A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Brassaï. Photograph of Picasso’s Head of a Woman (1931, plaster, 69×60×10 cm). Private collection. © Estate Brassaï-RMN.

  Another consideration: although Picasso had long ago internalized Marie-Thérèse’s features, he had not yet done a representational sculpture of her and needed to reexplore the head of this straightforward girl in a straightforward, classical way. Allowances must also be made for the pleasure Picasso took in showing off his sculptural virtuosity, just as he showed off his graphic mastery in order to validate his more difficult modernist work and demonstrate his infinite technical superiority to academic detractors.

  Picasso also worked on four other plasters. One of them is a smallish, tentative head that appears for the one and only time in the background of some of the photographs. Dakin Hart discerns a distinct resemblance to Brancusi’s La Baronne (1920),53 which is perhaps why it did not survive. Another perplexing piece is a mo-dello: a smallish seated figure in a traditionally masculine pose54—strong arms planted on strong thighs. Were it not for flattish breasts and a tiny head taken from the neolithic Venus de Lespugue, this figure could be taken for a man. This hybrid has nothing to do with Marie-Thérèse or Olga. The androgynous pose recalls Picasso’s Gertrude Stein portrait, but she was short and sturdy and this figure has very long legs. Although it is the only failure of this triumphant summer, there is a particularly aggrandizing photograph of it. Hart has an explanation. He suggests that just as Picasso derived some of the distortions for the smaller of his two great heads, Bust of a Woman, from Matisse’s radically pared-down Jeanette V (1916), he may also have wanted to go one better than another Matisse: the magnificent Large Seated Nude of 1917.55 But this time he did not succeed. Usually a synthesizer of genius, Picasso was unable to get neolithic primitivism, Hellenic classicism, neoclassical mannerism, and Matisse to meld.

  Right: Picasso. Bust of a Woman, 1931. Plaster, 62.5×28×41.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Lastly, two other more abstract plasters both of which refer to Marie-Thérèse: the earlier one56 con-fusingly entitled Bust of a Woman is yet another bid on Picasso’s part to envision his mistress in the guise of his and her genitalia. Its brash, priapic look is reminiscent of the Isernian ex-votos, also of Bran-cusi’s ithyphallic Princess X (1916).57 The photographer Xavier Lucchesi has used an X-ray scanner to make a number of fascinating discoveries inside Picasso’s sculptures.58 Inside the Bust of a Woman he has found an armature consisting of a tangle of thick wire that has been fashioned into a stick figure. This find reminds me of the secret that MoMA’s researchers discovered when they shined an infrared light onto Miró’s early masterpiece The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) and found a print of Ferdinand and Isabella welcoming Columbus back from the New World carefully buried under the paint. The gauzelike stuff that Picasso has wrapped around the stick figure’s waist gives it the look of a dancer in a tutu. Like Miró, Picasso was evidently having his own secret joke—Olga inside Marie-Thérèse. Though less spectacular, Lucchesi’s other finds are nonetheless interesting in their revelation of Picasso’s rough-and-ready methods. Some of the armatures consist of very large nails and screws bound together with wire in such a way that they resemble figures. As a result, three sculptures made of twisted wire illustrated in Spies’s catalog can now be seen to have started life as armatures and were either not used or elaborated upon.59

  The other at first sight nonfigurative piece—yet another Head of a Woman — appears to have been prompted by the sight of Marie-Thérèse reading, as she liked to for hours on end, her head cradled in her hand, while Picasso worked. There are countless carnet studies for this piece, where it is whittled down to four separate elements: a potato head with a penile excrescence of a nose, a bone-shaped forearm, a banana-shaped hank of hair and a small orb at the center—eyeball?—which holds everything together in precarious equilibrium. The only trouble with this piece is that over the last two decades Brancusi had been doing numerous variations on a very similar configuration. Brancusi did not keep his resentment to himself. He asked his friend the Romanian sculptor Jacques Hérold, “What’s with this painter who is now making sculpture? He steals from me, he came [to my studio] to steal from me

  Left: Picasso. Head of a Woman, 1931. Plaster, 71.5×41×33 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris. Right: Constantin Brancusi. Muse, 1912. Marble, 45×23×17 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

  Difficult and mistrustful to a paranoiac degree, Brancusi had never liked Picasso. For invading the sacrosanct field of sculpture, he disliked him even more. Their relationship had got off to a bad start. Circa 1908, Picasso had invited Brancusi to visit his studio at a certain time on a certain day. The sculptor had showed up, but finding nobody at home, left a note. The next day, an embarrassed Picasso knocked on Bran-cusi’s door. Asked to identify himself, he did. “I don’t know you, sir,” Brancusi said, and slammed the door in his visitor’s face.60616263 After that, they barely spoke, except behind each other’s backs. Their mutual friend, Jean Cassou, remembered Picasso comparing Brancusi, who was forever polishing his surfaces, to “a cleaning-woman who spends all day polishing her pots.”64

  Sometime in 1929, Brancusi was prevailed upon—seemingly by González, in the hope that the two sculptors he worked with would bond—to overcome his resentment and allow Picasso to visit his studio. Picasso had recently (1928) done a drawing of a plaster version of the ovoid Beginning of the World, which Brancusi had given González. He would certainly have seen Brancusi’s photographs of his own work—works of art in their own right—that had appeared in two recent issues of Cahiers d’Art6566 Nevertheless, Picasso was very eager to see the rival shaman’s lair and study the infinite variations that Brancusi had played on the egg and other basic forms. To judge by the studio photographs, Picasso still had difficulty grounding his pieces. Brancusi paid particular attention to this, setting his sculptures on the simplest and subtlest of plinths as well as on carefully contrived socles that became part of them.

  It was rash of Picasso to help himself to Brancusi’s Muse (1912)—a long-necked girl sometimes described as goiterous, with a hand up to her face—and use an almost identical pose for his Head of a Woman. He may have kidded himself that he was taking the idea a stage further, but in Brancusi’s case that was virtually impossible. Brancusi was a perfectionist who took every work as far as it could be taken— technically, stylistically, and philosophically. No one ever succeeded in beating him at his own game. Picasso has given his Head of a Woman a brilliant parodic twist, but it lacks the integrity and the conviction of Brancusi’s original.

  Given his belief that art should be profoundly serene and joyful, Brancusi was anything but an admirer of Picasso or his work. He inveighed against his indulgence in the “tragic and dramatic,”67 as the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung would a year later. Brancusi also disapproved of another of Picasso’s fundamental characteristics—one that was all too familiar to the latter’s fellow artists and friends—his habit of making off not so much with their ideas as with their energy. “Picasso is a cannibal,” Brancusi said.68 He had a point. After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it. Brancusi hailed from vampire country and knew about such things, and he was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy appropriated by Picasso. Some of us—myself, for one—prided ourselves on having made a contribution, however paltry, to his work.

  By the end of June, Picasso, who had taken his big heads as far as he could, was ready for a break. He had chores to do and people to see in Paris before leaving for the south in mid-July. There was also the sale of Breton’s and Eluard’s collections of tribal art at the Hôtel Drouôt, July 2-3, which he is likely to have attended. On July 3, Picasso had arranged to visit González, but took Olga to collect their new identity cards instead. On the fourth, Picasso was back at Boisgeloup doing engravings: rap
es inspired by Ovid and self-referential scenes of a classical sculptor—as noble and meditative as the the Farnese Hercules—sitting with a model in his studio.69 This series, which would ultimately include one hundred plates and occupy him for the next three years,70 had been commissioned by Vollard, who had vowed to stop Picasso from defecting to Skira.71 On July 11, Picasso attended the vernissage of Paul Jamot’s revelatory exhibition, Degas, Portraitiste, Sculpteur at the Orangerie: it was the first definitive show of this artist’s work since his death, and it included a set of Degas’s virtually unknown sculptures, which Hébrard had recently cast and sold to the Louvre. Among them was the little bust of Rose Caron with her hand up to her face—which would have reminded Picasso as well as Brancusi of their own renderings of a similar subject.72

  Picasso never took much interest in Degas’s paintings. He preferred the sculptures and above all the monotypes, some of which Vollard had used to illustrate La Maison Tellier, Maupassant’s novel about a brothel’s holiday outing. Twenty-five years later, Picasso coveted a small, sexually explicit monotype, from Maurice Ex-steens’s famed collection, which I had acquired. He was so captivated by it that I gave it to him; he went on to acquire several more monotypes from Exsteen’s collection. Much later, they would inspire a series of brilliant brothel scenes. Many of these engravings feature an elderly artist who is drawing the girls at their work. Lines connect his eyes to his subject.73 This voyeur is a curious hybrid: Picasso’s painter father, who was addicted to whores, in the guise of Degas. “I like to improve people’s circumstances for them,”74 as the artist used to say of his earliest portraits of family and friends back in Barcelona. Over the next few years, Picasso would do exactly that for Marie-Thérèse and the reverse for his wife. Portrayals of the latter are often the more powerful.

  Picasso standing in front of his Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust (1932, oil on canvas, 164.4×132 cm. Private collection), rue la Boétie, 1932. Photograph by Cecil Beaton. Courtesy Sotheby’s.

  38

  Annus Mirabilis II—The Paintings (1931-32)

  On July 16, 1931, the Picasso family set off in the Hispano-Suiza for the Riviera. Since they intended to visit Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas at Bilignin, as they had done the previous year, they took a roundabout route. A bill from the Hôtel Pernollet nearby at Belley confirms that they spent the night of July 16 there.1 It was apparently on this occasion that

  Gertrude brought up the subject of Alice’s needlework. “Alice wants to make a tapestry of that little picture,” she said, pointing to one of his paintings, “and I said I would trace it for her.” Picasso, of course, would have no one tamper with his work. “… If it is done by anybody … it will be done by me,” he replied. Quickly, Gertrude places a piece of tapestry in front of him. “Well, go to it.”2

  Picasso was particularly fond of Alice and enjoyed teasing her. He designed two seat covers and chair backs for her to stitch.3 One has a large, white, disembodied hand woven into the pattern so that anyone using the chair would, as it were, feel the artist fondling them. The other includes trompe l’oeil patterned wallpaper, a chair rail, and the corner of a frame, suggesting that the chair back is transparent. During the war, the Germans looted the footstool that completed the ensemble.

  On this visit, Picasso had good reason to keep his hostesses happy. He wanted Gertrude to lend the finest of her paintings to his retrospective at the Galeries Georges Petit the following year. Gertrude was already at work on her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; and she welcomed the chance to mull over the past. The immensely readable, infuriatingly self-promotional account of their early years in Paris that Gertrude put into Alice’s mouth would include embarrassing stories about Picasso’s personal relationships and imply that he owed his fame to Gertrude rather than to her far more artistically perceptive brother Leo. When the book came out in 1933 it would be a best seller, despite a pamphlet included in an issue of the avant-garde magazine transition, in which Matisse, Braque, and other former friends accused Gertrude of flagrant inaccuracies.4

  After leaving Bilignin, Picasso made a further detour, this time into Switzerland. He was anxious to visit Dr. G. F. Reber at his Château de Béthusy in Lausanne. Reber had liquidated his magnificent post-impressionist collection—among much else it had included twenty-eight paintings by Cézanne—in order to assemble the world’s most comprehensive collection of cubism and also the world’s largest collection of Picasso.5 The artist hoped to persuade Reber to lend major works to next year’s retrospective. Since the collector’s speculations on the Paris Bourse were souring, he agreed. Most of his loans to the show would be discreetly for sale.

  Above: Villa Chêne-Roc as it was when Picasso rented it, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes. Monuments Historiques.

  Right: Picasso. Villa Chêne Roc at Juan-les-Pins, 1931. Oil on canvas, 33×55 cm. Musée Picasso, Antibes.

  After a couple of days including a luncheon in their honor at the Château de Béthusy, the Picassos made their way slowly to the Riviera, where they rented a villa at Juan-les-Pins for the month of August. It was across the road overlooking La Vigie, the castellated house they had rented in 1924. Picasso’s paintings of the Villa Chêne-Roc depict a wedding-cake baroque mansion, with a grandiose flight of balustraded steps leading up to it. As a contemporary photograph reveals, it is in fact a charming, smallish house with a high raked roof like a chapel, balustraded balconies, and a skimpy flight of steps. To upgrade its appearance, Picasso aggrandized the steps with dramatic volutes; these features appear not only in paintings of the house but in paintings of Marie-Thérèse. Her massive volute-like arms reach out to gather the viewer into her architectural embrace.

  For the first week or so at Juan-les-Pins, Picasso relaxed, mostly with Marie-Thérèse, who was installed in the neighborhood, with one of her sisters to keep her company. They spent much of their time on the beach. The Murphys were no longer around—they had rented the Villa America and taken their sick son to the United States—so Picasso could take the girls to the beach at La Garoupe without fear of detection or distraction.

  On August 2, Picasso resumed drawing the same classical sculptor-and-model subjects he had been doing at Boisgeloup.67 Two days later, he executed a heavily worked variation on this theme.8 The balustrade and palm fronds outside the window are true to Chêne Roc. Inside the villa, a bearded, bare-chested sculptor is working on a reduced version of a life-size statue conceivably of Galatea in a state of metamorphosis. Picasso teasingly leaves us in two minds as to whether his Galatea is flesh or plaster. Partially hidden, crouching at his knee, Marie-Therese is rendered in chiaroscuro hatching of utmost delicacy. Later in the month he did a couple of oil sketches,9 similar in subject, but nothing like as evocative as the drawing in which he transports himself back to Antipolis.

  Picasso. The Sculptor and His Model, August 4, 1931. Pen and India ink on paper, 32.4×25.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  After a few more drawings in this vein,10 Picasso did a number of sketches for the sculpture of a reclining figure,11 which he had been planning for months and would finally realize on his return to Boisgeloup. And then, on Sunday, August 16, he turned his attention to a subject entirely new to him. A forest fire had broken out in the hills back of Mougins and Vallauris12—an area where Picasso would spend his last twenty-five years of life. The spectacle of the façade of the Villa Chêne-Roc against a starlit night sky obscured by flames and smoke excited him. Between August 15 and 23 he did five colorful paintings—only one a daylight view— of the fiery scene.13

  At the end of August, Picasso and his family returned to Paris via Bilignin, once again to see Gertrude and Alice, who enjoyed fussing over Olga. Their stay was brief and wet—so much rain that a swan had ended up in Gertrude’s garden. The day after they left, Gertrude wrote Picasso that she was worried about his leg—probably sciatica—and suggested he visit a Dr. Crosset, who would see there would be no recurrence.14 Their on-again, off-again friendship appeared to be as close as ever; in fact,
the dynamics of it had totally changed.

  In earlier days, Gertrude’s understanding of Picasso’s work, such as it was, had depended on her involvement in his life as well as with the women in his life. Picasso had never told Gertrude about Marie-Thérèse, let alone introduced them. In revenge, Gertrude, who certainly realized what was going on, wrote off the entire period with which this girl is identified.

  From 1927 to 1935 [Gertrude wrote in her 1938 book on Picasso] the souls of people commenced to dominate him and his vision … lost itself in interpretation.… in these years … for the first time, the interpretations destroyed his own vision so that he made forms not seen but conceived. All this is difficult to put into words but the distinction is plain and clear, it is why he stopped working. The only way to purge himself of a vision which was not his was to cease to express it, so that as it was impossible for him to do nothing he made poetry15

  Gertrude’s emphasis on the dates of Marie-Thérèse’s reign are a giveaway. With no link to Picasso’s mistress, she decided she had no obligation to like his work. And so in her ruthless self-centrism, Gertrude denounced his most innovative period since cubism, and in doing so disqualified herself as a champion of his art. The reason for her negativism—lèse-majesté—would indeed have been “difficult to put into words.” By the mid-1920s, Gertrude’s inner bell, which had once upon a time rung only for genius, now rang only for duds like Sir Francis Rose.

  On his return to Boisgeloup, Picasso set about realizing his long mulled-over plan to extend the plaster of Marie-Thérèse with the hand up to her head into a full-length, reclining figure consisting of separate elements. Drawings in a sketchbook confirm that as early as May 26-27,16 he had contemplated adding a boomeranglike torso, which would have transformed the pose into a curvaceous crouch—a pose he conceptualized from different angles. Later in the same sketchbook, Picasso elongates the body to its fullest extent by adding legs as well as arms and testicular looking buttocks. This would be the prototype of the piecemeal reclining nude sculpture that he now began to work on. A photograph of Olga in a bathing costume on the beach clutching an inner tube—very like a figure in one of the drawings—confirms that Picasso had no compunction about mixing up his women’s attributes.