A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  After concentrating on sculpture through the fall of 1928, Picasso turned back to painting. As he would tell Kahnweiler, he had fantasized about turning his heads of Marie-Thérèse into houses, which he envisioned overlooking the Mediterranean, much as he had dreamt of setting up ithyphallic sculptures on the Croisette at Cannes the year before. “But I have to paint them,” Picasso told the dealer, “because nobody is ready to commission one from me.”14 In the first of these conceptual “building,” Standing Nude (December 7, 1928),15 Picasso transforms Marie-Thérèse into an Arc de Triomphe. Set theatrically against a bright blue Mediterranean sky, far from being anchored in the sand this behemoth is on the move and threatens to trample the viewer under her stumpy, cabana-shaped legs. To emphasize the gigantism, Picasso has topped her off with a pinnacle so small and high in the sky that all we see is a tiny tip-tilted nose with dots for nostrils. The downward convergence of the figure’s gas-pump arms confirms that Marie-Thérèse is headed for the magic door of the cabana. The sliver of white down the left side of the painting. The only trouble, the cabana’s keyhole is at ground level; to enter, the giantess will have to shrink or crawl.

  Picasso. Standing Nude, December 7, 1928. Oil on canvas, 162×130 cm. Private collection.

  In April, Picasso did another monumental beach sculpture, Nude Standing by the Sea.16 The uplifted arms in this great painting do not stand for Olga; they stand for Marie-Thérèse. Picasso evidently wanted to see how his beautiful, trim young mistress would be enhanced by the position that he usually used to travesty his former ballerina wife. See how Picasso has based her torso and tiny head on the decorative obelisk with the ball on top that was part of the furniture of their Left Bank hideaway (see page 372). It enables Marie-Thérèse to tower up into the sky.

  As for the figure’s amazing legs: the secret of their monumentality had escaped me until Courbet’s great view of Etretat in the Musée d’Orsay provide a sudden subliminal flash. Picasso has used the rock arches of Eretat—the Porte d’Aral and the Porte d’Amont—to magnify the scale of the bather’s legs and breasts, indeed of her entire figure. The legs are easy to spot, but don’t miss the tiny cone-shaped projections— rocky outcroppings—on the topmost edge of the cliff, which correspond to the figure’s disembodied, cone-shaped breasts. Guy de Maupassant, who had lived at Etretat, described his vision of the Porte d’Aral as the “leg of a colossus [with] the separate ‘Needle’… pointing its sharp head at the sky” and of the Porte d’Amont as “an enormous elephant [with] its trunk in the waves.”17 Snapshots of Picasso with the Braques in front of the cliffs leave us little room for doubt.

  Picasso, it turns out, spent far more time on the Normandy coast in the late 1920s and early 1930s than has yet been recorded. Until he bought Boisgeloup in 1930, he had no place of his own to go for weekends. And so, like many another well-off Parisian, he took his family off for weekends by the sea, usually in the Trouville Hon- fleur area. A favorite destination was La Ferme Saint-Siméon, an auberge de luxe outside Honfleur frequented by the rich in quest of privacy. Picasso also spent some time in the Dieppe area farther to the east, as he told Zervos in 1935, when he compared the different light of his Pourville paintings with that of his Dinard ones. “I didn’t copy the light of the Dieppe cliffs, nor did I pay it any special attention. I was simply soaked in it.”18

  Top, left: Picasso with Marcelle and Georges Braque at Etretat, 1931.

  Above, right: Picasso. Nude Standing by the Sea, 1929. Oil on canvas, 129.9×96.8 cm. The

  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn.

  Above: Gustave Courbet. The Cliff of Etretat After the Storm (detail), 1870. Oil on canvas,

  Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

  Pourville? This attractive place is usually associated with Monet’s duller cliff-and-seascapes rather than with Picasso. And yet, if we study the 1928–29 Bather paintings in the light of Picasso’s statement, we realize that the setting is not the Mediterranean, as is usually assumed; it is Normandy. The cliffs of Pourville are not as spectacular as the Etretat ones, but the light is much the same. Picasso had a good reason for going there. The Braques were staying nearby. They had commissioned a house at Varengeville, which was next door to Pourville, from their friend, the American architect Paul Nelson.19 It would be finished in 1931. By the mid-1920s, Braque realized that he was no longer perceived as an avant-garde painter. Paul Rosenberg was partly to blame: he had marketed him as a latter-day Chardin, accomplished purveyor of belle peinture. As Picasso once mercilessly said, “Avec braque, toujours la crerne— moi, jarnais!”200 In his bid to regain avant-garde credibility, Braque had turned to Picasso for inspiration and painted a series of Picasso-like beach scenes—boats, bathers, and cabanas at the foot of the Pourville cliffs. Given certain similarities, it would seem that at times the two artists may have worked in tandem as they had before. As always, they had much to give and much to take from each other. Picasso would always miss their former togetherness and would nurse a fantasy that the two of them could resume their old association. Braque was right to be less sanguine. Their rapport could never be as close as it had been in the years of cubism.

  Olga, Braque, and Picasso at Varengeville, 1931.

  Braque never succeeded in adapting Picasso’s iconic bathers—the angular Dinard ones or the boomerang-shaped ones conceived in the studio—to his painterly vision. However, he showed Picasso how to paint the light of the north— the pale, veiled sunlight as well as the thunderous grays and foggy browns, which are the glory of his seascapes. Braque’s use of the local chalk for his sculptures may also have inspired Picasso to draw upon the scale and light-refracting whiteness of the cliffs to monumentalize his bathers.

  In years to come, Picasso would use landscapes to give even greater scale and an element of mother-earthiness to his women. In 1938, he took Dora Maar to stay with the Zervoses at Vézelay, and painted a large, sprawling nude (Nu couché), in which the contours of Dora’s body follow the hills and dales and highways of the locality21 In 1959, after acquiring the Château de Vauvenargues, which included several hundred acres of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, he told friends that he did not know how he would go about painting Cézanne’s favorite motif. In the end, he transformed its lengthy backbone and abrupt western face into a reclining figure of the woman he was about to marry (Nude under a Vine Tree, 1959, Art Institute of Chicago).22 Just as Cézanne often did, Picasso uses a pine tree in the foreground as a repoussoir. He tries to make the mountain very much his own. Had he, one wonders, already decided to be buried at its foot?

  Early in 1929, Olga emerged from the clinic, where she had intermittently spent the previous four or five months. Cured or not, she would now be the victim of some of Picasso’s most harrowing images. For the previous two years, his passion for Marie-Thérèse had been the main source of the psychic energy that fueled his work. But now, resentment and superstitious fear of sickness in women—Olga, above all—proved to be a source of demonic energy. Paintings triggered by her depressive state suggest that she was far from cured. Accounts of hysterical scenes and threats to kill her husband23 might suggest that the distraught wife had discovered that “the other woman” had become a fixture while she was in the clinic. She had only to look in his wallet to see that he always carried Marie-Thérèse’s photograph with him; or check his work to be confronted by image after image of her. (“How awful,” Picasso once said, “for a woman to realize from my work that she is being supplanted.”)23 Not that there was much question of Olga being supplanted as the wife. Marie-Thérèse would have been miscast as Madame Picasso. The status quo suited Picasso. Olga seems to have sensed that Marie-Thérèse had no desire to take her place, which is why she came to accept her existence. Acceptance did not preclude resentment; but it would have been easier for Olga to bear than the promiscuity of the past. Interestingly, Dora Maar reported that Olga never harassed or attacked Marie-Thérèse,24 as she would Dora and Françoise Gilot.

  W
omen’s tears evoked a predatory tenderness in Picasso—indeed, that is what gives his images of Dora Maar such intensity, but the tears of Olga evoked only guilt and rage—rage, above all, to paint. Take Bust of a Woman with Self-Portrait (February 1929).25 This depicts Olga as a scrawny succubus; eyes sewn onto her cheeks like buttons and a dagger-sharp tongue protruding from her gaping mouth. Perversely, Picasso has given his wife, who had begun to dye her hair, a chignon dyed the color of Marie-Thérèse’s. Most hurtful of all, he has set this travesty of Olga off against a fine, cool profile of himself incised into a rectangle of paint redder than her blood. As before, the manic conviction of these images has been attributed to the influence of Dr. Charcot’s clinical photographs of women in the throes of hysteria, which Breton and Eluard had recently published in La Révolution Surréaliste These attempts to “surrealize” Picasso by association do not, to my mind, work. Why would he bother with Charcot’s old photographs, when he had a prime example of something like hysteria on his arm?

  In another bifurcated head of Olga,26 27done around this time—goggle-eyed and manic on the left, depressed and tranquilized on the right—Picasso diagnoses Olga’s perturbed state, the better, perhaps, to exorcise it. In yet another bifurcated head (August 25, 1929),28 entitled The Kiss, he contrasts a demonic dark-haired Olga on the left with a serene blond-haired Marie-Thérèse on the right. The anger in these images suggests that Picasso suffered from the atavistic misogyny toward women that supposedly lurks in the psyche of every full-blooded Andalusian male.

  Left: Goya. Time or The Old Ones, 1808-12. Oil on canvas, 180×120 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

  Right: Picasso. Large Nude in a Red Armchair (Olga), May 5, 1929. Oil on canvas, 195×129 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  It is above all in the two masterpieces of this spring—Large Nude in a Red Armchair (May 5) and the Large Bather (May 26),29 that Picasso pits his demons against Olga’s. The shadows of two very different artists fall across the Large Nude: Matisse and Goya. Bois has pointed out that this painting is another of Picasso’s responses to Matisse’s Odalisque with a Tambourine,30 which had been reproduced full-page in the September 1926 issue of Cahiers d’Art.31He may indeed have mocked the Matis-sean pose, but by positioning her right arm flopping bonelessly over the arm of the chair to look like a broken leg he has endowed it with a hideous new meaning. However, it is the darkness of Goya—a shadow Picasso usually avoided—that falls across this stridently colored work. The Large Nude bears an uncanny resemblance to his predecessor’s misogynistic masterpiece, Time or The Old Ones: a bedizened hag gazing into a mirror, its back emblazoned with the words ¿Qué tal? (What’s up?), which a no less hideous attendant holds up to her. The similarities—malevolent distortions, the ominousness, the droopy flesh—are self-evident. Primed with Goya’s merciless Spanish irony, Picasso gets back at his wife of a little more than ten years by picturing her as une vieille.

  The red armchair is intentionally menacing. He had no intention, Picasso said, of painting bored-looking Seated Women ensconced in comfortable fauteuils. He preferred to envisage his subjects “caught in the trap of these armchairs like birds caught in a cage. I want to chart the trail of flesh and blood through time.”31 32To Mal-raux, Picasso elaborated on this theme. The armchair in which he sat his women “implies old age or death, right? So too bad for her. Or else the armchair is there to protect her … like Negro sculpture.”33 Olga’s fauteuillooks about as protective as an electric chair. Its redness might refer to her hemorrhages, and the contorted right arm to the damaged right leg that put an end to her career as a dancer.

  After joining the Communist Party at the end of World War II, Picasso would come to see armchairs in a very different light. Françoise Gilot describes him launching into an attack on Matisse for his famous 1908 statement that he aspired to an art of purity and serenity “that might be for every mental worker, be he businessman or writer… something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.” Why on earth does Matisse want to provide a businessman with an armchair? Picasso asked. “Why wouldn’t his art appeal to a simple workman who is certainly more in need of a good armchair at the end of the day than his boss?”34 The views of the nou-veau Communist do not ring as true as those of the old misogynist. Picasso would soon revert to using armchairs in his later paintings to enhance or entrap the women in his life. Apropos armchairs, Dora Maar told me that ten years or so after she had broken with Picasso, she received a large crate from him. She was puzzled to discover that it contained a chair made of wooden balls and a web of string, designed by the boyfriend of one of his models.35 Once assembled, it looked like a cage, she said.

  Unlike the Large Nude in a Red Armchair, which is very much a painting, the next tragic portrayal of Olga, the Large Bather (May 26, 1929), is a conceptual sculpture—a monument that Picasso treats with the dignity and solemnity due to a sacrificial victim. It is dusk. A naked Olga stands, like a pillar of chalk carved from the cliffs of Pourville, staring numbly out to sea, her angular arms clasped in the fifth position above her head. Her skinny body—note the protruding ribs—is cloaked in a dark shroud, whose craquelure is certainly intentional. The light is northern, the sky a thunderous gray, the beach is the color and texture of coffee grounds. And yet, despite the gloom, this portrayal of Olga is one of the few of the great late denunciations in which Picasso shows a glimmer of mercy.36 He has captured Olga’s solitude—“I have never seen a more solitary person,” Gilot said of her;37 and, for once, her âme russe, her Russian soul, receives its due; too much of Russia, Picasso complained, had rubbed off on him, especially the Russian superstitions which, Gilot claimed, enabled him to demonstrate his power over his family:

  Every time we left on a trip, however short it might be, we had to carry out the Russian custom of having all members of the family sit down in the room from which we were going to leave, without speaking a word for at least two minutes. After that we were allowed to start out on our trip, with complete assurance that nothing bad would befall us. We did that in the most serious fashion and if one of the children laughed or spoke before the time was up, we had to begin all over again; otherwise Pablo would refuse to leave.38

  Dora Maar, who would suffer more from Picasso’s cruelty than his other mistresses, told Penrose that “in some ways Picasso enjoyed [Olga’s] violence.”39 It certainly inspired some of his most powerful images. By sticking her tongue out at him, cursing him in Russian, and telling him that he was not Paulo’s father, which he so obviously was, Olga generated the rage, misogyny, and guilt that fueled his shamanic powers. However, for all the violence of his imagery and his cult of Sade, Picasso deplored physical violence. To fight back at Olga, he used his paintbrush, and only resorted to force to protect himself. These cruel paintings acted as lightning conductors, and they apparently worked. Home movies Picasso made two years later, around the time he was working on the convulsively cruel Repose, reveal a seemingly united family at play in the garden at Boisgeloup. A bit on the plump side and formally dressed, Picasso behaves like a quintessential bourgeois husband and father—the antithesis of the priapic polymorph he would turn back into, after his wife and child returned to Paris.

  Earlier images of Marie-Thérèse are set on the beach or in the studio. However, in the early spring of 1929, Picasso took to painting her in a very different indoor setting.40 This setting is certainly not the apartment Picasso rented for Marie-Thérèse in 1928-29 on the rue de Liège41 nor is it the rue la Boétie apartment. The view through the back window includes the twin steeples of Sainte-Clotilde, which is on the Left Bank. It has not been possible to locate the apartment, but McCully thinks the building was near or on the corner of the rue de l’Université and the rue Courty42 So much for the view. The décor of this rented hideaway apartment would provide Picasso with an uncharacteristically fancy setting for his paintings of Marie-Thérèse.43 Decorative features include an arched doorway, a screen, windows opening onto a balcony, patterned wallpaper,
a little table with a lamp, a fringed shade protruding from it, and a fashionable art deco accessory in the form of an obelisk, conceivably mirrored, topped with a ball that appears alongside a bust of Marie-Thérèse in a large interior scene, dated April 24.44

  Another feature of the apartment—one that Picasso will come to identify with Marie-Thérèse—is a philodendron plant. The plant would make its first appearance in the Woman in the Garden sculpture (see Chapter 31) and later play a decorative role in The Dream and other Marie-Thérèse paintings of 1931-32. The dried-up remains of this or another philodendron would end up at the rue la Boétie as an assemblage, hung with such oddities as “a brightly colored feather duster, the horny beak of a bird, and a number of… empty cigarette packs. The chance accumulation of so many unrelated objects … was more Picasso than anything one could have put together consciously”45 A small painting46 of the love nest depicts the colorful wallpaper, a treillage pattern usually but not always on a reddish ground. This wallpaper would provide figure paintings and still lifes of 1931-32 with a variety of ornate settings, regardless of where they were executed.47

  While working on his exorcisms of Olga, Picasso did the first drawings (June 17-18, 1929) for the Crucifixion,,48 which he would begin painting in December. And then, all of a sudden, he reverted—mercifully for no more than a day or two—to his commedia dell’arte penchant. Perhaps to placate Olga on their eleventh wedding anniversary (July 12, 1929), he painted two mawkish portraits of Paulo, one as Harlequin, one as Pierrot.49 These images are at such odds with his recent work that they were presumably done as a tongue-in-cheek mea culpa and possibly a sop to his dealer. Rosenberg had been out of favor with Picasso for having declared that he did not want any more culs (assholes) in the paintings he showed and may have needed placating.50 Delighted that his artist had reverted to the Harlequins he favored, Rosenberg persuaded him to sell the version that Olga liked less. Picasso’s failure to hand over the painting before leaving for the summer elicited a further reprimand: “You departed without handing over my Harlequin—you are terrible.” The dealer went on to “hope that Madame Picasso is in excellent health and that the bad memories of last summer have been washed away. Lucky man, in going to Dinard you have blotted Foujita out of the picture.”51