Picasso’s penchant for dismemberment and reattachment had manifested itself the previous December in drawings in which he redistributes body parts as if he were redesigning humanity. Hands emerge from necks, heads from ankles, a conjoined pair of amputated legs clutch a disembodied arm. Just as he had jolted us into seeing eyes and noses anew by repositioning them in his paintings, Picasso was now ready to go even further and do sculptures that could be dismantled and reassembled in different ways. As he said, he loved displacing things: “To put eyes between the legs, or sex organs on the face. To contradict. To show one eye full face and one in profile. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them.”17
Another possible reason for Picasso’s interest in dismemberment: from earliest childhood, he had been aware that disembodied limbs had played a memorable role in one of the most celebrated events in Málaga’s history. This had taken place in 1487, during the reconquest of Spain by the Catholic kings, in the Moorish castle of the Gibralfaro and the Alcazaba, whose ruins had served as Picasso’s playground. In the rubble of what had once been hanging gardens, Gypsy kids had taught him how to smoke a cigarette up his nostril, as well as the rudiments of flamenco. Sabartès remembered Picasso describing how beggars and Gypsies used to sit “delousing one another in the sun among the whiffs of orange flower and drying excrement and children up to the age of twelve ran naked.”18
In his book Islamic Spain, Professor L. P. Harvey recounts what had transpired at the Gibralfaro:19 a venerable hermit called Ibrahim al-Jarbi had had a vision in which Allah instructed him to proclaim a jihad. Putting himself at the head of four hundred adherents, he advanced on Málaga’s Gibralfaro, where the King and Queen were encamped with a retinue that included Don Alvaro of Portugal and his wife, Doña Felipa. After contriving to be captured in the course of the attack, Ibrahim asked to be taken to the King and Queen; he had a secret that he would divulge only to them.
The King was having a siesta, so the venerable hermit was taken instead to Don Alvaro, who was playing chess with his wife. Ibrahim did not understand Castilian. Mistaking the richly arrayed Don Alvaro for the King, the holy man lunged at him with a sword hidden in his garments, wounding him severely. Doña Felipa’s screams for help alerted a treasury official who subdued the holy man. Ibrahim was subsequently cut up by the King’s retainers. The Spaniards catapulted bits of Ibrahim’s dismembered body back at the Moors occupying the city, with the message, “There you have him—he came on land and we are sending him back by air.” The Moors “collected the remains of Ibrahim, sewing him together with silk thread, washing them with scented water, and they made a shroud for the body. With weeping and sadness, they buried him.”20
Gijs van Hensbergen—author of an excellent book on the Spanish roots of Guernica—believes that the dismemberment of Ibrahim al-Jarbi’s body inspired some of Guernica’s imagery21 A fascinating insight, but Ibrahim’s story is also relevant to Picasso’s Reclining Figure: a sculpture “originally made in separate pieces.” Picasso told Penrose “that he had wanted to move the pieces around—arms and breasts, head and body, leg-leg—But when cast in bronze, they were fixed together.”22 Bras-saï’s photograph of the plâtre originale, taken a year later, reveals that there were indeed two separate sections divided at the waist. These are what the caster “fixed together.” Ironically, it would be Henry Moore, a sculptor Picasso never much liked, who took over the idea and, a few years later, started chopping up his reclining figures.
In the wake of the Matisse-Picasso show, discussed in the previous chapter, this
Reclining Figure has inevitably been seen, with some justice, as a response to Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (1907)23 and the succession of bronzes of reclining figures in a similar pose that he did over the next two decades. No doubt about it, Picasso “rummaged through Matisse’s catalogue of sculptural forms— seated nudes, reclining nudes and heads—in a bid to go one better,”24 but Matisse is only part of the story. In his Reclining Figure, Picasso pits himself against all the reclining nudes in history from antiquity onward, not just the Ariadnes and Artemises of the Hellenistic tradition, but their progeny in works by Titian and Rubens, Ingres, Courbet, and Renoir, as well as Matisse. Picasso’s astonishing visual memory and digestive powers enabled him to assimilate all the above and “create and populate an alternative Picassian antiquity.”25 Reclining Figure thus constitutes a supremely important Picassian synthesis, which would help to shunt the classical rendition of figural sculpture onto a new modernist track.
Right: Venus of Lespugue, c. 25,000 B.C. Ivory, ht. 14.7 cm. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.
Far right: Picasso. Bather, 1931. Bronze, 70×40.2×31.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Below: Picasso. Reclining Figure, 1931. Bronze, 23×72×31 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Back at Boisgeloup, summer memories of Marie-Thérèse and her sister frolicking on the beach prompted four playful, plaster figures, which appear to be moving— a total change from the earthbound stasis of his Boisgeloup sculptures. To simulate the effortless friskiness of his Dinard pictures, Picasso has simply given these little plasters a rhythmic twist so that Marie-Thérèse and her playmates can cavort three-dimensionally, just as they did two-dimensionally at Dinard. The larger of these Bathers reveals how, in quest of movement and getting, as Leo Steinberg puts it, “recto and verso to cohabit,”2627 Picasso has resorted to classical contrapposto, as exemplified by the Callipygian Venus he had admired in the Naples Museum. Contrapposto gives his figure a spiral twist that is almost futurist. Protuberances below the neck can be interpreted as either breasts or rudimentary arms. As well as exploring contrapposto in plaster, Picasso would explore it in the elegiac engravings of the Vollard Suite—meditations on a sculptor’s complex feelings for his model and his work in the light and shadow of Galatean ambiguity—which would preoccupy him over the next two years.
The light-footed dancer serves as a tryout for a culminant Bather sculpture. Notwithstanding its bottom-heaviness—her huge feet stuck in the wet sand as she struggles out of the sea—this sculpture has the same callipygian twist as the modello. Back and front twirl into one. Its eerie little head, which derives from the Venus de Lespugue, suggests that this piece is a fertility symbol. Compact as a netsuke, the head makes the body look larger than it is, and endows it with a mythic presence. Despite its bulk, this figure—like one of those fat girls who turn out to be nimble dancers—indubitably has rhythm.
Picasso then sets sculpture aside for a year or so and returns to his easel. The first manifestation of this is a large still life done on September 22, of a square-handled jug alongside a corny arrangement of flowers in a vase that looks like an inverted straw hat;28 however, for once the irony, which usually redeems Picasso’s kitschy flower arrangement, is missing. In this work Picasso returns to the charcoal-on-canvas technique, which he would use to great effect over the next few years. The rough nub of canvas proved an ideal surface for black chalk, charcoal, and on occasion sanguine.29 This technique allows the artist to do monumental drawings in which graphic precision is played off against a web of misty, out-of-focus contours.
On October 25, 1931, Picasso had to face the fact of his fiftieth birthday. For someone so fearful of mortality and so conscious of all he had to achieve, this anniversary must have been an enormous challenge. Skira celebrated the occasion with a party, ostensibly in honor of the new edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which the artist had finished engraving (all but the half-page illustrations) exactly one year earlier. Picasso was delighted with the book as well as with the hyperactive Skira, who would remain a friend for life. Ovidian allusions would surface in many of the paintings he was about to start on for next year’s retrospective. Picasso hoped that besides establishing his supremacy as a modern master, the Herculean bouts of painting and sculpture engendered by his fiftieth birthday would somehow keep age and death at bay.
The initial work in what would turn out to be one of the most sustained creati
ve feats of his career is an allegorical self-portrait dated December 7.30 Picasso portrays himself in his new role as a Hellenistic sculptor taking his ease in his studio, wiggling his toes, twiddling his fingers as he contemplates his recent work: a crouching nude and a large head of Marie-Thérèse. She is also the subject of a tiny framed painting hanging behind his head. Note how the superstitious artist holds his fingers up to his face “horned” against the evil eye; and how he bisects his head—half shadowy painter, half classical sculptor. Even his legs and arms are different colors. As Picasso would explain to Françoise Gilot some fifteen years later, when showing her a similar subject in the Vollard Suite:
“[The artist is] a little mixed up…. He’s not sure of which way he wants to work. Of course if you note all the different shapes, sizes, and colors of models he works from, you can understand his confusion. He doesn’t know what he wants. No wonder his style is so ambiguous. It’s like God’s. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor. First he works from nature; then he tries abstraction. Finally he winds up lying around caressing his models.”31
Picasso had continued to conceal Marie-Thérèse from the world in his paintings as well as in his life, but that was about to change. That Olga was almost certainly aware of her existence made concealment less necessary; however, she still made terrible scenes and occasionally had to be sedated. Picasso’s thoughts began to turn to divorce,32 with a view not so much to marrying Marie-Thérèse, Picasso told his wife Jacqueline, as to ridding himself of Olga.
The first of the new portrayals of Marie-Thérèse—identifiable though not always recognizable—that Picasso painted for his retrospective the following June was The Red Armchair (Art Institute of Chicago).33 Dated December 16, it is executed on a panel in oil paint and Ripolin, and is as far removed from sculpture as possible. The image is flat and stylized as a playing card, the face as lunar as the man in the moon’s. To temper the hieratic look of this very unhieratic girl, Picasso wraps her in a fur tippet that doubles as her arms and ends comically in twin white tails suggestive of fingers. This time the red armchair that had rat-trapped Olga looks positively benevolent.
For Picasso, as for most Spaniards, Christmas was not a major festival (the January 6 feast of Three Kings takes precedence), but as a dutiful father, he was obliged to celebrate it. He was in a far from festive mood. One of Olga’s hemorrhage-related crises was about to trigger what is perhaps his cruelest exorcism of her: Woman with a Stiletto.34 On December 19 Picasso had begun his blood-soaked reenactment of Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, while the revolutionary demagogue revered as l’ami du peuple35 was soaking in his bath. The subject derives from Jacques-Louis David’s iconic portrayal of the event: a painting that Picasso greatly admired.36
To distance himself as far as possible from David’s secular Crucifixion, Picasso came up with an image that is all the more harrowing for being crass and carica-tural. At first sight, Woman with a Stiletto looks like a large rough sketch. Marat has the same minute head and body as the self-referential Christ in his Crucifixion, painted almost exactly a year before. Besides being stabbed in the heart, the Marat/Picasso figure is about to be snapped up in Corday/Olga’s toothy maw. Picasso takes the same preposterous liberties with scale that he took in the Crucifixion. The disproportionately large leg and foot (bottom center) belong to the otherwise minuscule Marat. Their odd shape may stem from the weird-looking bath in which Marat was actually murdered. This was no Davidian sarcophagus: it was a therapeutic contrivance shaped like a huge boot that alleviated the appalling skin disease—incessant itching and peeling—that Marat had contracted while a fugitive hiding in the sewers. Anecdotal details are all Picasso took from David: the letter from Corday that Marat holds in his hand and the governmental report that he had been reading.
The bloodstains in the David are very discreet; Picasso serves up oozing gobs of vermilion gore which end up as the red in a tricolor flag. This grotesquely farcical approach suggests that for Picasso demonic mockery was the most effective way to exorcise Olga’s murderous threats.37 Better that he should purge himself of his wrath on canvas rather than on her. Meanwhile, he had to celebrate Christmas en famille. When they split up in 1934, Picasso would do an even more fiendish drawing of the murder of Marat.38 This time round, a maniacal Olga is cutting Marie-Thérèse’s throat with a gigantic knife.
Picasso finished this Woman with a Stiletto on Christmas Day. While he was working on it, Olga had been busy arranging an elaborate tea party for Paulo and his friends as well as the Picassos’ inner circle—in an effort, perhaps, to demonstrate what a united family they were. The party would take place on December 30 and, surprisingly, at Boisgeloup. Olga’s memo has survived.39 Presents included sixteen dolls, seventeen toy cars, eight ducks, ten fountain pens, fourteen necklaces, cotillion favors, and candy. Her guest list was equally meticulous: four boys, four girls, eighteen adults, among them the André Levels, the Kahnweilers, the Lascauxs (Bero Las-caux had become and would remain very close to Olga), Zette Leiris (Michel was in Africa on the Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic Expedition), the Ortizes, the Pellequers, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Vollard, and Lifar. How the unheatable château was heated for the occasion, we do not know.
The catharsis of portraying Olga as Charlotte Corday left Picasso all the readier to adulate Marie-Thérèse. Three days later, he did a languorous, loving painting of lilac-skinned Marie-Thérèse asleep, her head cradled in flipperlike arms.40 On December 30, the day of the Christmas party, Picasso found time to turn her into a swirl of arabesques:41 a lunar octopus, which reminds us that he had associated her with the phases of the moon the previous summer. By January 2, Marie-Thérèse’s moon face is full, her eyes stare us down.42 The fuzzy print in the open book that this moon goddess clutches in her anaconda arms signifies pubic hair. Over the next three weeks, Picasso produced a succession of large (size 100) Marie-Thérèses, dozing in a chair with a red leather back, studded with brass nails.43 Some of these paintings flew off the artist’s easel rather too easily.
In the course of this series, Picasso comes up with some bizarre substitutes for Marie-Thérèse’s arms. Flippers, tentacles, and snakelike coils eventually give way to the baroque balustrades he had dreamed up for the Villa Chêne-Roc. Volutes swell out at us, as they did in paintings of the villa, except that they end in large bearlike paws. They generate monumentality and volume. In another mid-January painting, The Sleeper and the Mirror, Picasso borrows a mirror from a 1916 Matisse44 and contrasts Marie-Thérèse with her own reflection. The right breast mimics an erect penis; the left one droops postcoitally. Picasso has likened her face to a palette daubed with black, as if to embed her in his paint.
If we obey the artist and interpret his work as a diary, it would appear that Olga suffered a further attack in mid-January Once again, catharsis was called for. On January 22, Picasso executed the first of three sizable paintings—one a day for three days—to which, exceptionally, he gave thematically linked titles. Repose (Le Repos),455 the title of the first and most violent of the paintings, is ironical; it depicts Olga in the throes of hysteria. The pose—hands linked over her head in the fifth position—mocks Olga’s balletic past as well as her psychological and physical state, just as the Large Nude in a Red Armchair had done so memorably in 1929. Once again, the armchair, which Picasso portrays as friendly or inimical, depending on the occupant, wraps itself around her like a shroud. Olga’s hair, which she now dyed black, is rendered as if it were as short, straight, and stiff as the teeth of a comb; Marie-Thérèse’s chignon in the next two paintings is floppy and yellow.
Emptied of rage, Picasso is at his most loving in the second of these three allegories, Sleep (Le Sommeil),4647 which depicts Marie-Thérèse naked and asleep in a friendly armchair. A self-congratulatory inscription on the stretcher—“executed between three and six o’clock
on January 23, 1932”—suggests the time frame of one of Marie-Thérèse’s naps. Picasso has wickedly used the circular swoop of the arms and the positioning of his hysterical wife’s head and breasts in Repos to evoke the true repose in this portrayal of his mistress. The next day, Picasso executed the third painting, the celebrated Dream48 The wallpaper pattern, which staggered off the wall in Repose, keeps its place in the Dream, and its darker, denser colors evoke the workings of the subconscious every bit as effectively and much more economically than Dalí. Picasso’s transformation of the dreamer’s thumbs and forefingers into a vaginal image, and her forehead into a penile one, confirms that sex is on her mind as well as between her legs. The Dream has become one of Picasso’s most popular images; sadly, the record prices it fetched in 1997 and 200649 and its renown as a tourist attraction at a Las Vegas casino have left this painting so sullied that it is difficult to judge it on its merits.
The wallpaper, which sets the mood of these paintings, is evidently one that Picasso knew well. A small oil sketch of the bedroom in the fancifully decorated love nest he had rented was papered with it.50 Apart from its first feverish appearance in Repose, where it mirrors Olga’s manic state, the wallpaper mirrors Marie-Thérèse’s passive tranquility. If Picasso sometimes uses the mistress’s sign for the wife and the wife’s sign for the mistress, it is because he preferred confusing the viewer to spelling things out for him. Whereas Matisse, from whom Picasso supposedly borrowed his patterned backgrounds, uses patterns decoratively, Picasso uses them dramatically to establish a mood and characterize the woman in the picture. Whereas Matisse’s models have the air of still-life objects, Picasso’s still-life objects have the air of women.
A Life of Picasso Page 58