Picasso, too, was playing games—pretending to go along with the Apollinaire project because it provided cover for a secret volte-face. He no longer wanted to have his Daphne replicated in bronze for Père-Lachaise; he now planned to set her up in his park—Le Nymphe de Boisgeloup. That he did not reveal his intention even to González emerges from the latter’s notes on their collaboration: “[Picasso did not] want to be separated from [the sculpture] or think of its being at Père-Lachaise in that collection of monuments where people seldom go. He wanted this monument to become the reliquary for the lamented poet’s ashes, and to be placed in his [Picasso’s] garden, where his friends could gather around him who is no longer.”27
González was either very credulous or very discreet. Picasso would never have allowed Apollinaire’s friends to gather at Boisgeloup. Besides infringing on his sacrosanct privacy, a throng of mourners would have evoked his fear of the shadow of death. As he had told the Apollinaire committee, he was “superstitious and feared cemeteries.”28 A monument to the dead on his property would have been abhorrent. A monument to the living Marie-Thérèse would be a very different matter.
Brassaï. Photograph of Picasso’s Woman in the Garden in the park at Boisgeloup, December 1932. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Estate Brassaï-RMN.
The replica of the Woman in the Garden would necessitate almost a year of finicky work on the part of González. Each separate element of the original had to be re-created exactly before being welded into place. González’s assistant, Augusto Torres (son of the painter Torres García), confirmed that Picasso took no part in the replication, but visited the workshop regularly to urge them on. Your “casserole” (slang for “wench”), González told Picasso, has “turned into [such] a titanic undertaking” that “I have had to go and buy the heaviest hammers in the scrap-iron market.”29 The bronze replica brought their historic collaboration to an amicable end.
Though seemingly modest, González was ambitious and intent on making a reputation for himself; and, to his credit, Picasso helped him to do so. He continued to supply Picasso with pedestals,30 just as he did Brancusi. In 1937 González would do aDaphne of his own—composed of elements not unlike the ones Picasso used for his Daphne. This would lead, in 1939, to a formidable pair of welded figures entitled Monsieur Cactus and Madame Cactus— handsome allegories of the toughness of the Catalan people in the face of the civil war—but they lack the magic fire of the pieces he did with Picasso.
The notes González kept of his collaboration with Picasso make no mention of the woman who had inspired the piece he had been working on for the previous year or so. Picasso had presumably sworn his closest and most trustworthy associates— González, Leiris, Pellequer, Kahnweiler—to secrecy about Marie-Thérèse. Kahn-weiler would still be in denial about her after Picasso had embarked on his affair with Dora Maar. The secrecy about Marie-Thérèse likewise explains why, after the bronze version of Woman in the Garden was installed at Boisgeloup, Picasso and his friends referred to it as Le Cerf (The Stag). This code name corresponded to the sculpture’s four-legged support and antlerlike hair—features that looked all the more striking when the bronze was set up in the long grass. To have an effigy of his mistress mistaken for a startled stag would have amused Picasso, so would the idea of turning Marie-Thérèse into the same animal that, as Ovid relates, Diana metamorphosed Actaeon into.
Eager to show off his new château to old friends, Picasso had Gertrude Stein and Alice down to Boisgeloup for the day. The visit sometime in November was a success, as Gertrude confirmed in a characteristically misspelled postcard. (“Nous sommes rentrait toute doucement, et tellement contente de votre home … et maintenant nous mangeons un bon poire de Boisgeloup.”)31 The visit also inspired her to write a very short five-act “play,” called Say It with Flowers (1931). The main characters are called George Henry, Henry Henry, Elisabeth Henry, Elizabeth Long, and William Long, but she muddles up their names. As far as one can tell, Elizabeth and William Long correspond to the Picassos. The play is set nearby at Gisors at the time of Louis XI, in a cake shop as well as at “the seashore where they are near Gisors.” Here is a typical passage from this tedious, self-indulgent text:
The cake shop in Gisors. They did not open the door before. Elizabeth Ernest and William Long. Who makes threads pay. Butter is used as much as hay. So they will shoulder it in every way To ask did they expect to come in the month of May.
Ernest and William Long and Elizabeth Long were not happy.32
Gertrude found it impossible to get this stuff published, so Alice proposed to become a publisher. To finance the publishing house, which they called “Plain Edition,” Gertrude decided to sell Picasso’s 1905 masterpiece, Woman with a Fan (National Gallery, Washington). Did Gertrude, one wonders, consult the artist, as she had done in 1923 when she had contemplated swapping his celebrated portrait of her with Rosenberg for another more recent Picasso? On that occasion, he had laughed off the suggestion.33 Picasso was still fond of Gertrude but dubious about her claims to genius. Had he understood English, he might have found the Woman with a Fan was a ridiculously high price to pay for publishing Say It with Flowers.
A little later, another very close friend from the past came back into Picasso’s life. Max Jacob reappeared in Paris for a small exhibition of his dim little drawings and watercolors—twenty-seven of them—at the Galeries Georges Petit, where Picasso would have his retrospective in 1932. Olga had always disliked Jacob, and she disliked him even more after Fernande Olivier’s recent revelations about him in Le Soir. And so, instead of inviting him to the rue la Boétie, Picasso visited him at his hotel. The composer Henri Sauguet, who was present, has described this fraught encounter: “The two friends had not seen one another for a long time. Pablo arrived, amiable and affectionate. Max remained circumspect. All of a sudden he gave the artist a meaningful look and said, ‘Eh, it seems that you have just bought a château.’ And he burst out laughing.”34
Max did not receive an invitation to Boisgeloup. Nevertheless, Picasso attended his vernissage, where he found himself surrounded by the chic people he mostly avoided, headed by Cocteau, who had written the catalog preface. Charles de Noailles had returned to Paris specially for the occasion; and among the others were “Flames” d’Erlanger, Winnie de Polignac, Johnny and Baba Faucigny-Lucinge, Arturo López, as well as a smattering of collectors, critics (Salmon), and dealers (Kahnweiler). Since the Fernande Olivier articles, Picasso had laid very low; and now, at this of all moments, he found himself confronted by his past in the form of Max Jacob, who personified the Bateau Lavoir, and Cocteau, who personified I’epoque des duchesses. Both these laureates had been in love with Picasso and, deny it though they might, still resentfully were.
Olga in front of the sculpture studio at Boisgeloup, c. 1932.
37
Annus Mirabilis I—The Sculpture (1931)
La sculpture est le meilleur commentaire qu’un peintre puisse addresser à la peinture.
—Picasso to Renato Guttuso1
Picasso’s switch to volumetric sculpture in March 1931 comes as no surprise. Intimations of an imminent change had appeared in two very large, very sculptural paintings that he had done shortly before he reopened his Boisgeloup studio. In these monumental works—Figures on the Seashore (January 12, 1931) and Woman Throwing a Rock (March 8, 1931)2—Picasso carries the deconstruction of his figures into separate biomorphic elements further than ever before. In the first of these paintings, Picasso takes the bodies of two naked bathers—as it might be himself and Marie-Thérèse—and reassembles them into a baroque heap of inflated body parts; at the center dagger tongues jab at each other in a cannibal kiss. In the background, an erect cabana testifies once again to the artist’s virility. It is a sunny day; the sea is a wall of blue, but not quite as intense a blue as the Mediterranean. We are evidently in Normandy. Working in Paris in the depth of winter, the artist wants to evoke the pleasures of the beach in summer. So sculptural is the handling, we are able t
o envision how the figures would look from the other side.
Woman Throwing a Rock is grimmer.3 It is not as self-referential as Figures on the Seashore; it is mythic. The woman has little to do with Olga or Marie-Thérèse. She is all alone on her bleak eminence, a monumental sculpture set on a cliff against a cold, cloudy sky, as if she were Ovid’s Pyrrha, at the dawn of creation, caught in the act of ridding herself of one of her life-engendering stones. Or is she about to insert it— the stone looks suspiciously like a glans penis—into her blimp of a body? The rock also serves as a counterweight to keep the seesawing figure in balance. Breasts in the form of two balls prop up her belly and make for an androgynous pun. Woman Throwing a Rock is the harbinger of Picasso’s reemergence as a volumetric sculptor later in the spring.
Another possible source for these genitalian deconstructions is an amateurish engraving in an obscure work of salacious eighteenth-century scholarship, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus: Theology of the Ancients, by Richard Payne Knight (1786).4 The artifacts illustrated in Payne Knight’s volume would have been familiar to Picasso from his visits to Naples. However, the book contained an additional preface by another classicist, Sir William Hamilton—British envoy to the court of Naples and the Two Sicilies, and husband of Nelson’s Emma—which would have been of the greatest interest to him. An engraving of a pile of disembodied phalluses illustrates an astonishing discovery that Sir William had recently made. Far from dying out in the Dark Ages, as was generally thought, the cult of Priapus still flourished in the Neapolitan countryside at a place called Isernia. To share this news with his fellow cognoscenti, Sir William had dispatched a Neapolitan friend to attend the festivities, write an account, and obtain samples of the phallic ex-votos that were distributed at the cult’s priapic ceremonies. He commissioned the engraving and presented a selection of the wax ex-votos to the British Museum, where they remain to this day. Those ex-votos would inspire Picasso to make some votive pieces of his own—mostly of eyes.5
Left: Picasso. Figures on the Seashore, January 12, 1931. Oil on canvas, 130×195 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Right: Engraving of phallic ex-votos from Isernia, in A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus: Theology of the Ancients by Richard Payne Knight, 1786.
According to Sir William’s informant, the three-day festival took place every February outside Isernia in an ancient church dedicated to Saints Cosmo and Damian— martyred Syrian doctors whose only conceivable link with Priapus was their mythic power as healers of venereal diseases. The waxen votive phalluses came in all sizes. Parishioners would kiss them fervently in the hope that Priapus would make their women and their beasts fertile and their harvests bountiful. The priests also sold a miraculous oil of “invigorating quality” for the faithful to smear on themselves. Sadly, the festival did not survive Sir William’s account for long. In 1805 Isernia was destroyed like Pompeii, though in an earthquake rather than an eruption. Picasso’s two great paintings perpetuate the survival of priapism and its rituals into the twentieth century. The engraving served as a time warp that would bring antiquity closer than Pompeian relics could. Another consideration: although well aware that in antiquity sexual imagery was not considered pornographic, the artist would have been delighted to find a way of sexualizing his imagery, the better to dismay, offend, shock, and, who knows, excite the puritans of his day.
Payne Knight’s volume does not figure in the incomplete lists of books in Picasso’s various houses; or in the well-cataloged library of Apollinaire, that formidable expert on erotica once described by Picasso as “my discoverer of rare manuscripts.” However, the parallels in style, composition, and implications of the two paintings discussed above are so striking that Picasso must surely have known the engraving. The sexually charged image would certainly have been to Picasso’s taste, but the naive gigantism of the engraving and the no less naive disproportion of image to format left an even greater mark on these works. To my mind, this engraving constitutes as useful a source of monumentality as the rock arch at Etretat.
Since the Wall Street crash, Rosenberg had cut back on purchases and done little to promote his most important artist. Unaffected by the crash, Picasso—who kept much of his money in a bank vault—had taken against his dealer and saw as little as possible of him. In a New Year’s letter, facetiously addressed to the Noble Seigneur de Bois-Jeloux et de la Boétie Hispano (Six Cylindres) Parigot, Rosenberg set about reestablishing a more personal rapport with Picasso. He regretted that they had drifted apart: “the distance between 23 and 21 rue la Boétie has become too great.”67 Picasso responded positively with a promise to deliver some large, yet-to-be-executed paintings for an exhibition to be held July 1–21. Rosenberg wanted this show to coincide with the large Matisse retrospective at the Galeries Georges Petit scheduled for the summer (June 16–July 25, 1931). So did Picasso, who encouraged André Level to organize yet another exhibit of his work.8
To satisfy his obligation to Rosenberg, Picasso took a rest from the Isernian figures and embarked on four large still lifes (dated February 11, 14, 22, and March 11).9 All four of them conform to the familiar allegorical formula: a pitcher (the artist) on the left and a bowl piled with fruit (Marie-Thérèse) on the right. In the first three paintings Picasso reduces these objects to essentials and sets them out on a cloth-covered, rectangular table. In the second one he adds Marie-Thérèse’s emblematic philodendron leaves: a tangle of tendrils that evokes the curves of the loved one’s buttocks and breasts and suggests her Ovidian oneness with nature.10
The third of these still lifes (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) is more intricate and richer in color. Its luminosity stems from the nineteenth-century stained glass in the Bois-geloup chapel; a small, teardrop-shaped fragment of the glass is still to be seen in a vitrine in the house. Thick leaded outlines had appeared in earlier works, but the incandescence testifies to Picasso’s ownership of a chapel where Mass was celebrated—yet another example of his surreptitious use of sacred magic to enhance anything but sacred work. He may also have drawn on memories of the cloisonniste set piece, Virgin with Golden Hair, that he had exhibited in 1902 and subsequently painted out.11
Picasso. Large Still Life on a Gueridon (Marie-Thérèse), March 11, 1931. Oil on canvas, 195×130.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Picasso would keep the fourth and last of these paintings for himself. It is one of his most memorable still lifes, also one of his most memorable Marie-Thérèses. The objects in Large Still Life on a Gueridon are the same as in the previous ones; only the table has been replaced by that other standby, a gueridon.12 Picasso took particular pride in this metamorphic tour de force. When showing it to Alfred Barr,13 he jokingly remarked with a smile, “Et voilà une nature morte” emphasizing the word morte. Years later, when Daix said that it reminded him of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso recalled his conversation with Barr, and indicated with his finger the profile and curves that pertain to Marie-Thérèse.14
Daix does not say which curves Picasso delineated, but the girl’s head corresponds to the fruit dish, her neck to its stem, her eyes to the dots on the peaches, her breasts to the green apples and her buttocks to yet more peaches. As for the golden pitcher that rears up like a crowing cock, this stands for the triumphant artist. Once again, Picasso adjusts the perspective of the dado rail and skirting board so that they can be read as both convex and concave, simultaneously thrusting the gueridon out at us while also holding it back. The black (sometimes white) leading enclosing the orbs and arabesques is another reference to the stained glass. To accusations that his depiction of women as objects degraded them, Picasso said that he liked to take inanimate objects and turn them into people and vice versa. He failed to add that his metamorphoses were not as mechanical as those of the dadaists and surrealists, who tended to see women as metronomes or coffee grinders.
Shortly before Picasso’s show—the four still lifes plus major works from the gallery’s stock15—opened at Rosenberg’s (July 1, 1931), Matisse’s large retro
spective of 141 paintings, 100 drawings, and a sculpture opened at the Galeries Georges Petit. The selection was disappointing: too tainted with dealerism. An American critic, Helen Appleton Read, reported that “Matisse refused to be lionized and slipped away early in the evening, preferring that his pictures speak for him…. But Picasso, who shares with Matisse the distinction of being leader of twentieth-century painting, was much in evidence.”16 Picasso would return more than once to study his rival’s work and gauge the gallery’s suitability for his own show there the following year.
The nature of Picasso and Matisse’s rivalry has recently come under a great deal of scrutiny as a result of two remarkable exhibitions. The first, at Fort Worth, Texas, in 1999, was organized by Yve-Alain Bois, whose sagacious catalog preface, slyly subtitled “A Gentle Rivalry,” tends to see things from Matisse’s viewpoint. Bois took the line that “behind the erotic flourish of [Picasso’s] rhetoric, no one can miss the hint of Matisse,” and that Picasso chose “to signify sensuality via a detour through Matisse’s language.”17 These and other of his views strike me as a touch chauvinistic, but Bois is so astute that one learns from him even when not agreeing with him.
A Life of Picasso Page 55