A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  Beaten to the post by Chick Austin’s beautiful 137-work retrospective at Wads-worth Atheneum in Hartford (in 1934), New York would have to wait until 1939 for MoMA’s first Picasso retrospective—far and away the most comprehensive show of the artist’s work ever held. Barr’s obsession with the artist, and the acuity of his perceptions, would set a new standard for Picasso scholarship, also a new standard for catalogs. The outbreak of modern art collecting that the show engendered would establish New York, as opposed to Paris, as the center for Picasso studies.

  Forty years after its heyday, the décor of the Galeries Georges Petit looked as overblown as Paul Rosenberg’s premises had before he redid them. Although an architect12 had supposedly modernized the gallery’s “gilded salons”13 for the occasion, installation shots show that some walls were still ornately patterned. (“Royal purple,” Cabanne says.)14 Jacques-Emile Blanche took exception to the garish hangings and the ubiquitous gilt frames.15 Others disapproved of the gallery’s corny grandeur. Picasso relished it. The Beaux-Arts look made the shock of the new all the more shocking.

  In successive visits to the Galeries Georges Petit’s Matisse exhibit the year before, Picasso had checked out the place’s possibilities. Critics of the Matisse show had deplored the shortage of important early works and the surfeit of minor, “Nice period” paintings from his dealer’s stock. Profiting from these failings, Picasso was determined that his show should not suffer a similar fate. He insisted on a full-scale retrospective that would chart his development from 1900 onward and draw on private as well as dealers’ holdings. He also insisted on control over the selection and a well-illustrated catalog. Among others, Gertrude Stein, Eugenia Errázuriz, and Reber would lend masterpieces. Besides twenty of the paintings he had done during the previous winter and spring, Picasso lent a great many works from his own vast collection, which had never previously been exhibited. Officially nothing would be for sale, but in reality at least a third of the loans could be had for a price.

  Opposite and right: Picasso’s installation of works at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, 1932. Photograph with annotations by Alfred Barr. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  By far the most important absentee from the show was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Although Doucet, to whom Picasso had sold it, had died, the painting still hung on the walls of his Neuilly mansion. If pressed, the widow, who contributed a 1905 Head of an Acrobat1617 to the show, would surely have lent it. Why the exclusion? Daix believes that Picasso wished to avoid discussion of the Demoiselles and the so-called Negro period (1907-08).18I suspect that he may not have wanted this shocking, still little-known work to overshadow his more recent achievements. His anger at Doucet for promising and failing to donate the Demoiselles to the Louvre so as to get it cheaply19 may also have influenced the artist’s decision. Actually, this period was well represented by Reber’s magnificent Nudes in the Forest (1907–08),20 soon to become the jewel of Cooper’s cubist collection. The only other major gap: no loans from the Shchukin or Morosov collections, which the Soviets had nationalized and hidden away. There was nothing from French museums; but then, apart from the Musée de Grenoble, none of them had anything much to lend.

  Opposite and right: Picasso’s installation of works at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, 1932. Photograph with annotations by Alfred Barr. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  Hanging the show obsessed Picasso. “I’ve been hooking these things on the wall for six days now and I’ve had enough of them,” he claimed to Guy Hickok,21 an American journalist who interviewed him. Even well-disposed viewers found the artist’s hang peculiar. Installation photographs demonstrate that his disregard for chronology, subject, style, and coherence, was, to say the least, idiosyncratic. On one wall Blue and Rose period paintings hung next to works from the classical and “bone” periods. The mismatching was strategic: Picasso wanted his disparate oeuvre to be seen as an organic whole and not chopped up into arbitrary “periods” by critics and academics, without his authorization. He saw his work as an ongoing family, but “members of the same family don’t always look identical,” he told Tériade in a frank interview shortly before the show opened.22 Picasso regarded his assembled works as “prodigal children returning home clothed in gold.” Apropos the show, he went on to say:

  Someone asked me how I was going to hang [it]. “Badly,” I told him, for an exhibition is like a picture, whether it is well or badly “arranged,” all comes down to the same thing. What counts is the element of continuity in [an artist’s] ideas. When that element is seen to exist, everything ends up falling into place, just as it does in the worst of households.23

  Did Picasso have his own household in mind? In yet another cri de coeur, he told Tériade that nothing could be achieved “without solitude.”

  [E]verything depends on oneself—on the fire in one’s belly [un soleil dans le ven-tre]. The rest does not matter. It is only because of this that, for example, Matisse is Matisse. It is thanks to the fire in his belly. … One’s work is a way of keeping a diary…. Nobody has any suspicion of the solitude I have created around myself. It is so difficult these days to be alone, since we all have watches. Have you ever seen a saint with a watch?24

  Hanging the show permitted Picasso to investigate the workings of his creative process, which, as he frequently complained, were a total mystery to him. Having his hands once again on some of his finest paintings enabled him to feel his way back into them and measure his most recent works—some not yet dry—against them, the better to establish where he might be headed. We should not forget that besides such masters as El Greco, Ingres, Gauguin, and Cézanne, the principal influence on Picasso would be his own earlier paintings.

  Picasso’s disregard of chronology may have been intended to deprive the surrealists of a handle on his more recent work, and at the same time to demonstrate that he had never been indebted to their movement. Finally, as discussed in Chapter 28, Breton seems to have accepted the fact that Picasso had eluded him. In the masterfully argued tribute to Picasso he would contribute to the opening number of Minotaure in 1933, Breton barely mentions the Galeries Georges Petit retrospective,25 except to comment on the effect made by the positioning of the two versions of the welded Woman in the Garden—“one of which was covered with rust… the other freshly painted with white enamel”—at opposite ends of one of the galleries.26

  A day or two before the retrospective opened on June 16, 1932, Picasso gave an old, though never particularly close friend, the society painter Jacques-Emile Blanche,27 a guided tour. Intelligent, articulate, and worldly, Blanche had prevailed upon Proust to write a preface for one of his memoirs. His comments typify the views of the cultivated gens bien Picasso had met through Cocteau and Diaghilev—people intent on appearing more à la page than they really were. Blanche was not alone in seeing the artist as a rebel and innovator like Manet—an artist Picasso particularly admired—whose centenary would be celebrated by a retrospective later in the summer. After granting that Picasso had “a Paganini-like virtuosity” and could succeed at anything he undertakes,28 Blanche took to grumbling. He rightly recognized Picasso and Stravinsky as “brothers in arms” at the head of the modern movement, but criticized them both for being “too engagé to take a step backwards, they were always obliged to forge ahead.”29 That they both lost the capacity to shock has the ring of insincerity: Blanche evidently had been shocked but could not admit it.

  Far from demonstrating that the exhibits were all of a piece, Picasso’s hanging, according to Blanche, demonstrated the contrary. “What would be right for one of these pictures would be wrong for another…. Each manner, each stage of the Picas-sian journey requires the critic to change his position.”30 The only unifying element that Blanche detected in Picasso’s work was “taste, taste, always taste.” So long as this implied bad taste, the artist might have agreed, but good taste was abhorrent to him. In addition, the Anglophile Blanche’s comment that the Rose-period Harlequins “derived f
rom the English post pre-Raphaelite Augustus John”31 would hardly have pleased him. In his youth Picasso had admired Edward Burne-Jones, but never the artist he had memorably described as “the best bad painter in Britain.”32

  Among the adverse reviews, one particularly crass example is worth quoting, since the ambitious young journalist who wrote it, Germain Bazin, was destined to end up as one of the Louvre’s least distinguished directors. In L’Amour de lArt, the magazine he edited, Bazin decreed that “Picasso belongs to the past…. His downfall is one of the most upsetting problems of our era.”33 Much the same could be said of Bazin’s rise to the top. The one critic who was unstinting in his praise was Charen-sol, who hailed the retrospective as “the most important aesthetic event of these past thirty years.”34

  The Georges Petit vernissage turned out to be stiflingly mondain, to believe Hickok:

  [C]elebs wander in with a bored air around midnight. Duchesses, diplomats, monocles, tail-coats, nude spines, such diamonds and pearls as are not in pawn, bottled tan on the women, larded hair on the men, a few paunchy politicians who like to be “among those present,” champagne, microscopic sandwiches and sharp-eyed dealers trying to read the thermometer of Picasso’s value five years from now.35

  Picasso stayed away. He “planned to skip the opening and go to a movie,” he told Hickok.36 Had he attended, he would have been obliged to take Olga.37 The shock of seeing so many loving images of her rival and so many hurtful ones of herself—Large Nude in a Red Armchair and Repose were both on exhibit—might have precipitated an ugly scene. The pleasure of mixing with the beau monde, which her husband was intent on avoiding, was not worth the shame of scandal.

  The day after the opening, Picasso was back working at Boisgeloup. He had the place to himself—and Marie-Thérèse. Olga and Paulo had been packed off to Juan-les-Pins;38 whether he ever intended to join them, he never did. The small reclining nudes of Marie-Thérèse asleep exude a tenderness and intimacy that was missing from most of the larger, more stylized portrayals that Picasso had done of her for his retrospective. Indeed, a profile of Marie-Thérèse cradling her head in her hands,39 silkily painted onto a small square canvas, is as loving as any of his images of her. With their flipper limbs and gorgeous buttocks, and free-and-easy facture, these little paintings—mostly done while the show was still on—constitute a touching epilogue to the daunting set pieces of the winter and early spring.

  On July 30, the day the show closed, Picasso celebrated by doing a virtuoso pen-and-ink drawing in the same fine but fuzzy graphic technique he had used a year earlier, for his dazzling Sculptor and His Model40 Zervos entitles this drawing Nu couché;41 it actually represents three Marie-Thérèses, squashed together under a beach umbrella with a cabana on the left. In another similar worked-up drawing,42 three identical Marie-Thérèses disport themselves on one of the Normandy beaches. At the top, she is vigorously paddling her dart-shaped kayak; below, she sits astride her bicycle; lower left, she sprawls on the sand. In other, idyllic drawings done this August,43 the artist sees himself as a Pan-like piper serenading a nymph.

  These small formats soon gave way to much larger ones. Picasso had regained his momentum and was back to painting Marie-Thérèse as intensively as he had earlier in the year. These new paintings are even more stylistically disparate than their predecessors. In Woman Holding a Book,44 Marie-Thérèse is seated, wearing a black lace slip, with her right hand held daintily up to her chin, as in Ingres’s Madame Moitessier. In the more curvaceous Nude in a Red Chair455 Marie-Thérèse coyly frames her face in her curly-fingered hands. In yet another painting, Picasso takes the girl out-of-doors and envisions her as a mountain of lilac flesh, sunning herself on the bright green grass of Boisgeloup.

  Marie-Thérèse was not always uppermost in Picasso’s thoughts. For business or family reasons he had to drive into Paris; also to pick up girls. On August 14, he did a painting of his Japanese model.4647 The pose, the chair, and the swirling rhythms are much the same as in recent Marie-Thérèses, but the woman’s hair is greenish black and the eyes are unmistakably oriental. Another painting, done a few months later, of a black-haired woman, en profil perdu,48 which bears no resemblance whatsoever to Marie-Thérèse or Olga, portrays the same Japanese model. By the time Picasso painted this portrait, Olga was back in Paris. It was probably then that she had the Japanese thrown out.

  The culminant painting of this summer, dated August 30, on the eve of Olga’s reappearance, is MoMA’s awe-inspiring Bather with a Beach Ball49 In this glorious work Picasso has pumped Marie-Thérèse so full of pneumatic bliss that she looks ready to burst her yellow-and-mauve bathing suit. Her hair—all too soon to fall out—streams out behind her like a wing. Her blunt snout looks ahead to next spring’s great sculpture of the Woman with a Vase.50 In his eternal quest for gigan-tism, the artist has not only filled the vast canvas to the edges with his volumetric bather, he has her reaching up to pluck the moon from the sky as if it were a beach ball—an image that is both proto-pop and cosmological. Note, too, the flagpole on the distant cliff; it might refer to Seurat’s views of the same stretch of the Normandy coast.

  To commemorate his fiftieth birthday Picasso did not limit himself to a huge retrospective. He had also set his heart on a catalogue raisonné, and for the previous three years he and Christian Zervos had been working together on an exceedingly ambitious publication. In the summer of 1932, the first volume of this project made its appearance; and it would do a great deal more to familiarize people with his beginnings in Spain as well as the Blue and Rose periods. It was handsomely produced on good thick paper with illustrations that are far larger and provide a far more palpable feel of the artist’s work than those in any comparable catalogues raisonnés. Given Picasso’s innate caginess and the dearth of information available at the time, the entries are scanty and often unreliable. However, the thirty-three volumes that Zervos would ultimately publish have proved a godsend to scholars, collectors, curators, dealers, students, not to mention fakers. Alexandra Parigoris has pointed out5051 a shortcoming which is probably Picasso’s fault: related drawings and pages from sketchbooks are seldom placed where they logically belong. She believes that Picasso did this in collusion with Zervos to prevent nosy scholars or other artists from tracking his sources or his codes.

  Artist and publisher worked closely together, but a letter that Zervos wrote in 1932 to the eminent Swiss modernist Siegfried Giedion, Cahiers d’Art’s architectural adviser, suggests that the publisher’s feelings for the artist were sometimes far from friendly. One of his wife Yvonne’s deals had evidently gone awry.

  Yvonne got nothing out of Picasso. He did to her what he did to me, he said that he was not around. What disgusts me is that he doesn’t even have the courage to refuse. I told Yvonne about this new development in order to convince you that in asking for the painting I was not acting in bad faith, but I did not want to approach [Picasso] again, because I know the pleasure he gets from seeing someone suffer physically or mentally. For instance, when he is at his château, he takes great pleasure in having his Saint Bernard dog attack the cats and watching them agonize as their backbones crack.52

  Zervos goes on to cite Picasso’s denial of Apollinaire at the time of I’affaire des statuettes: “this proves that the work and the man are never one and the same. The artist is great, the man very small. But that does not settle my affairs. I am at a loss and need to hear what you decide.”53

  This shocking letter should perhaps be seen in the light of Zervos’s marital and financial problems. For some years, he had had a relationship with an assistant, called Suzanne. When she had to enter a sanatorium in 1928, he switched to the woman he had picked up in the Dinand station, Yvonne Marion.54 Rather than rejoin Zervos when she left the sanatorium a year later, Suzanne had married a young Spanish painter, Ismael González de la Serna. Ismael was a friend of Lorca’s and a cousin of Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who had organized the banquet in Picasso’s honor in Madrid in 1917. He had b
een written up in Cahiers d’Art, which had sponsored an edition of Gongora’s sonnets illustrated by him. After Ismael’s marriage to Suzanne, Zervos dropped him and saw to it that he was not received into Picasso’s Parisian group of Spanish painters.

  Zervos married Yvonne in May 1932. According to Christian Derouet, director of the Musée Zervos at Vézelay, his marriage was a response “to the necessity of introducing new capital into a business that was prestigious but lost money”55 To raise funds for his ambitious publishing ventures—the first volume of the catalogue raisonné was selling badly—Zervos was reduced to desperate measures: selling his cars and also his apartment, borrowing money from his brother who worked on cruise ships, and soliciting contributions from the artists he published.56 Picasso’s affection for Yvonne enabled her to make some very profitable sales, notably to the Italian tycoon Frua di Angeli and his consort, the American sculptor Meric Callery. This couple were about to supplant Reber as Picasso’s biggest collectors, and they relied on the Zervoses to keep them supplied. However, fond as he was of Yvonne, the artist was often recalcitrant with dealers who pressured him—hence Zervos’s whining letter.

  As for the cat story, it is completely out of character. True, Picasso was fascinated by nature in the raw, as Françoise Gilot observed at Menerbes some years later:57 On his evening walks, he liked to watch barn owls swoop down on the local cats and carry them off in their claws—a spectacle he would later draw; and he probably watched similar encounters at Boisgeloup. However, his instinctive rapport with animals, he is unlikely to have done anything as callous and utterly pointless as hunting cats with a Saint Bernard—one of the gentlest and slowest of large dogs. That “nocturnal cat hunter” used to be a pejorative phrase used to stigmatize someone as a cad.