A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Back in Juan-les-Pins, sculpture was still uppermost in Picasso’s mind. Far from allowing a lack of materials to hamper him, he improvised with whatever was at hand: flotsam and jetsam from the beach as well as sand, the additive he had used on previous visits to enrich his paint surfaces. This summer, Picasso would use sand as the subject as well as the matière for a series of little reliefs.38 These were ingeniously contrived from bits of driftwood and metal, toy boats, palm fronds, rope, rags, roots, and seaweed. There was also a glove, which he stuffed with bran to give it the look of a washed-up hand.39 He would glue, sew, or otherwise fasten these bits and pieces as well as additional cardboard cutouts onto the backs of small canvases placed face downward so as to form shallow boxes.40 And Picasso would then sprinkle the contents of these boxes with a unifying layer of sand, perhaps to evoke the sand-encrusted embraces endemic to beach cabanas.

  Picasso. Bather and Profile, August 14, 1930. Sand, cardboard, and plants on canvas, 27×35×3 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Since her first summer with Picasso in 1928, Marie-Thérèse had developed from an adolescent playing ball with her playmates—simulacra of herself—into a lan-gurous sun worshipper in thrall to her sun god of a lover. And it is this sexy, sandy sleeper that Picasso encapsulates in one after another of his little boxes. The one exception is a comical clutter of toy boats, which he presumably did to amuse his son.

  That these reliefs represent yet another advance in Picasso’s blurring of the gap between the second and third dimensions41 should not blind us to the joy with which he distills the delights of his favorite arena, the beach. Nor should we overlook the little jokes: for instance, the cardboard fingers affixed to the right-hand stretcher of one of these reliefs,42 which suggests that Marie-Thérèse is trying to clamber out of the space she shares with a cutout of the artist’s profile; or the identical tassels of frayed rope standing for the sandy hair between her legs as well as on her head.43 The box evokes all too memorably the awful invasiveness of sand. Forty-one summers later Picasso will summon us back to this beach on the occasion of what is probably his last apotheosis: a sequence of five paintings of the Three Ages of Man set on a Riviera beach.44 In four out of these five paintings, a surrogate of the artist holds a stick with which to draw in the sand, just as he used to do as a child in Málaga.

  On September 5 and 6, just before leaving Juan-les-Pins, Picasso devised a more impromptu tribute to Marie-Thérèse. By superimposing her image onto magazine illustrations of successive lunar phases, he visualizes her as a Mithraic moon-woman. As Picasso told Penrose, he associated Marie-Thérèse with the moon. “The sleeping blonde paintings [of her are] lunar,” he said. “She has always done just what she wanted—strayed, wandered, changed her way of living…. [Her] long neck carries [her head] like the moon racing through the clouds … like a ball, a satellite.”45

  36

  The Shadow of Ovid

  Besides the ongoing scandal of the theft of his early drawings from his mother, Picasso had to face an even greater public embarrassment on his return to Paris around September 7, 1930: successive installments (September 10, 11, 12, 13) of his former mistress Fernande Olivier’s memoirs in the popular evening newspaper Le Soir. Instead of using Fernande’s original title, Neuf ans chez Picasso, the editors used the offensive rubric Quand Picasso était pompier (When Picasso Painted Kitsch). That Fernande’s disclosures—opium, mistresses, involvement in thefts from the Louvre—were mostly true made this exposé the more distressing for Olga. She resented her husband’s past affairs almost as much as she resented his present ones, and was even more determined than he was to have the series legally stopped.1 Six installments would appear before the lawyers prevailed. Years later, Picasso would express a very different view of Fernande’s memoir: the only account to capture the ambiance of the Bateau Lavoir, he said in the 1950s.

  Readers of Volume II may recall how Fernande’s foolish affair with the Italian painter Ubaldo Oppi in 1912 had enabled Picasso to leave her for her treacherous confidante, Eva Gouel2—leave her, what is more, without a penny and only a single drawing to show for an eight-year relationship. Except for the saintly Max Jacob, most of her friends had melted away. After telling Serge Férat that “la basse prostitution”3 was the only solution to her problems, this most voluptuous of all Picasso’s women tried out a succession of jobs: movie extra, antiquaire’s assistant, children’s nanny, cashier in a boucherie, cabaret manager, reciter of poems (at the Lapin Agile), and astrologer—a skill she had learned from Max Jacob—but she usually ended up giving French or drawing lessons and using her beautiful voice to teach diction. During World War I, Fernande took up with a raffishly handsome movie star, Roger Karl, whom she and Picasso had known in Lapin Agile days. Karl had originally wanted to be a painter, then a writer: his aspiration to be “the French Dostoyevsky” prompted a sharp “Tu paries, Karl” from Max Jacob. Instead, he became a successful actor on stage and screen and a golden-voiced reader of poetry on French radio. The famous actor Louis Jouvet thought that Karl could have been the greatest tragedian of his generation had he worked harder and been less of a drunkard, philanderer, and spendthrift. Fernande, who had refused out of sentiment to move in with Karl until Picasso got married, would always have to provide for herself.4

  Fernande Olivier, c. 1925. Collection Gilbert Krill.

  In 1927, hoping to cash in on her glamorous Bohemian past, Fernande had embarked on an account of her life with Picasso. She had girlish diaries to draw on as well as a sharp sense of character and humor. An ability to write meant that Fernande could dispense with help from her literary friends. Just as well; except for Max Jacob, they would have been too fearful to do so. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, who had disregarded her pleas for help, were the ones Fernande most regretted. And then all of a sudden, in May 1928, she heard through Marcoussis that these women, formerly her closest confidantes, wanted to see her again. She was thrilled and went to visit them and told them about her book. An excellent idea, Gertrude said, as she took Fernande’s manuscript and promised to find her a translator and an American publisher. This offer was a poisoned chalice. Gertrude wanted access to Fernande’s material for a book of her own—her self-hagiographic Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, about the so-called banquet years. She was anything but eager for Fernande’s book to be published before hers. Fortunately for Fernande, the excerpts in Le Soir had so impressed the eminent diarist Paul Léau-taud that he arranged for the Mercure de France, the prestigious magazine he edited, to publish more of it. Besides the author’s ability to tell a tale, her alluring looks had set Léautaud wondering to his diary whether he might hire Fernande to strip and “sit” for him, the better to feast his eyes on her.

  Back at Boisgeloup, Picasso settled down to work on his Ovid engravings. Louis Fort, the printer, had delivered twenty-one varnished copper plates in the spring,5 but so far he had used only one of them: the tryout for the Death of Orpheus that Skira had criticized.” Whether or not Skira’s criticism was responsible, Picasso refined his concept. For inspiration, he turned to a source that was quintessentially classical: Etruscan mirror backs chased with mythological scenes, which, as he knew from his visits to the Louvre, are among the finest examples of engraving in antiquity. The British neoclassicist John Flaxman’s illustrations for Homer’s Iliad are sometimes said to have left their mark on engravings for the Metamorphoses. However, when Picasso was asked by Cooper about Flaxman, he was dismissive. And, indeed, these insipid pastiches are bereft of the energy and concision of Etruscan mirror backs.

  In a recent book, Lisa Florman has proposed a new interpretation of Picasso’s Metamorphoses and other classical engravings.6 Her observations are original and illuminating, but she goes too far in claiming that two of the paintings on Ovidian themes that Rubens and his assistants executed for Philip IV’s hunting lodge at Torre de la Parada may have “provided the models for Picasso’s own illustration of the myth.”7 The evidence? As Florman concedes, there is none.
Picasso never clapped eyes on them. But even if he had, he is unlikely to have been interested. For Picasso loathed Rubens. The great Rubens exhibition in Paris in 1936 was the occasion for a spirited attack, as Kahnweiler has recorded:

  Kahnweiler: “… I was wrong when I said, after seeing the photographs, that I thought I would like it. You were right. I disliked it a lot.”

  Picasso: “… I told you so. [Rubens] is gifted, but his gifts engender bad art.… it’s journalism, epic film stuff. Take Poussin, when he paints Orpheus, he tells the story. The least leaf tells the story. Whereas with Rubens, it’s not even painted. Everything is identical. He thinks he is painting a big breast [he makes a large circular gesture with his arm], but it is not a breast. His drapery looks like breasts. Everything looks the same as everything else.”8

  Picasso is more likely to have found the poetic reassurance that Apollinaire and Max Jacob had formerly provided in a recently reissued book by Mallarmé. First published in 1880, Les Dieux antiques is a lively compendium, which includes sections on Asiatic, African, and Norse mythology, but is principally focused on the Greek and Latin gods and their mythic deeds.9 Mallarmé’s comments on metamor-phic legends, their connection with the workings of the sun, and the pagan ethos, would have appealed to Picasso. Originally conceived as a “mythologie à l’usage des classes”—a schoolbook—Les Dieux antiques was based on a popular work by an English classicist, George W. Cox, entitled Tales of Gods and Heroes (1862). Mallarmé’s almost total reworking of Cox’s text is so lucid, so effortlessly informative and devoid of Victorian cant that Gallimard brought out a new edition in 1925. The full contents of Picasso’s library have yet to be established, but he must have owned a copy of this book. It would have enabled him to glimpse Ovid’s metamorphic myths through Mallarmé’s prismatic mind. Les Dieux antiques is also likely to have been known to Matisse, who revered Mallarmé and was about to illustrate his Poésies, which Skira would publish a year after Picasso’s Ovid.

  Since Picasso had spent much of the previous year on a sculpture of Daphne in flight from Apollo and was about to start on yet another hugely tall plaster of her, this was one metamorphosis that he did not need to illustrate. The choice of subjects is said to have been Skira’s, who supposedly gave Picasso a copy of Georges Lafaye’s prose translation marked with his preferences. However, the artist would certainly have had the final say in the selection. As an opener,10 Picasso chose to illustrate the first legend in Ovid’s Book I: the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, sole survivors, like the Noahs, of a great flood ordained by Jupiter to cleanse blood-soaked Earth of chaos and corruption. After the flood subsides, Deucalion and Pyrrha ask an oracle how they can perpetuate the human race. “Throw behind you the bones of the Great Mother [i.e. the stones of Mother Earth],” they are told. This they do, and as the stones soften, vestiges of human form emerge, much as a likeness does “when one has just begun to block the marble.”11 Deucalion’s stones become men; Pyrrha’s, women.

  Picasso. Etchings for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1930. Left: The Daughters of Minyas, 31.2×22.4. cm. Right: Cephalus and Procris, 31.2×22.4 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  The parallels between Ovid’s metamorphic poem and Picasso’s figures of the “bone” period are self-evident. Although there are no references to the re-creation of the human race in his illustrations, there is such an abundance of them in his paintings of 1929–31 that it is tempting to call this Picasso’s “Deucalion” period. Picasso also treats the story of Semele self-referentially. There was even a role for Olga: Juno. On discovering that Semele was carrying her husband’s child (Dionysos), Jupiter’s jealous wife arranged for her rival to be atomized by Jupiter’s thunderbolts, much as Marie-Thérèse would allow herself to be consumed in the furnace of Picasso’s love. This incineration is not even hinted at in Picasso’s engravings,12 which are amorous but most un-Picassian in their decorum. This is likely to have been imposed by Skira. Half the edition of this book was destined for the American market—conservative bibliophiles and clients of Marie Harriman’s new gallery. Decorum would have been obligatory.

  Picasso. The Rape (Philomena and Tereus), July 9, 1931. Etching, 21.6×30.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  For an artist so often identified with metamorphism, Picasso paid surprisingly little attention to Ovid’s metamorphic denouements. For instance, the daughters of Minyas are depicted spinning yarn,13 but we have no inkling that they are about to be turned into bats. Likewise, without knowledge of the poem, nobody would realize from Picasso’s engraving14 that the story of Cephalus and Procris is a horrendous drama of jealousy and treachery. The same with Philomela:15 Philomela was the beautiful sister of Procne, whose husband, Tereus, king of Thrace, raped her, then cut off her tongue and hid her away in a forest fortress. Unable to speak, Philomela wove her story onto a Thracian loom and had her handiwork smuggled out to her sister. In revenge, Procne killed her adored son and had his flesh served up to his rapist father. The story ends in successive metamorphoses: Procne becomes a nightingale, Philomela a swallow, and Tereus a hoopoe. Once again, all that Picasso distills from this shocking story is a mildly erotic scene in which an ardent young Tereus mounts Philomela, who offers herself up to him, much as Marie-Thérèse did to the artist. A year later (July 9, 1931), Picasso returns to the subject and comes up with a far more telling image: Philomela desperately struggling with the brutal king.16 To hint at the denouement, he covers the entire surface with crisscross lines—the warp and weft of Philomela’s loom.

  In playing down the pervasive violence of these myths, Picasso approached them in the spirit of Olga’s husband rather than the Sadeian guise of Marie-Thérèse’s lover. At the same time, he wanted his images to evoke the metamorphic spirit of the classical world—much as Shakespeare did in his Ovidian Midsummer Night’s Dream. For Picasso, the rape and slaughter endemic to Olympus was not to be taken literally. Instead of burning in hell, victims would be resurrected as trees or birds or stags or constellations—made one again with nature or the cosmos—thanks to the power of metamorphosis. Zervos spoke for the artist in an article celebrating the publication of the Ovid book: “these are not properly speaking illustrations … they are personal interpretations of the world that Ovid had envisaged”17—a pagan Mount Olympus, very different from the guilt-ridden darkness of Golgotha, where the artist had lingered earlier that year.

  Between September 18 and his forty-ninth birthday on October 25, 1930, Picasso produced fifteen full-page engravings, as well as fourteen alternate plates which do not appear in the Skira book. The engravings were printed at Louis Fort’s Paris workshop, not at Boisgeloup as is often said. It would be another four years before Picasso acquired Fort’s printing press.18 The following spring, Picasso would engrave a second batch of half-page illustrations to break up the extensive blocks of text.19 Concerned that the artist might drag his feet, Skira had taken a small office at 25, rue la Boétie, next door to Picasso’s apartment, to urge him on. “As soon as I had finished with one of the plates,” the artist told Brassaï, “instead of reaching for the telephone, I reached for my bugle, went to the window, and sounded the notes [Ta-ta-ti, ta-ta-ti, ti-ta-tati-ta-ta], and presto! In no time at all, there was Skira!”20

  The Metamorphoses would be published on Picasso’s fiftieth birthday, October 25, 1931. The book did not at first have as much success with bibliophiles as had been hoped. Nevertheless, it made Skira’s name as a publisher, a name that would be further enhanced, a year later, when he brought out Matisse’s no less beautiful engravings for Mallarmé’s Poésies (October 25, 1932).21 This was followed by Dalí’s sensational Les Chants de Maldoror in 1934. Henceforth, Picasso’s enjoyment of printmaking would become ever more consuming—thanks largely to the encouragement of Vollard, who had been his first Paris dealer. Vollard had made so much money out of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings that he preferred publishing éditions de luxe to depleting his stock of ever more valuable Renoirs, Cézannes, and Gauguins. The venerabl
e dealer was furious with the young interloper Skira for encroaching on what he had come to regard as his territory. From a hospital bed, where he was recovering from a gallstone operation, Vollard wrote Picasso that he could not wait to leave his bed and challenge Skira to “a race, which he [Vollard] was sure to win.”22 The publication a month later of Vollard’s magnificent edition of Balzac’s Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, with the thirteen engravings that Picasso had done in 1927, would settle that point—some felt in Vollard’s favor.

  Meanwhile, the Apollinaire memorial committee had held its annual meeting on November 9, to commemorate the poet’s death. As usual, Picasso attended. He informed the group that after a year’s work, his promised sculpture was ready; and he asked André Salmon to take a look at the piece in González’s workshop. Salmon was amazed at the cigar-box size of the space, the ferocity of the furnace, and above all the welded Woman in the Garden. “Nothing is more beautiful,” Salmon gushed nostalgically to Picasso. “For a moment I felt the same as I did on certain occasions [at the Bateau Lavoir] in 1906. You know what I mean.”23 González had also shown Salmon one of the sheets of bronze for the outdoor Père-Lachaise version. “Seductive, but iron is more pure”:24 Salmon’s comments were designed to please the artist. So was a fable about a blacksmith, in the manner of La Fontaine, that he dedicated to Picasso and included in his letter.

  In a two-part article inspired by this visit, Salmon provides a picturesque glimpse of Picasso as Vulcan at his forge, “roaring with laughter” as “the gas cylinders spewed out their fire.”25 If Salmon did indeed see Picasso playing with fire, it would have been an act contrived for his benefit. Salmon’s change of tune—he had deified Derain and sided against Picasso at the Apollinaire committee meetings—does not ring true. He regretted being dropped from Picasso’s circle, but no amount of sucking-up would get him readmitted any more than his boring stanzas would win him the avant-garde acceptance he craved. His work for a collaborationist newspaper during World War II would finally do him in with Picasso. At the memorial mass for Max Jacob (March 28, 1944), Picasso was chatting to friends on the street outside the church when Salmon advised him to move along, as the police might come. “Since you are present,” Picasso replied, “the police are already here.”26