A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  The other, a blockbuster show that opened at the Tate Modern in London and traveled to the Grand Palais in Paris and MoMA in New York in 2002-03,18 provided members of the public with a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, but resulted in distorted perceptions of the artists’ relationship. On both sides of the Atlantic, crowds flocked to see the show under the misapprehension that it was a wrestling match with a winner and a loser. This is not at all what the organizers had in mind. On a more positive side, these exhibits stimulated controversy and sharpened people’s perceptions—made them look. In contrast to Bois’s preface to the Fort Worth show, a book, Matisse and Picasso, by Jack Flam, Matisse’s most insightful biographer, favored Picasso. Flam sees Picasso as a master who felt compelled to correct or improve his fellow painters’ performances. He imagines Picasso saying to Matisse, “Look, here is how it should be done!” As an example, he cites the defiantly straight back of Matisse’s celebrated Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground (1925-26):19 a would-be modernist touch that fails to counteract Matisse’s riot of orientalist patterning. According to Flam, Picasso pointed out Matisse’s misunderstanding of this particular distortion by using it for the back of his 1930 Seated Bather20 There it works perfectly, and by further stripping the Decorative Figure of its ingratiating ornamental ground—the carpet, the potted plant, etc. Picasso translated it into something much more meaningful.21

  In fact, Picasso’s and Matisse’s mutual appropriations and put-downs were coming to an end. The give-and-take would continue, but there would be a truce and a renewal of their friendship. And it would be very moving to watch the two greatest artists of their time communicating in a language only they could understand; moving, too, to realize how much they needed each other and how little they were ever able totally to trust each other. Braque’s heartfelt comparison of Picasso and himself at the time of cubism as two mountaineers roped together could never be applied to Picasso and Matisse. They were ascending different mountains.

  After signing Woman Throwing a Rock on March 8, Picasso moved back to Boisgeloup to switch from doing paintings of sculptures to doing sculptures in the round: solid, volumetric pieces that would not be soldered or welded but built up out of plaster. He gave Penrose one of many reasons for his change of course: “Pictures are never finished in the sense that they suddenly become ready to be signed and framed. They usually come to a halt when the time is ripe, because something happens which breaks the continuity of their development. When this happens it is often a good plan to return to sculpture.”22

  This might imply that for Picasso sculpture was merely an alternative to painting. It was not. Just as much of his sculpture would be about painting, or about blurring the distinctions between the two, sculpture was a lifelong obsession that went back to Picasso’s early days in Paris, when Gauguin’s friend and collaborator Paco Durrio, the Spanish ceramist, had taken him under his wing. Durrio had helped Gauguin create his Oviri23—the gruesome phallic figure of the Tahitian goddess of life and death that was intended for Gauguin’s grave. Hoping that Picasso would don Gauguin’s mantle, Durrio had urged him to use the same kiln for his early stoneware sculptures. He also told him of Gauguin’s age-old belief that if certain secrets were correctly observed, a lump of clay could be transformed into a golem.24 Through Durrio, Gauguin’s shamanic spirit had rubbed off on Picasso. Indeed, the great heads he was about to execute could be seen as Picasso’s Oviri s.25

  Perhaps to endear herself after landing him with endless litigation, Doña María sent her son a letter (June 7, 1931), thanking him for keeping her abreast of his work in progress:

  I needn’t tell you how happy I was to receive your letter, even if it took three months and the main reason for that was work. In Boisgeloup you will work at your ease because you have plenty of space and no one to bother you. I am enthusiastic to learn that you are working on sculptures, but since you are too lazy to write, I will never know what you are really doing. But in any case I already know that it will be good and different from everything else.26

  On the last day of March, Picasso commemorated his switch from two dimensions to three in a portrait of himself27 looking unusually tentative and modest and utterly devoid of charisma: evidently a craftsman. Two months later, he did one more painting. Entitled The Lamp,28 it depicts the doorway of the sculpture studio— a massive stone arch framing a plaster head of Marie-Thérèse. The head in the painting predates the ones Picasso was already working on. It goes back to a grisaille painting (dated April 1929),29 where it is contrasted with a sad and shadowy Olga: one of her earliest appearances in the fifth position. The Lamp implies that although Olga was the chatelaine of Boisgeloup, Marie-Thérèse, wreathed in tendrils of philo-dendron, was queen of the sculpture studio. His predilection for this plant, Picasso told Penrose, had to do with its “overwhelming vitality”: “He once left one that had been given him in Paris in the bathroom, where it would be sure to have plenty of water while he was away in the south. On his return he found that it had completely filled the little room with luxuriant growth and also completely blocked the drain with its roots.”30

  The hanging kerosene lamp in the painting of the studio where Picasso worked much of the night as well as most of the day was the only source of light in this as yet unelectrified area. When more illumination was called for, he left the double doors open so that the headlights of the Hispano-Suiza could flood the studio with light so bright that Picasso wore a peaked cap to protect his eyes. Until recently nobody realized that, as well as Brassaï’s celebrated photographs,31 there existed numerous snapshots taken by Picasso himself— recently discovered by his grandson, Bernard, in a family archive—which teach us a great deal more about these sculptures than Brassaï’s do. Picasso took them while he was actually on the job.

  Picasso. The Lamp, 1931. Oil on canvas, 162×130 cm. Private collection.

  These revelatory photographs were taken between early March and early July 1931. We can date the earlier out-of-doors ones by the foliage on the trees—bare, in bud, or in leaf—in the background. In the earliest, the studio is empty except for a large stove, which later vanishes—too big for this former stable?—and a single plaster figure some three meters tall. Preparatory drawings for this figure date back to the previous November,32 that is to say shortly before Picasso closed the icy studio down for the winter. He is unlikely to have embarked on this technically daunting Tall Figure—Spies’s title Large Sculpture33 is insufficiently specific—so late in the year.

  Once again, the subject is Daphne; once again, she is in flight, an ungainly right leg extended so far behind her that it needed propping up with a forked stick. This time, however, the nymph is turning into a tree rather than a shrub. Arms sprout from this toplofty Daphne, like branches from a tree trunk. Halfway up this treelike neck two small balls are squeezed together—breasts— and then it goes on and on, up and up, almost as high as Brancusi’s skyscraping Colonnes sans fin, which Picasso is likely to have wanted to challenge. The height of the piece necessitated a special ladder: a huge librarylike affair with a platform on top and massive legs, which appears in the background of some of the photographs.

  Tall Figure in the sculpture studio at Boisgeloup, 1931.

  Whatever Picasso used as an armature for the Tall Figure, it failed to hold up. The piece fell apart. Unfortunately, González was no longer around to repair it. Picasso never found a replacement for him. In 1937 he failed to steal Jean van Dongen—the painter’s brother—away from Maillol. González would be his only sculptural collaborator until he embarked on his metal cutouts in the early 1960s. It would always be a matter of pride for Picasso to do the heaving and hoisting himself. He was extremely strong and regarded these chores as an integral part of the creative process. For heavier work he could count on his concierge, or chauffeur, or the farm workers.

  Whether the Tall Figure was ever actually finished is unclear. It was too fragile to cast and never properly photographed. This is the more regrettable since it
would be further damaged in World War II, possibly by French soldiers retreating from the advancing Germans. As Picasso told Penrose, the French did a lot of damage during their brief occupation of Boisgeloup.34 And so, sadly, this arboreal Daphne never joined the shrublike Marie-Thérèse in Picasso’s park.

  The sculpture studio at Boisgeloup, 1931.

  After World War II, Picasso told Spies “over a tray of tea” that he intended to restore this second Daphne:

  “When I am gone, no one will be able to put it back together again.” Pointing to the tray in front of him, he added: “As if one were to give tea, butter and jam to someone who had come into the world without knowing what they were for. What would he do with them? Maybe he would wash his feet in the tea, spread the jam on his head, and want red or blue butter instead of yellow.”35

  Nothing came of the restoration project and in due course the fragments disappeared. At least so it was thought. On a visit to the artist’s widow at Notre-Dame-de-Vie in the late 1970s, I wandered into a gatehouse used for storage and came upon a large crate filled with plaster fragments, which looked as if they might once have added up to Picasso’s tallest sculpture. But who knows? When I went to tell Jacqueline, she had been taken ill and was in no condition to deal with the problem.36

  After the Tall Figure, Picasso devoted the next three months to a group of plasters, all but one of which were inspired by Marie-Thérèse. He was out to prove to the world that he was as great a sculptor as he was a painter. Matisse was very much in his sights; so was Brancusi. The earliest of the Boisgeloup photographs— the bare trees of March can be seen in the background—reveal that Picasso had completed the basic modeling of the two large heads within a few weeks of starting work. Initially, both of them had strikingly long necks—the only feature they share with the Tall Figure—but these would be modified. To differentiate between the two heads, Spies calls one of them Bust of a Woman and the slightly larger one Head of a Woman.37 The studio photographs reveal that Picasso had progressively shortened the Bust of a Woman’s originally giraffe-like neck, and had also added breasts to the figure’s armless chest. These give it the look of a crouching sphinx. Its phallic nose is a reference to Marie-Thérèse’s most prominent feature—a feature she disliked and Picasso admired. The artist evidently had trouble articulating the head and neck until he had added breasts to the base.

  Above and right: Picasso’s attempts to combine his plasters of Marie-Thérèse, Head of a Woman and Bust of a Woman, while working on them in his sculpture studio at Boisgeloup, 1931.

  The companion piece—which Spies calls Head of a Woman—is almost as much a portrayal of Picasso’s genitals as it is of Marie-Thérèse. The nose is an extension of the flange of Marie-Thérèse’s hair, which in turn is an extension of the buttocky back of her head. By once again substituting his penis for her nose, but adding testicular eyeballs on either side of its base, Picasso endows this sculpture with primeval mystery and power—characteristics that the submissive Marie-Thérèse lacked.

  Left and above: Two more examples of Picasso’s experimental arrangements of his two plasters.

  One of the most surprising things about these photographs is Picasso’s attempt to merge the two heads into one. He tries this out by setting them out in the courtyard on a sculptor’s turntable in a variety of bizarre combinations. Back to back, they look as if he had a two-headed Janus figure in mind; and indeed dualities—sun and moon, sea and sky, night and day—are a theme of much of this period’s work. However, nothing would come of this idea. Face to face, the heads look slightly comical— Eskimos rubbing noses—but as he pushes them closer and closer, the purpose of these juxtapositions becomes clear. Picasso is out to maneuver them into a Kiss— one that would outdo Brancusi’s famously fused kissing couple of 1909. Shortly before turning to sculpture, he had done this with horrifying success in a painting of the two faces inexorably clamped together in a brutally toothy kiss.38 This proved to be impossible to duplicate in plaster. The huge noses got in the way. All that remains of these experiments are these extraordinary photographs. Another revelation: they bear out an illuminating statement Picasso made to Brassaï: “For a sculpture to attain maximum rotundity, the bright parts must be much brighter than the rest of the surface, the dark parts much darker. It’s that simple.”39 Photographs enabled Picasso to see how his sculptures took the light and how they would appear from different viewpoints—factors he never had to consider in his paintings.

  Left: Picasso. Bust of a Woman, 1931. Bronze, 78×44.5×54 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. Right: Brassaï. Photograph of Picasso’s Head of a Woman (1931, bronze, 86×32×48.5 cm). Musée Picasso, Paris. © Estate Brassaï-RMN.

  Some of Brassaï’s most arresting photographs of the sculptures were taken at night. As Penrose reports:

  Working at night in the studio at Boisgeloup [Picasso] had first built up a very complicated construction of wire, which looked quite incomprehensible except when a light [presumably from the headlights of the Hispano-Suiza] projected its shadow on the wall. At that moment the shadow became a lifelike profile of Marie-Thérèse. He was delighted at this projection from an otherwise undecipherable mass. But he said, “I went on, added plaster and gave it its present form.” The secret image was lost.40

  Since the third and largest of these heads does not appear in Picasso’s photographs, it must have been done later—possibly when he returned to Boisgeloup at the end of the summer or even the following year. However, since this head is so similar to its predecessors, it needs to be seen in their light. Arguably the artist’s greatest sculpture, the third Head of a Woman,41 is larger and nobler than the two others. Picasso was evidently determined that this was going to be a masterpiece—an advertisement for himself as a supreme modern sculptor. Although conceivably intended to be the cynosure of the upcoming Georges Petit show, the culminant head would not be ready in time. Brassaï’s December 1932 photographs confirm that there was still work to be done on the neck.

  Less overtly phallic than its predecessors, this phenomenal Head is indebted to two remarkable objects that Picasso had moved to Boisgeloup: a rhinoceros skull with two large horns, which, as he certainly knew, were prized as aphrodisiacs; and a massive Nimba fertility mask42 that he had owned since before 1918.43 He had installed it just inside the front door to the château as if on guard. Besides its awe-inspiring profile, the four-foot-high mask boasts a pair of pendulous breasts, flat as tongues. The shamanic power with which Picasso endowed his Nimba-inspired mask may have proved effective, to judge by Marie-Thérèse’s pregnant belly in MoMA’s all too famil- iar Girl before a Mirror.44 Marie-Thérèse would not give birth until 1935, but Picasso’s desire for a child might well be reflected in the fullness and repleteness of his Boisgeloup heads—the feeling that they are imbued with inner life.

  Right: Picasso. Head of a Woman, 1932. Plaster and wood, 128.5×54.5×62.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Below: Picasso’s Nimba fertility mask, Baga culture of Guinea. Wood and iron, 126×59×64 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Brassaï. Photograph of Picasso’s Head of a Woman (1931, bronze, 50×31×27 cm). Private collection. © Estate Brassaï-RMN.

  Golding’s apt comparison of the largest head’s beak of a nose to “a crowing cock symbol from time immemorial of rampant male sexuality”45 helps to explain a seemingly pointless snapshot of chickens pecking in the dirt. Picasso executed these sculptures to the accompaniment of squawks from the basse-cour and roucoule-ments from the doves in the dovecote behind the studio. Back in Boisgeloup earlier this fall or the following year, he would model a quintessential hen and a heraldic rooster.46 The lowing of cattle in the fields—rented like the basse-cour to a local farmer—might account for the large bull’s head47 that Picasso would do around this time. These farmyard noises would have been new to the artist, who was city born and bred. Rural life was a total change from the city or the beach. Painting the countryside would never be his thing, but he relished the sounds and the sme
lls and the earthiness.

  Watch how a number of these photographs depict the creation of the great bas-relief of Marie-Thérèse in profile.48 Picasso sets out to evoke the monumentality he was achieving volumetrically in a shallow space that limited him to a single viewpoint. To gauge how the light heightened chiaroscuro, he had the relief positioned outdoors at different angles. Plaster crumbs on the cobblestones confirm that adjustments were made on the spot. It is fascinating to watch Picasso reworking and darkening the area between eye and nostril, gouging out the cleft delineating the cheek and adding light-catching bulges to forehead and hair. Though small, these changes transformed an initially bland Maillolesque relief into a radical rethinking of a traditional form of classical sculpture. Besides checking the changes against photographs, Picasso evidently checked Marie-Thérèse’s nose against his own—and decided she should have his. Two years later, he would do a smaller, more spontaneous version of this relief;49 coils of wet plaster seemingly squeezed out of a tube give this profile the look of a large ear.

  At the same time Picasso was working on yet another neoclassical portrait head of Marie-Thérèse.50 He wanted to outdo Maillol—ironically, the first person to spot that the Gertrude Stein portrait was derived from Ingres’s Monsieur Bertin51—and he succeeded. The delicacy and precision with which the girl’s head is tilted makes for a tenderness that is missing from the other sculptures. Picasso took the pose from a neoclassical plaster cast, still to be found, although pretty much wrecked, in the Boisgeloup studio. He has harkened back to the Mediterranean classicism of his youth, as exemplified by his sculptor friends Manolo, Pablo Gargallo, and Enric Casanovas. Indeed this head is remarkably close to the sharply chiseled heads of Casanovas.52