A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Picasso’s portrayal of the Virgin Mary as all of a piece with her son on the cross is one of the most perplexing elements in his Crucifixion. That she is depicted as a virago with the vagina-dentata mouth, which we will come to associate with Olga— mother of Christ poised to bite the end off Longinus’s spear—has opened the painting up to many varied interpretations. Thanks perhaps to his Quaker origins, Penrose, the artist’s biographer, is eager to put Picasso in the most positive light. Penrose interprets the Virgin’s snarl as an image of “ungovernable suffering and rage at [the] picador for plunging his lance into the defenseless body of Christ.17I see it otherwise. Insofar as Picasso identified with Christ, he identified his mother with his vindictive concept of the Virgin. She was, after all, called María; she had belonged to a sisterhood devoted to the cult of the Virgin; and, although incapable of understanding her son’s work, she had always had implicit faith in his messianic aspirations. For his part, Picasso’s feelings for the tough, dumpy, down-to-earth woman who was the source of so much of his strength, have always been ambiguous—and they would soon worsen, as we are about to see. A further clue to his maternal resentments is a ribald drawing based on this 1930 Crucifixion done in 1938:18 a malign Madonna all set to bite the umbilical cord that attaches her to her crucified son. Coincidence or not, this most blasphemous of all his drawings dates from the time when Picasso was in the throes of a lawsuit to reclaim some four hundred of his early drawings, which his mother had entrusted to a crook.19

  While readying himself for his Crucifixion, Picasso had evidently taken account of a large, provocative drawing (India ink on fine linen pasted on cardboard) by Salvador Dalí, entitled The Sacred Heart20 This had caused a scandal at Dalí’s November-December 1929 show. Unlike Dalí’s usually meticulous paintings, this drawing is crass and crude: a rough outline of the Virgin Mary with the emblem of the Sacred Heart on her breast, over which Dalí had scrawled “I spit for pleasure on the portrait of my mother.” For this desecration the artist’s father disowned and disinherited him. Dalí, who in fact had adored his mother, whose death, when he was sixteen, had been the greatest blow of his life, blamed his blasphemous attack on “the dictates of his subconscious.”21 This cop-out did not delude anyone. The drawing was a shock tactic, designed to enhance his notoriety and curry favor with the surrealists in their excoriation of Church, fatherland, and family. Dalí played to the public; Picasso to the demons within him.

  Picasso’s treatment of the Magdalen raises problems that are totally different from his treatment of the Virgin—problems that the viewer is left to ponder rather than solve. Most writers agree that the disembodied arms on the right, stretched up in a general gesture of grief, are the Magdalen’s, but no one is sure which head and torso they belong to. A series of extraordinary drawings reveal that Picasso originally envisaged the Magdalen as a contortionist—one who could bend her head so far backward that her face appears to the viewer upside down; as a result her inverted nose and eyes appear to hang down her back like a disembodied penis and testicles. Surprisingly, this unforgettable image is missing from the painting.

  Of the many who have struggled to identify and interpret Picasso’s Magdalen, only Ruth Kaufmann, author of a pioneer study of the Crucifixion, and Lydia Gasman have cast much light on it.22 Both of them agree that the bony Versalian head, right center, belongs to her. She inclines her head penitently downward—the reverse of the shameless backward flip she makes in some of the drawings—the better to kiss Christ’s robe as she had once kissed his feet. Appropriately, her head resembles a skull, the Magdalen’s traditional emblem. As for the small, bifurcated head on a yellow neck squashed between the heads of the Virgin and the Magdalen, this corresponds to an earlier painting of Marie-Thérèse.23 Since three Marys were traditionally in attendance at the Crucifixion, Picasso might well have wanted to include Marie-Thérèse as the third one.

  The possibility of Marie-Thérèse’s presence in this Crucifixion raises a question as to whether this panel was intended as a Christmas present for her, as Tzara (courtesy of the unreliable MacGregor-Hastie) is said to have suggested. MacGregor-Hastie goes on to claim that Marie-Thérèse had been raised a Catholic and, far from allowing her faith to lapse, had remained, privately, a fervent believer.

  [This] showed itself in an insistence on going to Mass on all holy days of obligation, and during Lent, 1930, in a spasm of sexual self-denial. Her lover was furious, but unable to change her mind, and painted a startling and angry Crucifixion during his enforced abstinence…. Marie-Thérèse was always very pleased with and proud of this painting, not only because a work of religious inspiration seldom got beyond the drawing stage with Picasso, but also because she said it showed his soul could be reached. She did not, however, try to reach it in that way again.24

  As usual with MacGregor-Hastie, the dates do not work—Lent started late that year: March 5, a month after the Crucifixion was finished—but it is conceivable that Picasso would have wanted to put Marie-Thérèse’s faith, or the lack of it, to the test in his work. It could have given a sacrilegious charge to their lovemaking.

  The inclusion of Mithra—god of light and wisdom—in his Crucifixion suggests that Picasso probably had Mithra as much as Christ in mind when he identified with God. Fundamental to Mithraism was the dualistic struggle between good and evil, in which the sun god vanquishes the powers of darkness, just as day vanquishes night. But Mithra’s identification with the bull, which his followers worshipped as the source of all that is good on earth, is primarily what attracted Picasso to this cult.25 Years later, when the artist’s mistress Geneviève Laporte reproached him for enjoying bullfights, he invoked Mithraism as a rationale. Bullfighting, he said, was the last manifestation of this great faith and he had a duty to maintain it. Shy at first, Picasso warmed to his subject and let Geneviève in on the secret of his Mithraism and other croyances mystérieuses. She was “astounded.”26

  Left: Picasso. Head of Marie-Thérèse, 1929. Oil on panel, 64×47 cm. Private collection. Right: Picasso. Detail of Crucifixion with Christ and the Virgin, 1930. Oil on plywood. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Always avid for knowledge of such things, Picasso knew about the Mithraic cult of the sun and the moon, that it had been a principal religion of the Roman Empire, and had resisted the rise of Christianity until the third century. He also knew something about the survival of many of its tenets in medieval iconography, also that Christ’s birthday fell on more or less the same day as Mithra’s (December 21)—the rebirth of the sun. That Picasso was preparing to execute his Crucifixion—maybe had even started work on it—over Christmas is no coincidence.

  Picasso’s Mithraism of the 1930s27 was supposedly sparked by Bataille’s brief, sensational essay, “Le Soleil pourri.” This first appeared in a special Picasso issue of Documents. Although this journal did not come out until April 1930, two months after Picasso’s Mithraic Crucifixion was finished, Leiris was Bataille’s coeditor and would certainly have gone over the contents of this issue with the artist it honored. Since Mithraism was much discussed in the artist’s prewar circle, it may well have been Picasso’s work that triggered Bataille’s interest in it, to judge by Bataille’s invocation in his final sentence of Picasso as the only artist capable of facing up to the blinding flash of the Mithraic sun.28

  Rather more basic to our understanding of the Crucifixion is the transformation from a predominantly Christian icon into a partly Mithraic one. Pentiments suggest that this happened in the course of execution, when Picasso changed the centurion’s golden shield (top right in the drawing) into Mithra the sun god. To distinguish the sun god from an otherwise incoherent jumble of limbs and heads, Picasso has given him two little feet. However, he remains an anomaly with his scrotum-shaped visage, which may or may not refer to the testicles of the Mithraic bull.29

  Bataille was one of the most fascinating and alarming writers of his time—vastly superior to most of the surrealists, which may explain why Breton threw him out
. Bataille was also a great admirer of Picasso. They shared many obsessions, not least for the works of the Marquis de Sade; they also shared a great friend in Leiris. And yet the phenomenal artist did not take to the phenomenal writer. Nothing seems to have come between them, but I can only imagine that Picasso had a superstitious fear of Bataille. Despite his priestly appearance and style, Bataille was committed— supposedly in intellectual rather than physical ways—to extreme forms of sadism, Satanism, coprophilia, and bestiality. I believe that he had positioned himself too close for comfort to Picasso’s archenemy, Death. Picasso’s superstitious nature and fear of the power of evil should never be underestimated.

  Dora Maar, who had been Bataille’s mistress before she became Picasso’s, was inclined to think along these lines. Apropos the story Bataille liked to tell about himself, how after his mother’s death he went at night in his pajamas to the bedroom where she had been laid out and, racked with sobs and trembling with fear and sexual excitement, had masturbated.30 Dora thought it greatly exaggerated and proceeded to recount how, at the height of World War II, the curfew marooned Picasso and her in the apartment that the Leirises shared with the Kahnweilers. Since the Kahnweilers spent the war in hiding in the Midi, Picasso rightly assumed that he and Dora would be invited to sleep in their room. Picasso could not wait, Dora said, to set about desecrating his dealer’s marriage bed.31

  A drawing for the figures of Christ, the Virgin, and the Magdalen, dated the following December,32 suggests that Picasso thought of doing a second, more expanded Crucifixion, incorporating the backward-bending Magdalen in it. Nothing came of this. Two years later, however, after stopping at Colmar to see Mathias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece for the first time, he would return to the theme.

  34

  L Affaire Picasso

  Early in May 1930, Picasso was horrified to discover that a number of early works he had left in the family’s Barcelona apartment for safekeeping had been stolen and were being offered for sale on the Paris market.1 After realizing the extent of the theft—391 drawings and 10 paintings—he brought a lawsuit against the perpetrators. In the fight to have this stash of juvenilia returned to him, Picasso behaved with the same outraged tenacity he had manifested when he had tried desperately to repossess the cubist works confiscated by the Custodian of Enemy Property. This time, the fight to get his early work back would last eight years. It would stir up a storm of animosity and set Picasso against his mother and his sister’s family in Barcelona.

  In a letter to the State Prosecutor (dated May 9, 1930) stating his case, Picasso described how on March 20, his elderly mother had been alone in the family apartment at no. 7, Paseo de Colón,2 when she received a visit from two men—a Catalan rogue called Miguel Calvet and a nameless “American.” They were great friends of her son’s, they said, and were writing a study on his early work and needed material for illustrations. Doña María told them that none of the important early paintings on the walls or the hundreds of early drawings tucked away in closets were available. However, there was an old basket full of stuff in the attic, which she could let them have. “Taking advantage of my mother’s great age and credulity,”3 Picasso’s letter continues, “they persuaded her to entrust them with all my work … and handed over 1,500 pesetas by way of a receipt.”4

  Calvet was a small-time “runner,” who claimed to be an art dealer, but “had no apparent resources.” The “American” turned out to be Joan Merli: a Catalan art critic and publisher of a minor avant-garde magazine, who had become acquainted with Picasso in Paris and would later write the first book to chart his early years in Barcelona.5 Merli was supposedly honest; he claimed to have been helping out a friend rather than aiding and abetting a thief and was never accused of any wrongdoing. Nevertheless, Picasso would always regard Merli as a scoundrel. Sabartès told Penrose that Merli was very ma I vu by Picasso, and that his account of the artist’s early years was exceedingly inaccurate.

  After handing Doña María 1,500 pesetas and persuading her to sign a document that she failed to realize was a bill of sale, Calvet took the drawings to Paris and showed them to a dealer called Alice Manteau, who was initially tempted to buy them. This unscrupulous woman, who would be indicted after World War II for dealing in looted paintings,67 lost interest after Picasso refused to see her, let alone sign the drawings. Signatures were, of course, crucial. Unsigned, these untypical, unpublished drawings were virtually unsaleable. Next, Calvet turned to another expatriate Catalan friend of Picasso’s, Josep Llorens Artigas: a potter (known in France as Artigas) who would subsequently make a name for himself as Miró’s ceramist. Calvet promised Artigas 20,000 francs and two of the drawings if he persuaded Picasso to sign the rest. Artigas’s courage apparently failed him. Instead of showing Picasso the drawings, he took Calvet to see a dealer, the widow of the Polish painter Eugene Zak, whose work had once been mentioned unfavorably by Apollinaire.8 The Zaks had met Picasso at Avignon in 1914, presumably through his lover, Eva Gouel, who had formerly been the mistress of their Polish friend Louis Marcoussis. After her husband’s death, Edwige Zak had opened a small Left Bank gallery on the rue de l’Abbaye that dealt in minor works by major School of Paris artists. She needed stock and was delighted to handle this huge, potentially valuable consignment.

  Picasso. The Artist’s Mother (Doña María), Barcelona, 1896. Pastel on paper, 49.8×39 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona.

  After twenty-seven years “in a filthy old basket,” which Calvet said was verminous, the drawings needed to be cleaned up before being signed and framed and offered for sale. To help with this, Madame Zak consulted a friend: a former rope dancer turned painter called Dietz Edzard. Edzard’s Laurencinesque soubrettes, adorned in “laces, feather boas, ruffles, shimmering silks,”9 sold well enough for him to start “collecting”—some might say dealing. Edzard proceeded to acquire the entire collection of Picassos for 220,000 francs. Madame Zak agreed to sell them off for a 10 percent commission. Meanwhile, Edzard set about “restoring” the drawings. This procedure, unmentioned in legal reports, involved cutting up the sheets with multiple studies into more saleable units.10

  Madame Zak wasted no time making sales. Georges Bernheim, a serious dealer in modern art, not to be confused with the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune brothers, paid her 220,000 francs for a group including a Blue period view of Barcelona at night,11 two more paintings or gouaches, and seventeen drawings. When Bernheim sent his son round to the rue la Boétie to have these works signed, Picasso duly did so, not realizing that they came from the cache in his mother’s apartment. So many early works from Barcelona had been surfacing in Paris that he was having difficulty keeping track of their origins. Once the works were signed, they could be marketed. Bernheim asked René Gimpel for 200,000 francs for the Blue-period painting. Madame Zak offered items to other Paris dealers: to Ernest Brummer and, supposedly, Pierre Loeb,12 as well as the German Georg Caspari of Munich, a violinist turned art dealer, who specialized in Blue period Picassos. Caspari was not interested—much too expensive, too early, and too disparate to be of more than iconographical appeal: “they would harm [Picasso’s] reputation; one cannot foresee the talent to come.”13 Caspari should have kept to his fiddle. Besides being a phenomenal achievement for an adult, let alone an adolescent, these drawings are of absorbing interest to any student of Picasso’s graphic virtuosity.

  Encouraged by Picasso’s readiness to sign the works Bernheim had purchased, Madame Zak decided to exhibit 191 of them in her gallery. She invited Picasso to take a look before her show opened in the hope that he would sign them.14 According to Madame Zak, Picasso said he was too ému—upset—at seeing his earliest drawings again after so many years to sign them that very day, but he promised to return the following day with his wife to do so. He was indeed ému, not by sentiment, but by sheer rage that his mother, supposedly the keeper of his flame, should have handed so much of his early work over to a con man. Her folly had robbed him of control over his work—what should or
should not be preserved. There was also the possibility that some of the drawings might be partly or wholly the work of his father or sister15 or of fellow students at La Llotja.

  On realizing the magnitude of the theft, Picasso cabled his mother in Barcelona for an explanation. Had she gone mad? he asked Zervos. Doña María replied with an abject apology and a story that raised a lot more questions. Picasso instructed his lawyers—Maîtres Henry-Robert and Bacqué de Sariac—to bring a suit against Cal-vet, Madame Zak, and others as yet unnamed. He was damned if he was going to be done out of an intrinsic part of his cherished oeuvre—his buttress against oblivion and death.

  On May 10, accompanied by his lawyers and plainclothes detectives from the Sûreté as well as police, Picasso went from dealer to dealer to supervise the seizure of his drawings. Gimpel—brother-in-law of Lord Duveen, the world’s most celebrated dealer of the day—noted in his diary, “The dealers who have helped build [Picasso’s] reputation and fortune are furious.”1617 When one of them said so to his face, Picasso left the man’s gallery speechless with rage.18 What about the far greater fortunes that he had made for them? What about the poverty, hunger, and hardship he had endured during his early years in Paris at the hands of swindling dealers, who had left him with a chronic loathing of the art trade (Kahnweiler, Vollard, Flechtheim, and Level excepted).19 And now these predators were at it again: using his mother to defraud him of the precious early works he had kept back out of sentiment and pride for himself.