Ex. Caricature of Picasso from L’Algérienne, May 21, 1930. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Predictably, that perennial failure, Léonce Rosenberg, who had briefly (1915 – 16) been his dealer, came out against Picasso. Unlike his brother Paul, Léonce was supposedly more interested in modernism than money, but this did not stop him imputing his dealerish values to Picasso’s conduct. In reply to a question about the case from Picabia, Léonce claimed that Picasso had brought a lawsuit out of fear that the emergence of so much early work would flood the market and endanger the very high prices that his current work was fetching.20 Sour grapes. Léonce resented Picasso for defecting to his brother Paul, but Picasso resented Léonce for his inept handling of the Kahnweiler sales. Since they had formerly been on friendly terms, as numerous letters in the Picasso archives attest, Léonce should have known that all Picasso wanted was his work back. Their financial worth was not an issue. Picabia’s reply to Léonce’s letter—“Like his work, Picasso lacks sincerity”21—suggests there had been a falling-out. Had Picabia discovered that Picasso gave his name as Picabia when discreditable adventures necessitated a pseudonym?
Picasso’s raid on the galleries resulted in the recovery of three-quarters of the works Calvet had extorted from his mother. Madame Zak had to forfeit the 191 items she was about to exhibit; Edzard had to hand over 150 more, which he had stashed in his apartment, and Georges Bernheim relinquished most, but not all, of the works he had purchased, as did Brummer.22 Successive countersuits on the part of Calvet, Madame Zak, and Edzard would keep the case going. In 1938, some 350 drawings would be returned to him.23
Another fifty or so works apparently stuck to the hands of Calvet and his associates; and these would all too soon trickle into the market.24 Rafael Padilla, the painter who had allowed Picasso to use his Barcelona studio in 1917, informed him (July 12, 1930) that he had recently been offered a group of juvenilia: a Blue period seated nude; a gouache of a man on a bench with a mother and child; a tiny pastel of a bullfight, and two other little paintings. The asking price was 80,000 francs—“not pesetas,” Padilla added.25 They were presumably part of the hoard that the French police had been unable to lay their hands on.
News of the raids on the galleries triggered headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. Since the persons involved were a polyglot bunch, Spanish, Polish, and German newspapers were just as interested in the affair as French ones. The scandal soon came to be known as I’affaire Picasso. Philistine journalists sided against Picasso and attacked him for going to law to retrieve his own work. The Hamburg Fremden-blatt stated that the affair was nothing but a “publicity stunt by Picasso.”26 L’Oeil de Paris took a different line: it accused Picasso of being “a strategist,” of wanting to withdraw his early works from circulation because they revealed how indebted he was to French artists—Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Forain. “When I embarked on my career,” Picasso retorted, “I was not influenced by this or that master, but by all of them.”27 Picasso supposedly gave a very different reply to a similar accusation: “When I did those drawings, I did not yet know about [these artists].”28 True, he enjoyed giving contradictory answers to the same question; however, the only source for this quote is Madame Zak.
Picasso overcame his dread of the press sufficiently to give a number of interviews, notably to Merry Bromberger of Le Matin, an editor he had reason to trust. “These drawings,” Picasso told Bromberger, “are for me of unestimable value. They are childhood souvenirs … and I suffer when I see them up for sale. I don’t know if they have great artistic value, but they constitute the origins of my work and I want to have them back in my possession.” And he went on to specify the drawings that meant most to him: one of his “father’s hand, which I made [him] hold still for an hour so that I could draw it; [another of] my little sister at her dressing table; and of my mother’s face bent over her needlework…. These are my family’s bottom drawer.” “How well I understand,” Picasso concluded, “why papas and mamas tell their children to stop scribbling on bits of paper. The brats don’t realize the difficulties this will create in the future.”29
Eager as ever to believe the worst about Picasso, the gutter press excoriated him for failing to give his old mother enough money to live on. Replying to this accusation, he told L’Intransigeant that “she has need of nothing … every month I give her enough to live comfortably on.”30 Le Matin even published a letter from Doña María: “how could I possibly have wanted to harm the person I love the most and to whom I owe the most: above all to have harmed a son, who is so different from other sons, who is my support and to whom I owe everything.”31 The wording of Picasso’s authorized statement to Le Petit Parisien is inadvertently revealing: “Picasso is not at all cross with his mother, to whom he gives all possible support. The sale—or more accurately, the loan—does not constitute a betrayal but rather an imprudence.”32 A betrayal? Only Picasso used this word. For all his disavowals to the press, this is evidently what he thought of his mother’s behavior. According to family members, he would never really forgive her,33 nor would he forgive his sister or her neurologist husband, Dr. Juan Bautista Vilató Gómez, fond as he would become of their two painter sons.
Another innocent victim of I’affaire would be Artigas. He was the only person involved in the case to have been a friend of Picasso’s, and he was heartbroken at having unwittingly incurred his wrath. He scrupulously returned the two drawings Calvet had given him for being a go-between, but this did not repair their friendship; regrettably, because Artigas was an immensely gifted technical innovator, and he might have ended up working wonders for Picasso instead of for Miró. Artigas would never have exploited Picasso’s name as his Vallauris potters, the Ramiés family, did by swamping the market with mass-produced multiples.
Before retreating to Barcelona, Calvet defended himself against Picasso’s charges in yet more interviews and a public letter.34 He reiterated that his acquisition of “the filthy old basket” had been an act of mercy—a friend had asked him to rescue Picasso’s mother from the misère into which her son had let her sink—and that his altruism, far from being profitable, was going to lose him a lot of money. To believe Calvet, as many journalists did, most of the stuff was worthless; Picasso’s early drawings were supposedly so unappreciated that they sold for no more than twenty-five to fifty francs, even when framed as well as signed. Calvet did not let on that many of the “early Picassos” that surfaced in Barcelona—and continue to do so to this day— were fakes, often the handiwork of fellow students, who had added a signature to one of their own drawings in the hope of cashing in on the master’s prices. To look less like a villain who preyed on elderly widows, Calvet embroiled the widow’s daughter and son-in-law in the transaction by stating that Dr. Vilató had carried the basket of drawings to the closing. This would have further irritated Picasso, as would Calvet’s blatant lie that the artist “had been kept informed about all the negotiations.” Calvet’s admission that Doña María repeatedly said, “He will find out about it and he won’t be happy,” disproves his own story.
Meanwhile, Madame Zak had taken care to protect her interests. No fool, she had chosen one of the younger stars in the French legal firmament, Maître Maurice Garçon, to represent her. Garçon photographed Doña María’s “receipt” and immediately distributed copies to the press—“Received from Sr. Calvet fifteen hundred pesetas for diverse drawings.” This document, the lawyer argued, proved that the transaction was an outright sale and therefore legal. Let us take a look at the dollar value of the peseta and the franc in 1930. The 1,500 pesetas that Calvet “paid” Doña María for the four hundred works was the equivalent of $175 in 1930 (around $2,150 in 2007); the 200,000 francs that Calvet received for them from Dietz Edzard was the equivalent of $7,850 in 1930 (around $96,500 in 2007); and the 210,000 francs Bern-heim asked for a single painting—View of Barcelona by Night—was worth $8,250 in 1930 ($101,500 in 2007).
At the end of May 1930, de Gentile, the exami
ning magistrate, embarked on a task that would last two years—interviewing everybody involved in the affair, some more than once. Doña María and Dr. Vilató were obliged to make trips to Paris in June 1930 and again in 1932. Doña María and, in all likelihood, Dr. Vilató stayed at the rue la Boétie when they came to Paris in 1930.35 Their lack of French may have been a problem; at all events, the judge would dismiss the mother’s and brother-in-law’s testimony as “pas recevable” (not acceptable). Since the Vilató papers are not available, it has not been possible to ascertain what the reason was. In January 1931, Picasso’s lawyer announced that the case was finally under way and that Calvet was going to make a counterclaim. This involved round after round of negotiations. With Garçon leading the attack, Picasso’s lawyers had an uphill fight. He was adamant about recovering his property; Edzard was no less adamant about recovering the stolen goods that he regarded as his property.
Dr. Juan Bautista Vilató, Doña María, Picasso, and Olga at the Clos Normand, c. 1930.
There were no further developments in the case until 1932, when Maître Garçon’s argument prevailed and the case against Calvet and Madame Zak was dismissed. Picasso appealed. In October 1933, there would be another hearing. Calvet was summoned but failed to appear in court—the summons had never reached him, he claimed—and was sentenced, in absentia, to two years in jail. Whereupon he appealed. At a hearing on March 17, 1934, Calvet was convicted—not, however, for disobeying a court order, but for profiteering. Once again, he appealed. Picasso was present at the hearing but lost his temper and threatened to stalk out when the judge told the noisy Catalan contingent—Calvet, Artigas, and Vilató—“Shut up, Spaniards.”36 Palau believes that this outburst may have prompted Picasso to consider dropping the case,37 but adduces no evidence. L’affaire Picasso had developed a life of its own and would go grinding on.
The case was not resolved until July 28, 1938, when the judge decided that the drawings did indeed belong to Picasso and not Edzard. When contacted some seventy years later about the missing drawings, Edzard’s daughter Christine—a documentary filmmaker based in London—was not much help. She vaguely remembered her parents talking about the Picasso affair. Her father had apparently expressed some bitterness at having been “taken for a ride,”38 which is just how Picasso and his mother felt.
By the time Picasso regained possession of his drawings, he could not have returned them to his mother, even if he had wanted to: Franco had laid siege to Barcelona. Doña María would die the following year. And so he locked the drawings away in Paris, and they became part of his estate. In due course, Picasso allowed Zer-vos to include them in his catalogue raisonné. Zervos had tried to have these unknown drawings photographed, when they surfaced in 1930, but they had been impounded by the court. By the time they were back in Picasso’s hands, Zervos was deep into publishing later volumes. It was only after Volume V came out in 1952 that he decided to devote a supplementary Volume VI to the early works that had not been discovered in time for Volume I.39
So much for the fate of the four hundred items that Calvet had made off with. How about the much larger and more important stash of his oeuvre that Picasso had left in his mother’s care—a stash whose existence was apparently not divulged in the course of l’affaire? Its safety must have been on Picasso’s mind when, unbeknownst to Olga, he took Marie-Thérèse on a trip to Barcelona in August 1930. Picasso apparently agreed to leave this vast collection—681 drawings, 200 paintings, and 17 sketchbooks—in the care of his mother and the Vilatós, so long as they never let any outsiders take a look.40 If the Vilatós were lulled into thinking of the collection as their fond de tiroir, their nest egg, they were in for a disappointment. To their dismay, Uncle Pablo would make the entire collection over to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona—a sensible decision. When Alfred Barr visited Picasso’s sister, Lola Vilató, in the summer of 1955 in quest of loans for his seventy-fifth anniversary show of Picasso’s work at MoMA (1957), he was appalled at what he found. As he wrote Peggy Guggenheim, “the apartment with the paintings [was] in a most extraordinary state of neglect and dirt… a strange Bohemian and rather disquieting atmosphere.”41
Lola and her children in Barcelona. Photograph by Inge Morath, 1954. Inge Morath Foundation / Magnum Photos.
Château de Boisgeloup, 1931. Musée Picasso, Paris.
35
Château de Boisgeloup
To Picasso’s irritation, the surrealists intensified their persecution of Cocteau. On February 15, 1930, he and Olga attended the first night of the poet’s new play at the Comédie Française, La Voix humaine—Cocteau’s apogee as a playwright. This instant and lasting success consisted of a forty-five-minute monologue by a brokenhearted woman, alone onstage—with a telephone as her only prop—trying to win back her lover. Berthe Bovy triumphed as the protagonist; so did the young designer, Christian Bérard, with his décor. Ten minutes into the first performance, a voice was heard from a balcony box, repeatedly yelling, “It’s obscene … Enough! It’s obscene … It’s Desbordes [Cocteau’s lover] she is telephoning.” Someone in the audience identified the culprit as Breton. It was not. When the man was ejected for rhythmically chanting, “Shit, shit, shit!” he was recognized as who else but Eluard. Outraged members of the audience called for his arrest. In the darkness of the theater, women shrieked. Someone ripped Eluard’s jacket; another stubbed out a cigarette on his neck. Cocteau rescued him from what threatened to become a lynching. “I will end up killing you, you disgust me,” was all the thanks he received from his surrealist foe.1
That same night, Cocteau’s mother, who had been plagued by malicious telephone calls about her son’s homosexual affairs, received yet another call—Jean had been badly injured in a motor accident. The anonymous caller also used the telephone (La Voix humaine’s central prop) to inform Picasso, André Gide, and Anna de Noailles that Cocteau had committed suicide in a bar.2 As a precaution, the poet had Eluard barred from the Boeuf sur le Toit. Madame de Chevigné, who lived in the same building as Madame Cocteau, rushed to comfort her. So did Picasso, who was appalled by the surrealists’ telephone calls and later lashed out at them. “If it wasn’t you who did it, it was you all the same.”3 To save face, Cocteau pretended that “minor journalists claiming to be surrealists” were responsible. In fact, it was Robert Desnos, whose wife Youki would subsequently fall in love with Picasso.
Picasso’s solicitude was typical of him. Mean as he often was to Cocteau as, at one time or another, he would be to many of his old friends, he had a very loyal, if sometimes paradoxical, heart. Moreover, as Dora Maar maintained, in his sadistic way Picasso loved Cocteau. The great artist and the mercurial jack-of-all-trades needed each other. Unwittingly, Cocteau was always doing or saying something for which Picasso would make him suffer. The whipping boy would rail against his master, but always come back for more. They could not in the end do without each other. For Christmas 1930, Picasso sent Cocteau some drawings, but they turned out to be by his son Paulo. He also sent him a more symbolic, more touching present—a pot of four-leaf clovers. In his thank-you letter,4 Cocteau said he was watering them with eau de Vittel.
If Picasso was upset by the ruckus at the first night of La Voix humaine, it is because there was a menacing political edge to the surrealists’ persecution of Cocteau. In the early 1930s Picasso was adamantly apolitical: determined to remain neutral and out of the crossfire, as explained in the Epilogue. By now active communists, Eluard and Desnos were not so much attacking Cocteau for his very public pédérastie—though that, too—as for his closeness to important right-wingers like Philippe Berthelot and above all the egregious Préfet of Paris, Jean Chiappe. Cocteau’s politics were too opportunistic to be taken seriously. He deserves credit for using his right-wing contacts to protect his left-wing friends, not least Sergey Eisenstein, the great Soviet filmmaker, who was sitting next to Eluard when he caused the uproar at La Voix humaine. “Maybe [Cocteau] even had cause to thank me,” Eisenstein wrote in his memoirs,
5 as if Eluard’s intervention contributed to its success.
Of late Picasso had been inundated with offers of properties from all over France, but he had never been interested. However, after spending weekends at one or another of the hostelleries on or near the Normandy coast, he felt the need for a country house not too far from Paris, where he could shut himself away from the prying public and have a sculpture studio of his own, rather than have to work in González’s cramped workshop. As Picasso told Brassaï, he was weary of lugging back to Paris “every year, from Dinard, from Cannes, from Juan-les-Pins, the cumbersome harvest of his summer; of packing and unpacking canvases, paints, brushes, sketchbooks, all the paraphernalia of his traveling studio.”
Kahnweiler’s brother-in-law, Elie Lascaux, supposedly told Picasso about the secluded Château de Boisgeloup, some forty-five miles northwest of Paris, near Gisors. Gisors was on the road—a little less than halfway—from Paris to Pourville, where, as recounted in Chapter 30, Picasso wanted to resume the habit of painting alongside Braque, who was already at work on his country house. Picasso purchased the Château de Boisgeloup on June 10, 1930, from Monsieur Léon Louis Joseph Renard and Madame Jeanne Marie Georgette Weibel.67 He moved in almost immediately. Boisgeloup was a perfect solution to Picasso’s requirements: a handsome house, more manoir than château, in a beautiful, secluded setting with a wall around it. For a château, it was modest in scale, yet imposing, and totally free of conforts modernes: no electricity, central heating, or proper bathrooms. The lack of heating would prove a mixed blessing in winter, when Boisgeloup, as Picasso recalled to Brassaï, became an “unheatable barn, riddled with drafts…. That’s where I got my sciatica…. But I can tell you one thing—cold stimulates you; it keeps the mind alert…. You work to keep warm, and you keep warm by working. But a comfortable warmth makes you sleepy”8 And so no chauffage. “Just because I bought [Boisgeloup], that’s no reason to modernize it,” Picasso told Françoise Gilot one freezing day many years later, when he took her to see what she dubbed “Bluebeard’s Castle.”9
A Life of Picasso Page 52