A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  That Picasso’s thoughts reverted briefly to sculpture—conceptual sculpture—at the end of January emerges in two paintings of a naked Marie-Thérèse, seated in a red armchair, composed of separate biomorphic elements, stone colored and stone shaped.51 Ovid was still on his mind, specifically the legend of Pyrrha and Deucalion, whose stones turned into men and women. The black backgrounds, against which Picasso sets his Pyrrha figures, evoke primeval darkness. The head of the first of them derives from one of his drawings after Grünewald, the head of the other from Brancusi. Although they correspond to the artist’s pictorial concept of Marie-Thérèse, these formidably mythic paintings cannot be said to reflect Picasso’s love or desire for her as much as an urge to deconstruct her and re-create her merging with the fateful armchair.

  Exhausted from doing monumental paintings at the rate of almost one a day for the previous six weeks, Picasso lay fallow for most of February. The one major work of this month is a no less passionate evocation of his love for Marie-Thérèse in the form of a voluptuous guitar and fruit dish set against the usual wallpaper, this time painted a vivid red in contrast to the yellow of the guitar.52 On a visit to Cooper, who used to own the painting, Picasso observed that red and yellow were the colors of the Spanish flag. Might Alfonso XIII’s exile the previous year have boosted his patriotism? (His mother’s first cousin, General Picasso, had helped lay the groundwork for the King’s removal, as explained in the Epilogue.)

  Picasso. Woman in a Red Armchair, 1932. Oil on canvas, 130×97 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  The next group of Marie-Thérèses takes an allegorical form: a plaster head of her set on a plinth paired with flowers and fruit that likewise stand for her. In the first of this fresh batch, dated March 2,53 the plaster head confronts the kitschy basket of flowers left over from the charcoal-on-canvas still life of the previous September. By contrast, the following day’s painting is a triumph:54 Marie-Thérèse’s plaster head gazes at a bowl of peaches as intently as if it were her face in a mirror. A palette hanging from a nail establishes that the setting is the studio and not the Left Bank love nest. Picasso liked to signal a locality, he also liked to make his presence or his absence felt.55

  Two of the most memorable paintings of this memorable series date from March 8 and 9. In the first, Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust, the plaster head looks down on the live Marie-Thérèse, sleepily proffering her naked body to another image of herself. The philodendron plant and decorative hanging—into which a shadowy profile has been worked—identify the setting as the Left Bank apartment, though it was not necessarily painted there. In a second, even more remarkable version, Nude in Black Armchair,5657 painted the following day, the plaster head has gone, so has the decorative hanging. The philodendron plant now issues from a cleft in Marie-Thérèse’s body. No less metamorphically, one of her hands is turning into a lily—a Daphne no longer in flight. Nude in Black Armchair is the most consummately romantic image of the series.

  The lily owes its appearance to the magnified photographs of natural phenomena by the German art teacher Karl Blossfeldt.58 Some of these had appeared in the third issue of Documents (1929), with a commentary, “The Language of Flowers,” by Bataille. The writer had no time for “art photographers;” he admired Blossfeldt’s plates for reminding us, as Picasso sometimes does, that “even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled at the center by hairy sexual organs.”59 Sketches done later in the year suggest that the artist contemplated further use of Blossfeldt’s photographs to give Marie-Thérèse an even more organic look.60

  Picasso. Girl before a Mirror, Boisgeloup, March 14, 1932. Oil on canvas, 162.3×130.2 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim.

  In the next two paintings, the trellis-patterned wallpaper dominates the composition. Marie-Thérèse’s pose in The Mirror (March 12) enables Picasso to play off the swirl of her breasts against her gorgeous buttocks in a mirror—one of those old-fashioned looking glasses, known in France as a psyché. This time, the blue and green of the wallpaper gives the bedroom an ethereal look. The following day, he took a rest from color and did two sublime charcoal-on-canvas drawings of a sleeping Marie-Thérèse, in which Picasso combines the back and front of his nude to callipygian perfection.

  Two days later (March 14), Picasso further explored the dramatic possibilities of the psyché in MoMA’s celebrated Girl before a Mirror,616263 a standing Marie-Thérèse, reaching out as if to embrace her mirror image. The lower half of this painting is taken up with side and frontal views of her bulging, conspicuously empty uterus. This suggests that Marie-Thérèse was or had been pregnant, and may have had a miscarriage. It might also signify that the painting is a fertility symbol: Picasso wanted her uterus filled. Not that there is any evidence for these suppositions. When Marie-Thérèse did become pregnant in 1935, Picasso was not altogether pleased. He relished the idea rather than the fact of having children. Also, by that time his feelings for Marie-Thérèse were beginning to wane; he was about to leave her for someone else.

  The inordinately exalted place that Girl before a Mirror has come to occupy in the eyes of scholars as well as the general public has always mystified me. This set piece is not in the first ten or even twenty of MoMA’s Picassos. And yet Rubin claims in his catalog of the museum’s collection that this work is this great museum’s “emblem”: “the balance and reciprocity of the expressive and the decorative here set a standard for all Picasso’s subsequent painting—indeed, for twentieth-century art as a whole.”

  This overweening claim belittles many of MoMA’s far greater works. As Picasso observed on more than one occasion, the culminant painting in a series, as Girl before a Mirror is usually thought to be, is seldom the best. “The penultimate one is almost always the strongest.” Once all the problems are solved, a painting ceases to live. None of Cézanne’s finest paintings is “finished.” Girl before a Mirror is a case in point. Compared to most of its predecessors, it is overworked and academic, which is perhaps why academics including Barr have thought so highly of it. The cloisonnisme is too constricting; the trellis wallpaper is too tight and busy to work its magic; hence there is no trace of what Braque called poésie. If any of this sequence of paintings sets a “standard for all Picasso’s subsequent painting,” it is Repose—the artist’s rage at his wife’s hysterics and maybe at women in general electrifies every brushstroke.

  On March 17 (1932), three days after signing Girl before a Mirror, Picasso invited Kahnweiler to come to the rue la Boétie and see what he was working on. As Kahn-weiler wrote Leiris, who was still driving across Africa:

  Yes; as you say, painting is really sustained by Picasso: and so wonderfully. We saw two paintings at his place which he had just finished. Two nudes, perhaps the most moving things he’s done. “A satyr who had just killed a woman might have painted this picture,” I told him. It’s neither cubist nor naturalist. And it’s without painterly artifice: very alive, very erotic, but the eroticism of a giant. For years Picasso hasn’t done anything like it. He had told me a few days before, “I want to paint like a blind man, who does a buttock by feel.” It really is that. We came away, overwhelmed.64656667

  Picasso. Reclining Nude (day), April 4, 1932. Oil on panel, 130×161.7 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Toward the end of March, Picasso drove to the Normandy coast—to Pour-ville, whose light he claimed to have caught. He wanted to see Braque, who was about to celebrate his fiftieth birthday and had finished building his house at Varengeville. On his return to Paris, Picasso executed several paintings (dated March 25-26) of a woman in a deck chair on the beach.6869 A large pale sun in a wan greenish sky confirms the locale as Normandy. The Varengeville plage was difficult to access, so Pourville is more likely to have been the setting for Picasso’s Bathers. Braque’s Bathers—boomerang- shaped shadows overpainted with the free-form outline of a body—were not forceful enough to propel the artist back to the forefront of the avant-garde. He needed his old friend’s help. For his pa
rt, Picasso still fantasized—and would continue to do so until the 1950s—that he and Braque could reestablish their former partnership. There was also something that Picasso needed from Braque, something that nobody else could provide—his light. When Picasso told Zervos that the light in his Pourville paintings differed from the light in his Dinard paintings, it was Braque’s light that he had in mind: the charcoal-colored skies, the coffee-colored beaches, and the eerie-colored sea—so unlike the light of the Mediterranean—of his recent seaside paintings.

  Partly, I suspect, to rekindle the flame that had died out twenty years earlier, Picasso proceeded to deconstruct one of the beach compositions that Braque had been working on for the previous year or so and demonstrate how he would have done it. Between March 26 and 29 he painted six variations on this theme. To give his bather a touch of surreal eroticism, Picasso has helped himself to an airborne pair of conjoined legs from Max Ernst’s Les Hommes n’en sauront rien70(1923), stuffed them into black tights and shoes with Cuban heels, and set their malign silhouette hovering over or under the deckchair—Olga! (That deckchairs have a two-dimensional as well as a three-dimensional function fascinated Picasso.) The second of these Bathers paintings was instrumental in transforming a budding surrealist, Roland Penrose, into an obsessive admirer of his work. Hence his acquisition of this painting.71

  Now that spring had returned to Boisgeloup, Picasso finally got around to painting the place, not the château itself, but the courtyard with its chapel, gateway, and stables, as well as the village houses beyond the walls.72 Easter was very wet that year; most of these views are striated with driving rain—an effect that van Gogh had borrowed from Hiroshige—otherwise they are surprisingly prosaic. Gone is the pride in ownership to be found in Picasso’s first images of the rue la Boétie apartment, or of the Riviera villas he had rented.

  Picasso. Woman with a Flower (night), April 10, 1932. Oil on canvas, 162×130 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Galerie Beyeler, Basel.

  Inscriptions on the stretchers of his April and May canvases confirm that Picasso spent most of this spring at Boisgeloup. While the wife stayed in Paris during the week looking after Paulo, the mistress would move into the château. Weekends, she would go home to Maisons-Alfort, and Olga would take over again. She would come down with Paulo and his English governess and, possibly, additional help. Domestic chores were not Olga’s province. Picasso’s impersonation of a country gentleman was mitigated by self-mockery He enjoyed playing the role, impeccably disguised in tweed suits, sometimes going as far as wearing spats and plus-fours and a waistcoat complete with watch chain. Out of doors, he would sport one of the hats he had bought in London. In public, Picasso would match his behavior to his costume. Snapshots taken over these weekends make it clear that when a nanny or governess was around, or friends came to visit, family life at Boisgeloup could not have been more conventional. Paintings tell a very different story.

  Meanwhile, Marie-Thérèse, in one emblematic form or another and the lilac color Picasso associated with her, continued to be the principal subject of his work. Two of the last of this spring’s paintings take the form of contrasting allegories—day and night. The allegory of day (April 4) portrays a roly-poly sexpot73—volumetric buttocks aloft, curlicue arms and flipper legs awrithe. The source of light is a large, pallid northern sun outside the window. Indoors, it is hot. The sizzle of the girl’s body is spelled out in cartoonists’ shorthand: frizzy lines of heat radiating from her arms and breasts. The leaf in her hand serves as an organic fan, while another larger one shades her right thigh and doubles as a vagina. Besides allegorizing day, this painting pokes fun at Matisse. Picasso wants to show him how he would have done it.

  In the allegory of night (April 10),74 Picasso floats the girl’s disconnected body parts—the lilac volute of her arms and her pneumatic breasts—as well as a large, white balloon, the moon of course, in a sky of intense darkness. Once again Marie-Thérèse holds a leaf, a crescent-shaped one, rising heavenward like everything else in this painting. The lusty daytime girl has turned into a fearsome queen of the night. Dotted eyes and a toothy little mouth suggest Olga, but the quiff of blond hair and the striped blouse tag her as Marie-Thérèse. Jung would pick up on Picasso’s binary approach to night and day when he saw these paintings on exhibit in Zurich: “As the day is woman to [Picasso], so is the night; psychologically speaking, they are the light and the dark soul (anima).”75 This pair of allegories and two equally large, rather more decorative paintings of Marie-Thérèse in profile bring this phenomenal succession of some thirty major works to a close. Now Picasso had to decide how best to show them at his upcoming retrospective.

  39

  Paris and Zurich Retrospective (1932)

  At the end of April 1932, Picasso’s mother and brother-in-law, Dr. Vilató, arrived in Paris to give depositions in preparation for the upcoming case against Cal-vet and Madame Zak.1 Although the artist was still sore at his mother for her abysmal guardianship of his work, he was happy to show Boisgeloup off to her. Doña María’s visit turned out to be opportune: it coincided with her eleven-year-old grandson Paulo’s First Communion at the Eglise Saint-Augustin on April 28. Photographs taken later outside Sacré Coeur show the boy with his tiny grandmother. Paulo looks embarrassed: an unwitting victim of parental animosity, this unfortunate boy would all too soon change from being Olga’s pride and joy to being a rebellious adolescent, violently resentful of his overprotective mother. Paulo’s godfather, Georges Bemberg, did not attend; he was locked away in a Swiss rnaison de repos, ironically where Paulo would go for rehabilitation a few years later.2 As for the boy’s fashionable godmother, Misia Sert was still sporadically kind to Olga, and although she exemplified a world Picasso had come to despise, she would certainly have been invited, as were Stein and Toklas, who appear in some of the snapshots. In snapshots of the three generations of the Ruiz-Picasso family taken in the garden at Boisgeloup, they are all doing their best to look happy. Official photographs taken for the actual Communion tell a different story. Olga appears to be in a state of nervous distress. She was still a beautiful woman, but the tranquilized eyes had become infinitely, Slavically, sad. These were the traits Picasso would mercilessly seize upon in his portrayals of her.

  Paulo with his mother and grandmother in front of Sacré Coeur after his First Communion at the Eglise Saint-Augustin, Paris, April 28, 1932.

  His wife’s physical and psychological problems, as well as the pending lawsuit and worry about the upcoming retrospective, had also left Picasso understandably stressed. As a distraction, he had reverted to promiscuity, a habit he had never entirely abandoned. The writer Raymond Queneau noted in his diary (October 19, 1931) that Picasso had “resumed chasing girls.”3 These affairs were usually casual. Sometime in 1932, however, Picasso took a liking to a Japanese model and did at least two remarkable portrayals of her.4 All we know about this woman is what Picasso told Otero:5 Olga found out about the affair and insisted she be thrown out— something she never attempted to do to Marie-Thérèse.

  Picasso. Woman in an Armchair (The Japanese Model), August 8, 1932. Oil on canvas, 92.1×73 cm. Private collection.

  As a suitable setting for Picasso’s first full-scale retrospective—225 paintings, 7 sculptures, 6 illustrated books—the Galeries Georges Petit was an odd choice. At the turn of the century, the place had been a flashy alternative— Zola described it as “the apotheosis of dealers”6—to the venerable impressionist emporium, Galerie Durand-Ruel. Petit’s success had been short-lived. In failing to plow his profits back into stock, he lost out to his rivals. By the time of his death in 1921, the gallery was best known for auctions.7 After the 1929 crash, the Bernheim brothers and the dealer Etienne Bi-gnou joined forces with their principal rival, Paul Rosenberg, and took the place over for contemporary shows. Additional backing came from the canny American financier Chester Dale, who had recently bought the Rose period Saltimbanques8 and other major Picassos and was eager to invest in art, so long
as dealers granted him “dealers’ prices.” As Michael FitzGerald points out,89 “While the lesser figures went broke, the Bernheims, Rosenbergs and Wildensteins worked in greater concert than they ever had before. With the disappearance of most clients, their fierce competitiveness subsided into cooperation.”10 The Matisse and Picasso retrospectives at the Galeries Georges Petit in 1931 and 1932 would result from this newly awakened and all too brief camaraderie.

  This new alliance of Parisian dealers would put paid to the dream of Alfred Barr to hold a major Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Barr had been hard at work persuading European collectors and dealers to lend to such a show, but he found himself stymied by Picasso’s objections and his own scruples about dealer sponsorship. As FitzGerald relates:

  Without the cooperation of Rosenberg and the dealers who controlled the Galeries Georges Petit… [Barr’s] desire to maintain his independence from the trade ultimately gave the dealers even greater control. Picasso, meanwhile, was no mere pawn in the machinations. On June 21, 1931 … Barr sent [his assistant at the Museum of Modern Art] a wire. Instead of confirming plans for the fall exhibition, the message recorded the collapse of [his] plans: “PICASSO ABSOLUTELY POSTPONES TEMPERAMENTAL REASONS REBER REFUSES WITHOUT PICASSO’S APPROVAL.” … Picasso’s reasons for refusing to cooperate were not merely temperamental. They included both his desire not to be distracted from his work and his Parisian dealer’s advice that he resist being rushed by this relative newcomer.11