife at the clinic. On September 17, Picasso wrote to thank Gertrude Stein, who had also been notified about Olga’s illness, for her letter: “Olga is getting better, but she must remain in the clinic for some time. I’ll keep you informed about her health, but what a summer we have had! In spite of everything, I’ve worked and I will show you what I’ve done when you return.”33 This letter was also signed by Olga, who had left the clinic on October 10, only to return a month later for a second operation on November 2. On December 8, she was well enough to dine with the Rosenbergs, but was back in the clinic on December 10. A letter from Beaumont, December 20, confirms that she was still in the clinic at Christmas.34 Picasso, with or without Olga, may well have visited the Beaumonts over Christmas, judging by a fine, unpublished portrait, gouache and papier collé, of a stylish looking young woman—signed and inscribed “Picasso Noel 1928”—that he gave Beaumont. The subject is not Edith but one of their fashionable friends: possibly the beautiful, blonde Russian princess Natalie Paley, granddaughter of Tsar Alexander II, who had recently married the couturier Lucien Lelong. Cocteau was about to fall in love with her, introduce her to opium, and make her pregnant. This famously beguiling woman failed to live up to her reputation for converting homosexuals to heterosexuality. Her “little Tsarevich” did not survive. As for Diaghilev, according to Lifar, he “could see his old friend [Picasso] only occasionally, because [Olga] was dangerously ill.”35 There is no record of the Picassos attending the last Ballets Russes season in Paris, spring 1929, Misia’s lunch before the opening, or Chanel’s soirée after the last night, June 12—events they usually attended.

  Olga’s absence in a clinic cast no shadow on Picasso’s life and work. For the first time in their relationship, he and Marie-Thérèse could see each other as often as they liked without marital constraints. Buoyed by love and sex and freedom from stress, Picasso would turn back to sculpture. With González’s help, he would whittle the girls on the beach down to a cat’s cradle of metal rods, thereby advancing triumphantly into the new age of iron.

  30

  The Sculptor (1928-1929)

  Picasso began working with González in September 1928 on yet another project for the Apollinaire memorial—three-dimensional constructions made of welded metal rods. The maquettes had to be ready in time for the tenth-anniversary reunion around the poet’s grave in November. They were not. Later that month, there was a further get-together at which Picasso submitted drawings1 and also at least one of the constructions that he and González had prepared.2 To reassure the poet’s admirers, the committee informed the Mercure de France (December 1) that the maquette was “entièrement terminée.” The maquette was not rustproof: were it to be accepted, it would have to be replicated in bronze for its inauguration the following April.

  There was no follow-up. André Billy and his committee members did not exactly turn Picasso’s maquettes down, nor did they denounce them, as they had the previous year; they just never formally accepted them. After the date of the inauguration came and went the project lapsed. Some years later, Serge Férat gave a specious explanation to Maurice Noël of the Figaro Littéraire. Pointing to the illustration of a drawing for the project, Férat said that the motif may have been “very beautiful in itself, but for our purposes it had a serious shortcoming: it was a daytime monument…. Through it one would have been able to see the cenotaphs and vaults of Père-Lachaise, which are of utmost hideosity ”3 Férat took his interviewer to the window of his studio, which overlooked the Montparnasse cemetery. Disregarding Brancusi’s Kiss, he said, “Look at that. Picasso’s monument must make us forget these horrors.” The dreary menhir that Férat would design for the tomb some thirty years later exemplifies these “horrors,” and makes his successive vetoes of Picasso’s maquettes the more reprehensible.

  With González’s help, Picasso executed four maquettes,4 which vary in height from 38 cm to 60.5 cm. All of them are very precisely constructed out of thin iron rods soldered together. Tériade, who interviewed Picasso for L’Intransigeant, describes them:

  I found Picasso doing sculpture, which is what is closest to his heart at the moment. One feels he is obsessed by these experiments, which allow us to hope that, even if they have not yet been resolved, they will lead the painter Picasso to a new destiny—something that one has sensed in his work for a long time….

  [He showed me] small constructions of iron rods topped with minuscule heads that are flat and round. They correspond to the linear figures in his recent drawings [and] demonstrate Picasso’s desire to make sculptures that partake of space and air. Space will no longer define mass…. Picasso hopes to execute these sculptures, airy as rigging or [radio] antennae, in the form of large-scale metal pylons. … “I would like to do something of the kind for the Apollinaire monument.” …

  There were other experiments in heavy-gauge wire, twisted round and round into a tangle and mounted on bobbins instead of pedestals.5

  Picasso. Head of a Man (Tête d’homme), winter 1928-29. Mixed media including brass and bronze, 83.5×40.5×36 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  These bobbins had started life as the reels around which the wire had wound.6 Typically, Picasso could not resist using the reel as well as the wire as sculptural elements. At the end of this interview, the artist answered Tériade’s question as to whether he had ever worked in an abstract mode: “I have a horror of so-called abstract painting. What an error abstraction is. What a spurious idea! When one sticks colors next to each other and traces lines in space that don’t correspond to anything, the result is decoration.”7

  Picasso went on to claim that he was a stickler for exactitude, that he worked like a pharmacist, getting his weights and measures precisely right; and that he wanted every painting and drawing to correspond to his vision of the world. “Try setting synthetic cubist drawings alongside [my] representational ones [Picasso said]; only then will it be possible to understand [my] obsession with exactitude. People might even be able to see that the former are more exact than the latter.”8

  This insistence on the representational nature of the constructions stemmed from Picasso’s anxiety to distance himself from constructivists like Gabo and Pevsner, whose abstract sculptures had caused a stir at Level’s Galerie Percier in 1924. Apart from a few experimental diagrams, the drawings for Picasso’s constructions are mostly distillations of the previous summer’s images of Marie-Thérèse and her girlfriends playing ball. As FitzGerald points out, Picasso has captured “the [girls’] running and reaching posture … within his linear network.”9 He also draws our attention to the flattening of the ends of the rods into fingertips and suggests that these see-through constructions are skeletal cabanas, and the needle-thin, pinheaded girls are the “formal inverse of Picasso’s massive figures.”10

  Picasso. Figure (Proposed Monument to Guillaume Apollinaire), 19
28. Iron and sheet metal construction, 60.5×15×34 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  The first major welded, as opposed to soldered, sculpture that Picasso worked on with González was yet another project for the Apollinaire monument. This was the menacing iron, brass, and bronze Head of a Man— often dated 1930, but more likely to have been done during the winter of 1928-29.11 This piece consists of a rectangular face—a mustachioed mouth, a flat wedge of a nose, and two eye-holes, faintly reminiscent of Apollinaire— which is almost entirely concealed behind a large bronze vagina-shaped extension.12 Like virtually all the pieces Picasso welded and forged with González, Head of a Man would never leave his possession. It was a fetish, a shamanic defense against evil and death—all the more so for the androgyny, which belies its title.

  Shamans, as Picasso knew well, can change sex “without losing face…. Neither man nor woman, [the shaman] becomes something else, something superhuman, something beyond the culturally-induced distinctions between good and evil, master and slave, mother and father, boy and girl.”13 In standing guard over Apollinaire’s grave, the shamanic Head would stave off oblivion and confer immortality on the live sculptor as well as the dead poet. Once again, Picasso would have González replicate the piece in bronze; once again the committee would take no action. The vaginal mask was too flagrantly “in your face” for them.