A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  The name Boisgeloup derives from bois-jaloux; jaloux, in this context, implies a wood that is hidden away—screened as if by a jalousie. The property nestles in a declivity in an otherwise extensive plain—the site of many a skirmish in the Hundred Years’ War. The River Epte, which formerly bordered the estate, served as a kind of frontier between the French and English armies. In the fourteenth century Boisgeloup had been a château fort, linked by secret tunnels to the fortress of the Knights Templar at Gisors. In times of siege, these underground passageways kept the garrison supplied with food and arms and even horses. Although proud that so much history had rubbed off on his property, Picasso did not hesitate to brick up the entrances to the tunnels to keep out trespassers and people in search of the Templars’ nonexistent treasure. Sometime in the seventeenth century, the fortress was transformed into a château, which had burned down in the eighteenth century. The present building is thought to have been added onto an earlier gatehouse at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Stones for its construction came from the previous château.

  Notwithstanding its piecemeal past, the house is traditionally classical in style, the more elegant for being only one room wide, and entre cour et jardin. Light floods through the lofty, white-shuttered windows into an enfilade of simple, handsome rooms on the ground floor and into the bedrooms on the floors above. For a painting studio, Picasso used a large room on the second floor immediately above the entrance to the older part of the house, and to this day the floor is speckled with paint. Books still lie about the room: devotional works mostly in Spanish, an illustrated edition of Don Quijote, and one volume of a set of Antiquités étrusques (1786), engraved by F. A. David. On the main staircase is the life-size carving of Christ in agony on the cross—sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Spanish—which Eugenia Errázuriz had given Picasso in 1916. It had inspired a dazzling drawing.10

  Across from the château is a long, low range of stable buildings. One of these became Picasso’s sculpture studio; it is not nearly as large as it looks in Brassaï’s photographs.11 Other stables served as garages and storage rooms. Behind the stable block are the communs—farm buildings; at the center of the yard a typical Norman dovecote with roses climbing over it. The domed roof of the dovecote is a large wheel-like structure for the doves to perch on. In Picasso’s time, the communs belonged to a neighboring farmer; these now belong to his grandson Bernard, who has inherited the property and is transforming them into galleries for his collection of contemporary art. Back of the château is a twenty-acre park surrounded by stone walls. A rivulet used to meander through it, but Picasso had it filled to discourage mosquitoes. The once neglected park is now impeccably maintained. A vast lawn stretches away from the house to a great screen of trees.

  Inside the gates of Boisgeloup is a lofty, fourteenth-century chapel dedicated to the Virgin—virtually all that remains of the ancient Boisgeloup complex—where Mass was celebrated until the 1950s. Although the interior was re-Gothicized in 1886, it retains the original corbels—têtes de fou and dragons, which were much to Picasso’s taste. So was the nineteenth-century stained glass, insofar as it left its stamp on the cloisonnisme of some of his 1931 still lifes. Picasso took superstitious pleasure in having his own chapel and, although there is no record of his actually attending Mass there, he relished the protection that the sacraments provided. It is no coincidence that, thirty years later, Picasso acquired a property named Notre-Dame-de-Vie, which is sanctified by having a pilgrimage church on it.

  The summer after Picasso’s purchase of Boisgeloup, Clive Bell visited Paris and found that the artist no longer had any desire to see his former fan. Picasso had finally seen through Bell’s obsequiousness.12 A readiness to believe anything bad about the artist emerges in a letter to Mary Hutchinson, in which Bell regales her with gossip about the couple he had formerly courted and the château he had not been asked to visit:

  Did I tell you that Picasso had bought a country-house near Montargis and that poor Olga at last saw her vœux couronnés—to be chatelaine—the curé had called—and a local landowner, a “de” she said? And then Picasso set up on the lawn—where she dreamed of un peu de thé et tennis—a lamp-post, une colonne Morris with the theatre advertisements still on it, and an iron urinal. He is becoming sinister, that Spaniard; and if money gives out, as it may, I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if he were to disappear.13

  Bell’s malicious, snobbish, and totally inaccurate gossip is all too redolent of Alice Derain and Marie Laurencin, who had also been dropped. The gossip was the more reprehensible in that Picasso’s acceptance of Bell as a courtier had had little to do with the man’s meager understanding of his work, rather more to do with his abject toadying and courting of Olga. Picasso had indeed suggested setting up a pissotière in the garden, but that was nine years earlier at Fontainebleau, and even then it had been a joke. Photographs of Olga with her husband looking somewhat portly entertaining friends in the garden in the early 1930s confirm that she had indeed found her rightful niche as chatelaine. Most weekends in the warmer months, when friends rallied round and her demons were dozing, Olga would play this part to perfection. The moment she left, Marie-Thérèse was apt to materialize. Although the sculptures she inspired allegorized the numinous spirit of Boisgeloup, she remained the mistress of the artist and never aspired to become the mistress of the house.

  Picasso, Elie Lascaux, Marcelle Braque, Bero Lascaux, Lucie Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, and Michel Leiris at Boisgeloup, 1933. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Besides enabling Picasso to work in unwonted privacy, the château enabled him to indulge two antithetical sides of his character. During the week he played Mars to Marie-Thérèse’s Venus. Weekends he played the role of an affable père de famille in a three-piece suit and spats, having fun with a much fussed over child and a very large dog. Home movies confirm that when they were alone, and Olga was in good spirits, the family was united in an atmosphere of affectionate relaxation. Especially revealing are sequences in which Paulo is dressed up as a Napoleonic marshal in a bicorne, or as a torero, parrying the charge of a bull in the form of Mimi, his plump old nanny, index fingers extended to mimic horns. Most touching of all is a glimpse of the elegant chatelaine emerging from the house, a wistful smile on her face as she pulls the petals off a daisy—he loves me, he loves me not: an image that is painful to equate with the Large Nude in a Red Armchair of 1929.

  Interior of Boisgeloup with sanguine drawing of Three Women at the Spring. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Olga did her best to make Boisgeloup habitable; she was especially grateful when Eugenia Errázuriz sent them a set of chairs.14 The most dramatic addition to the salon was Picasso’s monumental sanguine version of his 1921 Three Women at the Spring. This gave the room a touch of appropriate grandeur. Despite her bouts of illness, Olga managed to impose her sense of order and tidiness on things and keep her husband’s love of accumulation under control. Should Marie-Thérèse show up when Olga was around, she would clear off on her bicycle to an inn at Gisors. Too bad Boisgeloup’s subterranean tunnels had been blocked up.15

  According to legend, the scales did not fall from Olga’s eyes until the Galeries Georges Petit retrospective in 1932, when painting after painting is said to have left her in no doubt as to the appearance if not the identity of her rival. However, Bernard Picasso questions this assumption. He believes that his grandmother realized what was going on. Olga was jealous and suspicious by nature, but she was no fool and is likely to have made inquiries of the concierge or people in the village. Maybe Picasso had even told her. How else explain the rows? Posterity has come to associate Boisgeloup with Marie-Thérèse’s imagery, but it was never her turf; it was very much Olga’s domain. Insofar as Picasso and Marie-Thérèse had a place of their own, it was the hideaway on the Left Bank; and later, a separate apartment on the rue la Boétie. It was not Boisgeloup. Ironically, when the Picassos separated in 1935, Olga would get the château. After no more than five yea
rs the artist would lose possession of the property. Instead, he accepted Vollard’s offer of an idyllic country house at Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre near Rambouillet.

  Left: Olga, Paulo, and Picasso, c. 1932.

  Right: Paulo dressed as a marshal of France at place de la Concorde, Paris, c. 1930.

  Like many another married man passionately in love with a mistress, Picasso repeatedly promised to marry Marie-Thérèse. These promises would not be kept. As he told Dora Maar and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, he would never remarry until Olga was dead. Spaniards are averse to divorce, and although Picasso certainly contemplated it, he surely realized that, without Olga, he would have been the target of every woman he slept with. And for her part, unambitious, unassuming albeit adoring Marie-Thérèse had no desire to be a chatelaine.1617

  Now that Picasso’s focus had switched to sculpture, he had González help him install a sculpture studio in the stables. There would be no welding equipment: ironically, the inventor of welded sculpture did not ever weld. Too protective of his precious hands to drive a car, Picasso was averse to handling an oxyacetylene torch. That was González’s responsibility. Since the Galerie de France was giving him a show in February, the welder had less time for Picasso. However, the country house where he spent his summers was not too far from Boisgeloup,18 and he continued to be of help whenever he could. When he was not available, Picasso summoned the village blacksmith to do the welding.

  The year before, Picasso had set aside the two welded heads he had worked on with González: the immensely powerful Head of a Man19 and the unresolved iron mask of Marie-Thérèse. Now he proposed to turn them into full-length figures. Dated sketchbook drawings20 reveal the artist trying to match the Head of a Man to body after body—a squatting one (one knee up, one knee down), a standing one, as well as a conglomeration of penises and testicles. Wisely, he concluded that the Head of a Man had no need of extensions, so he left it as it was. Nevertheless, as the sketchbooks confirm, he continued to redistribute body parts with ingenuity and abandon. Three lusty drawings suggest that Picasso saw himself as Jupiter Tonans in pursuit of a nymph, with a clutch of thunderbolts in his right hand and an erect penis in the other. He was having conceptual fun; few of these sketches lent themselves to three-dimensional realization. Only Jupiter’s great bloated bladder of a belly would resurface the following year in Picasso’s volumetric sculptures.

  The other welded head21—it can be seen propped up on a stool in a 1928 photograph of Picasso in his studio— needed a lot more additional work, above all a cranium. Picasso fixed this by having González buy a pair of colanders. After tearing off their little feet with pliers, he had the two hemispheres welded together into a head. The result is a Picassian paradox, seemingly solid yet open to the space around it; the holes in the colanders establish the scalp to be follicular. Locks of hair fashioned out of old bedsprings and metal flanges further fetishize the head and extend it into space. These embellishments also give the piece a ramshackle primitivism that is up-to-date and industrial-looking, and quite unlike the timeless, tribal look of his earlier sculptures.

  Picasso. Jupiter Tonans, July 1930. Pencil on sketchbook page, 17×10.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Once he had solved the problem of the cranium, Picasso turned his attention to the rest of the figure. He had originally envisaged a somewhat cumbersome base: a rectangular stack of shelves topped with twin cones by way of breasts.22 In the end, he found inspiration for the torso and legs in a Kota figure in his own collection.23 A perfect solution. The top-heavy colander head looks all the more gigantic for the rickety minimalism of the diamond-shaped legs.

  Above: Roger Viollet’s photograph of Picasso and an unidentified man in his studio with the colander head, Artist and His Model, and La Danse, 1928. Getty Images. Right: Picasso. Head of a Woman, 1928-30. Painted iron, sheet metal, colander, and springs, 100×37×59 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Among the astonishingly varied ideas for sculpture in the Boisgeloup sketchbook are several drawings of a head of Mithra, the sun god. Nothing came of this project at the time; twenty years later, however, this image of a disk-like face superimposed onto a flat, square head, edged with zigzag sun rays, would materialize as the sunflower face of the life-size, freestanding assemblage, Girl Jumping Rope (1950).24 The Mithraic aura endows this lighthearted piece with a cosmic radiance. The old basket that stands for the belly of the Girl Jumping Rope derives from the Jupiter Tonans drawing in the same carnet. “I use my old sketchbooks the same way a chef uses his cookbooks,” Braque once said.25 So did Picasso.

  Besides working on welded pieces, Picasso had taken to whittling away at bits of wood—sixteen of them—all Marie-Thérèse-inspired figures,26 which predict Gia-cometti. He had used wood, Picasso told Spies, that was lying around the studio— mostly “fragments of canvas stretchers.”27 To Daix he said he had used branches he had found in the park, pine for preference, which were easy to carve with a penknife.28 These figures are closely related to the Etruscan sculptures from the Villa Julia, which had been illustrated in the May 1930 issue of Documents, though not nearly as closely related as the famously attenuated figure in the archaeological museum at Volterra is to Giacometti’s later work. Like the figures of Fernande Olivier he had whittled at Gósol in 1906,29 the Boisgeloup carvings have taken their shape from the sticks and slats that engendered them. Their similarity to the hugely tall sculpture of Daphne that Picasso would execute in November suggests that these little figures can be seen as a three-dimensional sketchbook.30

  Picasso. Sculptures of Marie-Thérèse, 1930. Carved wood, ht. 48 cm, 51 cm, and 55.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  The acquisition of Boisgeloup did not release Picasso from the obligatory “summer exodus,” as he had hoped. At what was probably Olga’s behest, they arranged to leave for Juan-les-Pins on July 26; but Paulo caught cold, so they postponed their departure until the thirtieth. En route, they stayed overnight at Bourg-en-Bresse,31 doubtless to see the magnificent Eglise de Bresse before spending a day at Bilignin, near Aix-les-Bains in the Haute-Savoie. This is where Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas had found their “dream house,” a seventeenth-century manoir332 that had even fewer amenities than Boisgeloup. Picasso’s visit may have been prompted by the recent publication of Gertrude’s Dix portraits, in which her “portrait” of Picasso, entitled “If I Told Him: A Complete Portrait of Picasso” appeared.33 Georges Hugnet and Virgil Thomson had translated Gertrude’s idiosyncratic “portraits” into French, and Picasso had contributed drawings of Satie, Apollinaire, and himself.

  Here is Alice’s recollection of this visit:

  One day at Bilignin Picasso and his wife, with Elf their Airedale dog, came up in their big car—they had a big limousine with a chauffeur. They had come to spend the day with us. They got out of the car and we thought they were a circus. They were wearing the … sports clothes of southern France, which had not gotten to America yet and were a novelty to us—bare legs, bare arms, bright clothes. Pablo said, explaining himself, that is all right, it is done down on the Mediterranean. Elf ran over the box hedges of the terrace flower beds. Basket [Gertrude and Alice’s poodle] looked at the dog with the same scandal with which we had looked at her masters. Basket was outraged, he had never been allowed to do that.34

  After a lunch cooked by Alice, Picasso took a number of photographs and drove on to Juan-les-Pins, where he had rented the Villa Bachelyk, around the corner from the Villa Belle Rose, which they had taken in 1925. Once again, Picasso arranged for Marie-Thérèse to have a room nearby. During this visit, he stayed away from most of his old Riviera friends. The Murphys had gone to live in Switzerland, to be with their tubercular son. As for the Beaumonts, whether or not they were at Cannes, he preferred to be alone with Marie-Thérèse.

  Before he left for the south, Picasso had been bombarded with telephone calls from Skira as to whether he had started work on the Ovid engravings. Exasperated, he told Skira to come by the following Friday, “and I’ll
show you the first plate for the Metamorphoses.” Skira duly appeared, only to be told that Picasso had left for Juan-les-Pins the day before. “Strike while the iron is hot,” the indomitable Madame Skira declared, “prends ta Bugatti!”355 And off they sped to the Riviera. The following morning, Picasso was astonished to find the mother and son on his doorstep at Juan-les-Pins. Skira knew instinctively how to charm Picasso. So sure of himself was he that when Picasso showed him the first trial plate36—a somewhat incoherent engraving of the death of Orpheus—Skira rejected it as “too abstract,” the word “abstract” apparently a euphemism for “violent.” An instinctive editor, Skira felt that the plate did not correspond to his concept of the book. It included too much of the action, not only the killing of Orpheus by the Thracian maenads, but also the maenads’ slaughter of the local bulls. The appearance of bulls in Picasso’s work usually implies that he had attended a corrida. Indeed, he had—in Spain. Early in his stay at Juan-les-Pins, he took Marie-Thérèse off to Barcelona for a few days. As well as checking that his mother was taking good care of the rest of his early works, Picasso wanted to show Marie-Thérèse his Spain, not so much his old friends as the bullfights, which were about to become a dominant theme in his imagery. According to the artist’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, the Spanish journalists who usually trailed him “failed to notice Marie-Thérèse.”37