Gianlorenzo Bernini. Apollo and Daphne, 1625. Marble, ht. 243 cm. Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Ovid’s poem recounts how Cupid, to prove his power, shot one of his love-kindling arrows at Apollo and a leaden, love-defying one at Daphne—an act that was bound to end in rape. The passage describing the love-struck god chasing the terrified nymph through the woods was made for Picasso. “The wind laid bare [Daphne’s] limbs/against the nymph it blew/her dress was fluttering/her hair streamed in the breeze/in flight she was more fair.”25 “Exhausted, wayworn, pale and terrified,”/she appealed to her father, Peneus, a river god, to save her from Apollo. Peneus metamorphosed Daphne into a laurel bush. “A heavy numbness grips her limbs; thin bark/begins to gird her tender frame, her hair/is changed to leaves, her arms to boughs; her feet—/ … are now held fast by sluggish roots; the girl’s head vanishes/becoming a treetop. All that is left/of Daphne is her radiance.”26 For want of a laurel bush, Picasso used the philodendron plant that we know from the drawing of the Left Bank apartment. He has played off the upper part of Daphne’s body—the feeling of flight, of wind in the treetops—against the feeling of earthbound stasis below. To establish the figure unequivocally as Daphne, he has welded a small trivet to the figure’s foot: a neat device to demonstrate that her feet have taken root.
I believe that there is also a comical, personal side to Picasso’s predilection for this particular metamorphosis. As the reader of Volume II may remember, Apollinaire had been Picasso’s accomplice in a quasi-Apollonian enlèvement of Irène Lagut, the mistress that Picasso was trying to lure away from Serge Férat.27 Inevitably the enlèvement—more of a game than a rape—had ended in drunken farce. Irène had no difficulty escaping from Picasso’s suburban villa, to which she returned of her own free will the following day. Just as Apollinaire drew on this comical episode for his roman à clef La Femme assise, Picasso drew on it for this sculpture à clef, Woman in the Garden. The evocation of Ovid is particularly appropriate to the commemoration of a poet, who likewise saw sexual passion, violence, and metamorphosis as the raw material of art.
Once again, the Apollinaire committee showed no enthusiasm. Picasso was not offended; he was on the contrary delighted to keep this monument, that allegorized both the living and the dead, for himself. For her part, the widow was pleased that he had stopped forcing his unacceptable maquettes on them. She remained on sufficiently good terms with Picasso to bring an entrepreneurial twenty-six-year-old from Geneva called Albert Skira to meet him. Skira’s looks—tall, slender, fair-haired and blue-eyed as any jeune premier—were a useful adjunct to his infinite ambition. Skira had set his mind on becoming the new Ambroise Vollard and had a proposal to make. The son of a janitor and a notorious battle-ax—said by Cooper to have run a brothel—he had started his career selling paintings out of the back of a truck to rich tourists in Saint-Moritz.28 In the evenings, Skira is also said by Cooper to have worked as a professional dancing partner at the Palace Hotel; and it was there in 1928 that he met a well-heeled, well-born American beauty, who had recently left her playboy husband, Sonny Whitney, to marry a more enterprising playboy, Averell Harriman.
Harriman was about to open his own ski resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, and had come to Saint-Moritz to check out Swiss skiing facilities. This left his wife, Marie, in need of distraction. She liked to dance and drink, so did Skira. Another link: although far from knowledgeable, Marie loved modern art and was in the process of launching her own gallery in New York. Skira promised to help her get things going. Without his advice, she would never have been able to acquire such masterpieces as Picasso’s 1905 Woman with a Fan for her husband (who left it to the National Gallery, Washington), and the even more magnificent 1906 Boy Leading a Horse for their friend William Paley (who left it to MoMA).29
His dream, Skira told Marie Harriman, was to be a publisher of éditions de luxe like Vollard, above all of books illustrated by his hero, Picasso. Such were his powers of persuasion, Marie agreed to back him. Next, Skira had to face up to the more daunting task of persuading Picasso to overlook his total lack of experience and accept a major commission from him. Knowing nothing about him, Picasso had refused to take Skira’s telephone calls, but that did not deter the caller. Somehow or other he persuaded Jacqueline Apollinaire to take him to the rue la Boétie. When Skira explained what he wanted, Picasso was dismissive. “Young man, I am very expensive.”
How expensive? Skira asked, although his pockets were virtually empty. Twenty thousand francs an engraving, Picasso said, hoping to get rid of him. Unfazed, Skira promptly commissioned fifteen plates, without having any idea of what book he wanted Picasso to illustrate. “The difficulty was to find a text suitable to the style of Picasso,” Skira later admitted.30 Picasso told Françoise Gilot that the publisher wanted him to do a book about Napoleon.31 This was surely a joke at Skira’s expense. Let us turn instead to François Chapon—the illustrious former librarian of the Bibliothèque Doucet—who had the true story from Brassaï. In the course of discussing possible books, Picasso recounted a dream he had had about women turning into fish. Pierre Matisse, who was present in the studio, picked up on this. “Why don’t you illustrate the Metamorphoses of Ovid?” he said.32 The suggestion was instantly agreed upon. Picasso was already at work on Daphne; and in 1920, he had done drawings of Nessus and Dejanira.
To raise the requisite money, Skira had to have written proof of Picasso’s collaboration, so he asked the artist to sign a contract. “A contract?” Picasso was appalled. “Young man, do you realize that never in my life have I signed a contract? Neither with Kahnweiler nor Vollard nor anyone else.”33 Skira’s blandishments prevailed. By the end of April, the arrangements had gone far enough for Picasso to order copper plates from his printer, Louis Fort. By early May, the Harrimans came up with the cash. In the hope that the project would never materialize, Picasso refused to take an advance. So persistent was Skira that the artist finished his work in record time.
The Wall Street crash of October 25, 1929, left the modern art market in shambles. Paul Rosenberg, who had just spent a fortune refurbishing his gallery and establishing a racing stable, lapsed back into innate cautiousness. The dealer had planned a major Picasso show for March-April 1930; with this in mind, he had acquired sixteen paintings in the spring of 1929 and a further twelve later in the year. The crash put a stop to this project: Rosenberg substituted a group show for an exclusively Picasso one. Apart from a few piecemeal acquisitions to keep his principal artist happy, he would not make another major purchase of Picasso’s work until 1934.34 Instead, he shifted his focus back to impressionists and post-impressionists.
Kahnweiler, who had reestablished his rapports with Picasso and bought the occasional work from him—in January 1929 he had acquired a large painting for 125,000 francs35—would have gone out of business had he not been financially astute and well connected. One of Kahnweiler’s rich Anglicized uncles, Sir Ludwig Neumann, came to the rescue, his elder brother, Sir Sigmund, the gallery’s original backer, having recently died. In his memoirs Kahnweiler complains of making virtually no sales.36 Day after day, he and his stepdaughter, Zette Leiris, were alone in the gallery; they had fired the office boy. “We saw nobody,” Kahnweiler wrote. “It would have been relatively supportable, had I not had the responsibility of my painters. I did not want to abandon them. Not so much the big ones. Picasso had no need of me. Nobody bought Picasso any more; but Picasso could wait. Braque, too, could wait.”37 Four years later, Kahnweiler would write to his Swiss friend Hermann Rupf that “a Picasso worth 100,000 francs today fetches 20,000-25,000;” also that Rosenberg should henceforth concentrate on nineteenth-century art and “leave living painters completely in peace.”38
Collectors anxious to turn art back into cash would further depress the market. Chief among them was the mysterious German industrialist, Masonic bigwig and art investor G. F. Reber, who had seventy mostly major Picassos—including MoMA’s version of the Three Musicians—and countless works on pa
per in his château at Lausanne. Among other treasures Reber would liquidate at bargain prices were some thirty Cézannes, sixteen Braques, and eighty works by Juan Gris.39 Many of these were snapped up by Douglas Cooper, who would put together the world’s finest private collection of cubist masters.40 Like Reber, who was in some respects his mentor, Cooper—a die-hard elitist—confined his acquisitions to the four masters, Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger, who had constituted Kahnweiler’s pre-1914 stable.
Despite the devaluation of his work, Picasso suffered little from the crash. Thanks to Rosenberg’s successive hikes in his prices over the previous decade, and his banker Max Pellequer’s management of his funds, the artist had amassed a considerable fortune, which enabled him to continue as before. Picasso was about to buy one of the most expensive cars at the Salon de l’Automobile,41 a large, luxurious Hispano-Suiza coupe de ville—“its elegant interior adorned with mirrors and little crystal vases for flowers”42—which, twenty years later, his son Paulo would end up chauffeuring. Picasso, who had experienced greater poverty than most of his painter friends, enjoyed driving around, to Olga’s dismay, in this ostentatious chauf-feured car wearing an old suit the worse for paint stains, cigarette burns, and plaster dust. As he said more than once, “I would like to live like a pauper with lots of money.”43
Picasso’s generosity to friends and fellow artists did not preclude a superstitious respect for the thrifty precepts of his Andalusian forebears. Hidden away in the rue la Boétie was a hoard of gold coins, and in the vaults of the Banque de France, a vast stash of cash. In 1934 or 1935, Picasso would take Zervos to one of these strong rooms to look at some paintings. Zervos told Otero that after the guard left them,
“Picasso said to me, winking his eye like a mischievous schoolboy: ‘I have two more rooms. Do you want to see them?’ I said that I did … and he had another armored room opened for us….
“The second room was even bigger than the first…. To my amazement, there were no paintings in it, but only packages, piled one atop the other to the height, say, of Picasso. Between [them] there was a kind of labyrinthine trench that enabled one to reach the packages piled against the walls. I thought they were drawings, or engravings, or letters….
“… And do you know what there was inside? Bank notes! Yes, sir, bank notes, the largest denomination that existed in France then, which was enormous…. Instead of depositing his money in a bank account earning interest… he preferred having it in bundles wrapped in newspaper … no different from the country bumpkin who keeps his savings sewn into his mattress.”44
Picasso in the front passenger seat of his Hispano-Suiza with Marcel Boudin, his chauffeur, Juan-les-Pins, c. 1930.
Picasso was an obsessive hoarder, but the reverse of a miser. By far the most generous of the major School of Paris artists, he kept a number of his poorer friends, poets especially, in funds with gifts of his work. After 1936, he would secretly provide more support—including a hospital at Toulouse—for Spanish refugees than any other private person. However, Picasso was as paradoxical about money as he was about everything else; his largesse did not always extend to family members and dependents. Control necessitated a tight monetary rein. When one of his Vilató nephews, of whom he was fond, asked him for money, Picasso suggested he become a hustler.
Despite the crash, there was heartening news from New York’s cultural front. In November 1929, a group of rich New York philanthropists—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Conger Goodyear—opened the world’s first museum of modern art. In their wisdom, they appointed Alfred Barr, a young modernist art historian with an eye as sharp as his mind, to be its director. Barr was convinced that Picasso and Matisse were the two greatest artists of their time and did everything he could to propagate this view. Over the years he managed to make the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) the world’s richest repository of their work. In his pioneer exhibitions and writings and the guidance he gave to a new generation of collectors, Barr would do more than anyone on either side of the Atlantic to promote the public’s understanding of Picasso. Picasso thought very highly of Barr but never really warmed to him. He found Barr dry and academic, but the problem may have been Barr’s clever, caustic, outspoken, Irish-Italian wife, Marga.
Barr’s first major project, a Picasso retrospective exhibition in 1931, would come to nothing: the artist and his dealer decided that this should take place in Paris. However, the acquisitions Barr made—sometimes in the teeth of opposition from some of the crustier trustees—and the magnificent exhibitions that he organized and cataloged in 1939, 1946, and 1957 would convert successive generations of the public to Picasso’s work. The blockbuster Matisse-Picasso show at MoMA (2002-2003), which had originated at the Tate Modern in London in 2002 and came to MoMA via the Grand Palais in Paris was in a sense the apotheosis of Alfred Barr, who had died twenty-two years earlier. Sadly, the museum that Barr created, and which owes so much to him, failed to honor him on the occasion of this exhibition. Those of us who have benefited from his wisdom found the galleries redolent with his presence and austere modernist spirit. Without realizing it, everyone who visited this show, whether in London, Paris, or New York, was in Barr’s debt.
Left: Picasso. The Swimmer, 1929. Oil on canvas, 130×162 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Below, left: Picasso. Female Acrobat, January 19, 1930. Oil on canvas, 69×59 cm. Collection Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
Below, right: The Deluge, page from the Apocalypse of Saint-Sever by Stephanus Garsia, eleventh century. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
32
The Bones of Vesalius (1929-30)
Just as it had in the spring, the Left Bank apartment Picasso had taken for Marie-Thérèse continued to provide the setting for paintings that were probably not done there. Some of the larger canvases, which include a view of Sainte-Clotilde, are likely to have been executed back at rue la Boétie. A case in point is La Fenêtre ouverte, dated November 1929.1 This puzzling allegory becomes less puzzling once we realize that it dates from the time of Picasso’s close collaboration with González and that the Left Bank apartment was halfway between the rue la Boétie and the sculptor’s rue Médéah workshop.
In La Fenêtre ouverte, Picasso reverses the Pygmalion process and metamorphoses himself and Marie-Thérèse into conceptual sculptures. The artist likens himself to the semblance of the letter E: two huge feet connected by a single vertical leg,2 pierced by a mammoth arrow. The arrow forms the middle bar of the E and is aimed directly at the humanoid facing him: Marie-Thérèse, who has been no less drastically reduced to a sharp-featured head on a tall armlike neck, clutched by a hand as if it were a beach ball. (“It’s me all right,” Marie-Thérèse told Gasman, when shown an illustration of this painting.)3
Three days after finishing La Fenêtre ouverte, Picasso reverted to using a sketchbook,4 which he had not touched since mid-June. New drawings include a group of têtes à jambes: monstrous heads with radiating limbs like the ones in medieval illuminations. The manuscript that would leave the most decisive mark on Picasso’s work—on the primitive spirit as well as the color and the drawing of the Crucifixion he already had in mind—was the Apocalypse de Saint-Sever, by the eleventh-century Spanish master Stephanus Garsia. Picasso is likely to have seen this Apocalypse in the famed 1926 exhibition of medieval manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale, but its manifestation in his work was prompted by Georges Bataille’s article in the April 1929 issue of Documents. The hold that this manuscript had on Picasso’s vision is confirmed in numerous drawings,5 as well as two large (160 X 130 cm) Swimmer paintings—one vertical, one horizontal—which are as minimalist as some of Miró’s recent work. Stephanus Garsia, the Saint-Sever illuminator, turns out to have exerted as much influence on Picasso—above all, in years to come on his Guernica—as any Spanish master, except perhaps El Greco.
The vertical Swimmer stems from images of agonized flood victims on the Deluge page of the Saint-Sever Apocalypse.67 Picasso’s pale b
lue figure looks as if it might melt into the pale green water, were it not for the contour—taken from Garsia— that defines and articulates it. Picasso has simply added a long thin neck ending in a head shaped like a hand. The horizontal Swimmer belongs in a different, airier element. The scumbled blue ground—similar to the blue heavens in which Miró turns scraps of words into kites—suggests that this reddish figure is going for a swim in the sky. These swimmers are neither male nor female. The pale blue one has faint, breastlike bumps, while the reddish one clutches a dagger. Other oddities: the Swimmer’s upward-pointing nose (bottom right) mutates into an admonitory forefinger, while the hand makes a covert sign against the evil eye. These paintings do not refer to Olga or Marie-Thérèse. They are shamanic and can best be compared in shape,8 size, and flatness to the shamanic robes that the Sioux and Crow Indians made from the hides of buffalo or deer for their medicine rituals—hence their rudimentary quadrupal look.9 Picasso had lengthy discussions about such things with Leiris.
After Christmas 1929, these airborne swimmers gave way to contortionists10— perhaps the consequence of visits to the Cirque Medrano, which were usually reflected in his work. The first (January 18) and most striking of these contortionists is the Acrobat in the Musée Picasso.11 For better or worse, this dramatic white silhouette, the same size and style as the Swimmers, draws so much attention to itself that it reads as a magnificent poster rather than a shamanic exercise. Less imposing are two smaller but livelier contortionists, done the following day12 Like the Swimmers, these paintings fulfill an ambition that had long been on Picasso’s mind: to do a painting that would make sense whichever way it was hung, that would say yes as well as no, and be male as well as female. So successful was he that the vicious, reactionary anti-Semitic critic Camille Mauclair would maintain that Picasso’s only claim to fame was the invention of “the picture without up side or down.” Mauclair’s statement was published in Le Figaro and L’Ami du Peuple as well as in the Hearst papers in the United States. As Cabanne observes, “Mauclair actually was voicing what many felt, and what good students at the Beaux-Arts were being taught daily: Picasso was a hoaxer, his fake reputation, artificially built up by international Jewry, would not last; and the ‘modern’ art dealers were impostors or crooks (mostly Jews, anyway).”13
A Life of Picasso Page 49