A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  In another letter, Rosenberg, who was spending the summer in his villa at Deauville, announced that he had taken up racing. He had bought ten racehorses, which he proposed to name after his artists—“excellent publicity for your products,” he was stupid enough to tell Picasso.52 This new venture, doubtless inspired by his partner, Georges Wildenstein—owner of a famously profitable racing stable— would not survive the Wall Street crash in October, or Rosenberg’s discovery that Wildenstein had been having a long affair with his wife, Margot. That this conventional mère de famille preferred the loathsome Wildenstein to her far more scrupulous husband is not altogether surprising: Rosenberg was a workaholic, who lived above the shop and often liked to return to his office after dinner; whereas Wilden-stein took Margot racing and nightclubbing and gave her expensive presents. After the dust settled, the wives dutifully resumed marital life with their respective husbands. Recently a Cartier minaudière surfaced among the late Madame Rosenberg’s effects with a wafer-thin ivory dance card in a secret compartment. On it was a caricature of Wildenstein—not by Picasso, as the heirs had hoped—but by Wildenstein himself. After the affair came to light in 1932, Rosenberg and Wildenstein ended their partnership53 and divided up the Picassos and other works they co-owned. Rosenberg absorbed his share into stock. Wildenstein stashed his away; decades would go by before any of them came on the market.

  Sometime in June 1929, just before le tout Paris departed for the summer, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, who had decided to back avant-garde movies, attended a preview of the Buñuel-Dalí film Un Chien andalou at the Ursuline studios. The program also included Les Mystères du Château du Dé, a film that the Noailles had paid Man Ray to make in their new villa at Hyères. Man Ray’s lackluster film was a flop—he would henceforth abandon movies—but Buñuel’s was an instant success. Buñuel had been a nervous wreck at the preview. “I sat behind the screen with a gramophone and during the projection alternated Argentine tangos with Tristan and Isolde. I had filled my pockets with stones to throw at the public [presumably the surrealists] if they caused a disturbance.”54 Far from remonstrating, the surrealists hailed the film as a masterpiece. The Noailles were thrilled and arranged a preview of their own. They commissioned a second movie from Buñuel, the sacrilegious Id Age d’or. When shown in 1931, it would result in Charles de Noailles having to resign from the Jockey Club amid threats of his excommunication from the Church and the Beaumonts’ guest list. They also backed their great friend Cocteau’s masterpiece, Le Sang d’un poète.

  The Noailles’ party for Un Chien andalou took place on July 3, in what the press described as their “private cinema”: actually, their mirrored ballroom with its great frescoed ceiling. An up-to-date projection room equipped for sound had been concealed behind the rococo paneling from a palazzo in Palermo. Guests included Cocteau, Poulenc, the Beaumonts, the Jean Hugos—who were about to separate because of Valentine’s affair with Breton—and assorted members of the gratin. Marxist surrealists railed against the splendor; nevertheless, they continued to avail themselves of the Noailles’ patronage.55

  Since un chien andalou is derogatory French slang for Andalusians such as himself, Picasso, who had not attended the Ursuline preview, would have been anxious to see it. He was not the target of Buñuel and Dalí’s disturbing film, whose opening shot of a razor slicing into an eyeball has become one of the most memorable in cinematic history. The target was the already celebrated Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who had been Dalí’s boyfriend. Now that Dalí was living with Gala, he needed to distance himself from his ex-lover; and Buñuel was not averse to stirring up homophobic mischief.56 Picasso liked the Spanishness of the film but he and Buñuel would never derive much pleasure from each other’s company.

  The Noailles’ party spelled the end of Picasso’s époque des duchesses. Out of habit and bella figura, he and Olga would continue to appear in a box at opening nights, but ever less frequently. Picasso even managed to keep Cocteau at a distance. Friends, among them the Beaumonts, complained that the artist had gone into hiding. Picasso’s disappearance from the social scene is recorded by Count Harry Kessler, who was told over tea by the Beaumonts that

  they have not seen him for a year, although they are his closest friends. Whenever they invite him, he accepts, but ten minutes before they are to sit down for the meal a message arrives that his children [sic] have scarlet fever, his wife is indisposed, or something of the sort. He does not answer letters on principle, and telephone callers are informed that he is not at home. All his friends have had the same experience. Nobody knows what he is up to.57

  Marie-Thérèse is what he was up to. Picasso had no intention of bringing her into the Beaumonts’ lives. Anyway, he had no time to spare from his experimental new sculptures. In search of further guidance, he had recently arranged—presumably through their mutual friend González—to visit Brancusi’s studio, a privilege the sculptor had been unwilling to extend. Brancusi’s fear proved to be justified. Picasso, who had already derived some of the inspiration for his femmes-phallus from Princess X, would exploit even more of Brancusi’s ideas for his 1931 sculptures.

  Picasso at the Galeries Georges Petit retrospective with Woman in the Garden, 1932. Painted, welded metal. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  31

  Woman in the Garden (1929)

  On August 2, 1929, Le Journal de Dinard et de la Côte Eméraude announced that the Picassos had returned to Dinard and installed themselves at the Hôtel Le Gallic. They stayed there a couple of weeks while looking for a villa; they finally settled for the Villa Bel-Event, a biggish gabled house on a hill facing the sea. Rosenberg’s brother-in-law, the silver dealer Yvon Helft, had also taken a house at Dinard for his wife and two sons, one of them the same age as Paulo. Picasso would leave the two families at play and join up with Marie-Thérèse, who was once again lodged in the neighborhood. This year, both her sisters joined her for part of the time.1 Helft sent news of the Picassos to Rosenberg, who reported back to Picasso:

  I have heard that [Olga] is younger and prettier than ever, that she is fit as a fiddle and that she has taken part in all kinds of sporting activities even boule. I am so happy for her and that her troubles must now seem so far away. … It appears that you take such pleasure in fishing that you are going to appear before the Eternal Father as a pêcheur [the word means “sinner” as well as “fisherman”]. But watch out. He may not take a good view of your massacre of the human race.2

  Around August 15, Picasso took his family on a trip to Quimper on the south coast of Brittany. Max Jacob was there for the summer, staying with his family in the house they ran as an antiques shop.3 Olga, who had been responsible for cutting Max out of Picasso’s life, was obliged to be friendly. Max had suffered horribly from this rejection. Now he was proud to show off his celebrated friend, not to mention the elegant wife and child and the white-gloved chauffeur at the wheel of the Pan-hard, to his mother, brother Gaston, and sister Delphine.4 Picasso duly photographed them. They spent at least one night in a local hotel. Max complained to André Level that Picasso had liked only his “vieille mère” and the “vieilles pierres”— the menhirs and dolmens which had attracted Picasso to this area of prehistoric megaliths in the first place.5

  An hour’s drive southeast from Quimper, Carnac is famous for its astonishing Iron Age crop of some five thousand menhirs (“long stones” in Breton), numerous dolmens (primitive altars of large flat stones supported on granite blocks), and burial mounds. The most spectacular site consists of rows of megaliths, known as the Soldiers of Saint-Cornély. According to legend, an army of pagan invaders had been stopped in their tracks by a miracle-working saint, who turned them to stone. According to archaeologists, the megaliths were Druidic or Mithraic tombstones. Jacob, who was versed in myth and mysticism, had urged Picasso to see these vieilles pierres. In ancient times, bonfires had been lit around them on Midsummer’s Eve and large copper bowls struck with rattan canes until they resonated with �
��une curieuse et fort pénétrante sonorite”—the voices of the dead.6 It would be a year or two before these stones manifested themselves in Picasso’s imagery,7 but “the voices of the dead” would do so all too soon.

  Back in Dinard, Picasso received the news that shortly after he had left him Max Jacob had fractured his left leg and dislocated his shoulder in a motor accident. Pierre Colle, the young dealer who showed the drawings that kept Max solvent, had had a blowout while driving him home after a visit to Saint-Malo and crashed into a tree. The injuries would keep the poet in a cast for two and a half months. Two days later (August 21), Picasso received far graver news: a telegram from Misia stating that Diaghilev had died in Venice.8

  Exhausted and discouraged after his company’s disappointing London season, Diaghilev had undertaken a strenuous musical tour of Germany with his new Russian protégé, a very handsome, very costly seventeen-year-old musician called Igor Markevich. Igor’s next protector, Marie-Laure de Noailles, spent so much money on him that her trustees took over control of her fortune. The trip had left the diabetic Diaghilev exhausted. To recover, he had retired to Venice, to the Grand Hôtel des Bains de Mer on the Lido, where his lover, Lifar, and secretary, Kochno, who loathed each other, could take care of him. It was too late. A lifetime of overindulgence in very rich food and sugary desserts had done him in and within days he was on the brink of death. On receiving a telegram, “Am sick, come quickly,” Misia Sert and Chanel, who were cruising the Adriatic on the Duke of Westminster’s yacht, raced back to Venice. Misia sent for doctors—bungling German ones she said—as well as an English nurse and, just in time, a priest to give the dying man the last rites.

  As the nurse closed Diaghilev’s eyes in death, Kochno, who had been kneeling on one side of the bed, hurled himself in a rage on Lifar, who had been kneeling on the other side—“like two mad dogs fighting over the body of their master.”9 Misia and the nurse had trouble separating the biting, snarling rivals so that the body could be laid out. Besides Misia, who made all the arrangements, and Chanel, who paid for them, only Lifar and Kochno attended the funeral on the Isola de San Michele. Once again, the Russian rivals gave way to exhibitionistic excess, crawling on their knees to the gravesite. “Stop that clowning,” Chanel snapped, as Lifar tried to throw himself into the muddy hole.

  For the ailing Olga, who had come to regard Diaghilev in loco parentis, his death was a devastating blow. It was also a great blow for Picasso, who had enjoyed making fun of the impresario’s absurdly grand manner, but admired him for his courageous support of modernist artists and composers. Diaghilev’s fellow White Russians would mostly deplore his use of Soviet designers and theater directors. Years later, when helping Cooper with his Picasso Theatre book, I was surprised at the relish Picasso took in reliving backstage dramas and farces—Diaghilev’s jealous rages, Misia’s betrayals, Cocteau’s prima donna tantrums—not to mention the décors that Picasso characterized sardonically as “my divertissements” Picasso readily admitted that his décors for Diaghilev had done more to disseminate his fame internationally than Rosenberg’s Paris shows.

  Despite their bitter bust-up, Massine claimed to “have felt [Diaghilev’s] loss more than anybody.”10 Henceforth the choreographer would have a total change of heart about their past. As his biographer points out, Massine’s “recollections of Diaghilev would gradually shift from memory to myth.”11 From being an antagonist, Massine “eventually became his most fervent apostle.” Shortly after Diaghilev’s death, Massine tried to persuade Beaumont to step into the dead man’s boots: “we would create masterpieces—Picasso will help us. … I am full of enthusiasm…. We will take another direction—there are so many beautiful things to be done—discuss all of this with Picasso.”12 Beaumont was not interested. His one attempt at being an impresario—the Soirées de Paris, which gave birth to Mercure in 1924—had proved far too costly. Nor was Picasso tempted; he wanted no further truck with Olga’s Russian associates. Lifar also approached him. Would he execute a monument to Diaghilev? Picasso promised to do so but, as Lifar put it, he “never found the inspiration.”13 A chic Greek architect, Rodocanachi, took over the job.

  This summer’s harvest of work would be less abundant than that of previous Dinard summers, but the one sketchbook Picasso filled—inscribed on the cover: Villa Bel-Event, August 16, 192914—includes a number of ingenious variations on the theme of bifurcated heads: a genre which Carla Gottlieb compares to an eighteenth-century painting, The Living andDeadLady, which belonged to Picasso’s friend Ramón Gómez de la Serna.15 The rooms of Villa Bel-Event seem to have been unsuited to work on a large scale. Canvases—mostly heads of Marie-Thérèse but sometimes of Olga—are small. Although entitled The Kiss,16 they portray a single face in double profile, as if to incorporate his wife and mistress into a single physiognomy. Before leaving Dinard, Picasso did a very small painting of a very large, recumbent Marie-Thérèse—visualized, as it were, from the viewpoint of a beach towel. He also took a sexy photograph of her holding a large rubber ball, which inspired a little painting of her as stiff and long-armed as a gasoline pump. Shortly before returning to Paris at the end of September, Olga received a letter addressed to her from Jacqueline Apollinaire but intended for her husband—not the most tactful way of nudging him into modifying his stance on the Apollinaire monument.

  Someone with whom you recently discussed the monument to Guillaume asserts that you said that your project was finished and ready to be executed, but that I had begged you to abandon this idea for a monument.

  Picasso. The Kiss, August 25, 1929. Oil on canvas, 22×14 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  I can only imagine there has been a misunderstanding, for you are surely aware of my feeling that a monument, whose excessive modernity might cause a scandal, would never be acceptable. If it is true that you have come up with a project that is easy-on-the-eye and ready to be executed, be so good as to write me about it and I will see that it is brought to the attention of Billy or Salmon to the satisfaction of all the friends.17

  The letter suggests that Picasso had had little contact with the committee for a year or so, and that the malentendu of which she speaks may have reflected differences between traditionalists like Billy and herself and the pseudo-modernist, Salmon, who wanted to worm his way back into Picasso’s favor. At all events, Jacqueline’s letter had little effect. Picasso simply went ahead with a private plan to honor the poet his way with yet another monument, once again inspired by Marie-Thérèse.

  By now the Apollinaire commission had ceased to be a primary factor in Picasso’s sculptural development, other than constituting a pretext for experimenting with new techniques and new metamorphic concepts. As usual, the artist did countless preparatory drawings, but, as González says:

  [He could] never find the time to realize any of his projects. On the rare occasions when he does decide to, he always chooses to work on the most recent one. This is because he is such an anxious man, always wanting to surpass himself, that he ends up just filling more folios in his sketchbooks…. despite his thousands of sketches, he didn’t take a single one on the morning he set to work at the forge. His hammer was all he needed to try and build his monument to Apollinaire. He worked at it over a period of several long months, and he completed it. Often he would say, “I feel as happy again now as I did in 1912.”18

  Left: Marie-Thérèse Walter at Dinard, 1929. Photograph taken by Picasso. Musée Picasso,

  Paris.

  Right: Picasso. Bather with Beach Ball, 1929. Oil on canvas, 21.9×14 cm. Musée Picasso,

  Paris.

  Like the wire constructions, the new welded piece, Woman in the Garden,19 derives from the 1928 images of Marie-Thérèse, hair flying in the breeze, playing ball on the Dinard beach. Cowling has interpreted this figure as a “screaming woman … a desperately grieving Magdalen.”20 I agree with González that it is a joyous and celebratory piece—one made with “much love and tenderness.”21 Far from commemorating Christianity’s sa
intly sinner, Woman in the Garden is intrinsically pagan. To understand what it stands for, we need to realize that the Latin poet Ovid had begun to exert a far more radical influence on Picasso’s choice of theme and imagery than any contemporary poet.

  My soul would sing of metamorphoses.

  But since, o gods, you were the source of these

  bodies becoming other bodies, breathe

  your breath into my book of changes.22

  This is how Ovid begins the eternally radiant fifteen-book sequence of his Metamorphoses. Picasso was especially drawn to the second poem of the first book, the story of Apollo’s first love, the mountain nymph Daphne, who was a priestess of Mother Earth. This provided him with the subject for the most complex of his welded sculptures, the Woman in the Garden.23 The desire to do a sculpture of Daphne in the throes of metamorphosis dated back to Picasso’s visit to Rome in 1917. Picasso had been fascinated by Bernini’s Ovid-inspired sculpture of Daphne turning into a tree, when he saw it in the Villa Borghese.24 And, indeed, so striking are the parallels with Bernini, one is tempted to see Picasso’s sculpture as a reprise of the baroque as well as a radical rethinking of classicism.