A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  The outbreak of civil war in Spain brought Picasso and the Zervoses back together. As Communists, the Zervoses were indefatigable in their work for the Republican cause. Zervos’s adulation of Guernica in Cahiers dArt reveals that he had come to see Picasso—the man as well as the artist—in a heroic light. He would frequently act as Picasso’s spokesman: as, for instance, when the fascists insinuated that Picasso was a Marrano—descended from one of the Jewish families forced to practice their faith in secret or be persecuted by the Inquisition or expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella. There had been no Jewish blood, Zervos stated, on either side of his family for four or five generations58—an assertion that did not exactly settle the matter. For his part, Picasso would do everything he could to help Zervos in his clandestine printing for the Resistance.

  On September 11, Picasso’s Parisian retrospective resurfaced in Zurich in a very different form. Wilhelm Wartmann, director of Zurich’s Kunsthaus, had originally intended to include Braque and Léger, but after visiting the Georges Petit show, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Picasso to limit the show to his work. Braque, who had already agreed to lend Wartmann forty paintings, was furious, so was Léger. Wartmann placated them with promises of one-man shows later in the year.59 Meanwhile, he had written to his colleague, Carl Montag—later a notorious trafficker in art looted during World War II60—that “the Zurich exhibition must be … more beautiful and more serious, as far as structure and general impression, than the Paris exhibition. This will be its only justification.”61 Wartmann was as good as his word; nobody found fault with the chronological hanging.

  To give the Zurich exhibit an extra dimension, Wartmann included two hundred works on paper: 90 watercolors and drawings, many of them for sale, as well as 110 prints. These had been assembled by Bernhard Geiser62—a Swiss protégé of Kahn-weiler and Rupf—who had recently completed the first volume of his catalogue raisonné of the prints, which he had been working on since 1928. To compensate for the cancellation of several American loans—Zurich, not Paris, would have had to

  The installation of works at the 1932 Picasso retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich.

  The installation of works at the 1932 Picasso retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich. pay the shipping costs back to the States—Picasso lent ten more paintings to Zurich than he had to Paris. There were also several extra works from Swiss sources, even some from Basel; the rivalry between the two cities was such that the director of the Basel Kunsthaus—cross at not getting the Picasso show—had tried unsuccessfully to organize a rival attraction, Modern Art from Private Basel Collections. To defray the considerable costs at a time of financial crisis for Zürich, Wartmann had arranged for the Kunsthaus to pocket the commissions on any sales the show generated. Several major works from private collections were indeed for sale—among them some from the artist’s own holdings, Pipes of Pan (500,000 French francs) and La Danse (400,000 francs), as well as Madame Errázuriz’s 1914 Portrait of a Young Girl (150,000 francs) and the 1915-16 Seated Man (200,000 francs). Gertrude Stein offered the Kunsthaus Zürich her Girl with Basket of Flowers, to no avail. The city decided instead to buy the relatively unimportant Writing Desk63646566 (75,000 francs) from the artist himself.

  Accompanied by Olga and Paulo, Picasso left Paris on September 7 in the His-pano-Suiza, stopping en route at the Hôtel des Trois Rois in Basel. They arrived in Zurich on September 8, where they stayed at the Bauer au Lac Hotel, and left on the morning of the eleventh. Wartmann had arranged for Hanns Welti—a lawyer who dabbled in painting and journalism—and his wife to look after the Picassos. The Weltis took them sightseeing and for a boat ride on the Zuricher See. It was a beautiful day, and Picasso declared that he could live and work in Zurich, “not too southern, not too hard and northern.” His politesses were characteristically double-edged. He liked the way the city’s ugly buildings disappeared in the haze, and went on to say how much he enjoyed looking at particularly hideous ones, pointing at what turned out to be the concert hall. “Never allow that building to be pulled down … no architect could have built something like that—it is a contribution to Surrealism.”676869 Welti took lots of snapshots. These reveal the artist, who had depicted his wife as a lethal monster six months earlier, as a quintessential père de famille bour-geoise on holiday. On September 10 there was a luncheon and reception for Picasso at the Bellevue Park, and the following morning they left before the show’s official opening. When asked why he did not stay for the occasion, Picasso said he wanted to spend a few days in the Engadine; besides, he preferred not to remain in a city where “je suis collé sur tous murs” (I’m plastered all over the walls).70 And off the family drove to Tiefencastel, near Saint-Moritz, and then to Interlaken, where they stayed at the Beau Rivage & Grand Hotel, and on September 13 they left for Paris.

  The Zurich show was such a success—a record 2,362 people visited it on Sunday, September 25—that it had to be extended another two weeks until November 13. Cooper, who visited both shows, thought the Paris version eye-opening, but “a bit of a mess”71 and the Zurich exhibit more comprehensive. It was the prototype of all the great Picasso retrospectives to come, particularly those organized by Barr. And yet, despite plaudits from the modernist theoretician Siegfried Giedion, the Bauhaus’s Oskar Schlemmer, as well as promotional lectures from Max Raphael, Hans Hilde-brandt, and Gotthard Jedlicka, the show came under attack—less from the right than from the left. Especially virulent was the Social Democratic newspaper, Volks-recht. It parroted the Soviet writer Anatoly Lunacharsky’s dismissal of Picasso as “typically bourgeois-decadent” and accused his work of being “painted psychoanalysis,” and thus “a sign of the decadence of our times.”72 Giedion protested that if Picasso’s work was “bourgeois-decadent,” what about the fountains and monuments of Zurich?

  These attacks stirred up a lot of latent philistinism. According to Christian Geel-haar,73 Klee blamed negative articles spawned by the Picasso show (one of them entitled “Paul Klee’s Schizophrenic Garden”) for the difficulties that he, as the son of a German father and Swiss mother, would have obtaining Swiss citizenship. Nevertheless, the controversy had a positive side: it set other institutions—among them Stuttgart’s Würtembergische Kunstverein and the Bern and Basel Kunsthalles— vying for the exhibition. Too late, lenders wanted their pictures back.

  The day after the Zurich show closed, a lengthy critique appeared in the Neue Züricher Zeitung, signed by the eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Picasso’s followers were dismayed by the author’s censorious tone as well as by his summary diagnosis of Picasso as a schizophrenic. Seventy-five years later, this diagnosis does not seem all that egregious. For all his moralizing, Jung was the first non-poet to shine fresh light onto Picasso’s dark side. When, for instance, he compares the artist to “the underworld form of the tragic Harlequin,” an ambiguous figure who “already bears on his costume the symbols of the next stage of development … the hero who must pass through the perils of Hades,”74 Jung echoes Apol-linaire and Max Jacob. When he invokes the Nekyia—“a meaningful descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge … [a] journey through the psychic history of mankind,”75 he sounds a bit like Bataille. Jung is at his blindest when he indicts Picasso for being “demoniacally attracted to ugliness and evil.”76 Of all people, Jung should have sensed the exorcistic nature of Picasso’s work and that, far from delighting in the “demoniacal,” Picasso felt it was his shamanistic duty to exorcise evil by fighting it with evil. Regrettably, the psychiatrist had no inkling of Picasso’s shamanic nature or his conviction that art had a magic function.

  Zervos rashly chose himself to refute Jung’s critique in the pages of Cahiers d’Art. In a tedious, self-important piece, he impugns Jung for applying his psychological theories to Picasso’s work. “If Dr. Jung had taken account of historical facts,” Zervos writes, “he would have realized that Picasso’s predilection for blue was due to the influence of Cézanne … that when Picasso painted prostitutes
, he was only following a fashion common to Barcelona painters at the time;” and that his predilection for Harlequin, “too, was due to Cézanne’s influence.”77 Zervos’s “historical facts” were half-baked half-truths.

  Picasso did not resent Jung’s diagnosis as much as his supporters did. Years later, I asked Jacqueline Picasso what her husband thought of Freud. “Il préférait beaucoup I’autre” she said. I was not surprised. The surrealists had put him off Freud. Picasso’s persona was too much of a paradox and too deeply involved in myth for Freudian analysis to grapple with. Freudian interpretations of Picasso’s work tend to fall short. Jung’s ideas are much better suited to the intricacies and ambiguities and cosmological dimensions of the artist’s psyche.

  For Picasso, the main reason for his trip to Zurich was the opportunity to stop on the way at Colmar and visit the Mathias Grünewald altarpiece. He told Kahn-weiler he proposed to do so on his return from Zurich.78 Picasso was bowled over by the Grünewald. Back at Boisgeloup, he set about reinterpreting Grünewald’s altar-piece in a fresh series of Crucifixion drawings, “but as soon as I had begun to draw it, it became something else entirely”79 Years later, Kahnweiler would persuade Picasso that Cranach was a greater painter and that Grünewald’s expressionistic side was inferior to Cranach’s “purity and firmness.” “People are always citing Raphael’s drawings,” the dealer said. “Cranach is better.”80 Be that as it may, Picasso’s later drawings after Cranach lack the dark power of his Grünewald ones.

  The dramatic ink-wash drawings in which Picasso transforms Grünewald’s tortured figures into a frieze of Vesalian bones had a great impact when they were published in Minotaure81 Their solemnity should not blind us to the flashes of black Picassian humor. Christ’s loincloth is held together by a safety pin and the figure on the cross has been given a pair of freakish hands, based on a photograph found in Picasso’s papers of a man with hands malformed like lobster claws.8182

  Mathias Grünewald. Crucifixion (from Isenheim Altar), c. 1475. Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar.

  Unlike the 1930 Crucifixion drawings, Picasso’s Grünewald drawings focus on Christ and the two Marys. He has also followed Grünewald in choosing to depict Christ’s passion at the time—from midday until three in the afternoon—when darkness fell over the land, “a sign that the heavens went into mourning at the death of the Savior.”83 To simulate this eclipse, Picasso has drenched these drawings in great washes of India ink. Against this enveloping darkness—Saint John of the Cross’s dark night of the soul—a frieze of whitened bones performs a ghostly Totentanz, as if in some cavernous Mithraic ossuary There is nothing insubstantial about the figures. They are conceptual sculptures rather than sacred phantoms. Picasso would never again do a major painting of the Crucifixion. Henceforth, horrors of war would supplant the horrors of his private life as the inspiration for a tragic masterpiece. The next Golgotha would be Guernica.

  Left: Photograph of a handicapped man using a plane, c. 1920-25, Musée Picasso, Paris. Right: Picasso. Crucifixion, September 19,1932. Pen and India ink wash on paper, 34×51 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Toward the end of 1932, Marie-Thérèse fell seriously ill. While swimming or more likely kayaking in the Marne, she contracted a spirochetal disease from the rats in the river.84 She was hospitalized with a high fever for several weeks, and most of her hair fell out. Picasso commemorated the incident in a number of dramatic paintings—variations on the Eros and Thanatos theme. He transposes the accident from the icy, rat-infested river to a sunny beach, where he envisions Marie-Thérèse being saved from drowning by her sisters or alternate versions of herself. She looks inert—maybe alive, maybe dead.85 The pathos of these images is tinged with eroticism. The drowned girl—eyes closed, head thrown back, breasts thrust up—swoons erotically in the arms of one of her alter egos, while others dive, swim, and play ball, just as they did at Dinard in 1928.

  No one seems to have noticed that the drowning woman in these paintings is usually bald, as is the culminant Marie-Thérèse plaster—the full-length Woman with a Vase—which Picasso would execute at Boisgeloup, shortly after the girl’s recovery. Gone are the flanges of hair that are the crowning glory of the previous plasters. Cowling describes this great sculpture as “the surviving masterpiece” of Picasso’s “prehistoric mode,” that is to say inspired by the Venus de Lespugue. I would also like to evoke the great primeval sculpture Oviri, which Gauguin designed for his grave (as discussed in Chapter 37). Like Gauguin, Picasso chose his most exorcistic sculpture, Woman with a Vase, for his grave on the terrace of the Château de Vauve-nargues. The significance of the vase she holds has always been a mystery. I believe that the vase signifies the alabaster box of ointment that Mary Magdalen—the saint who had always obsessed the artist—proffered to Christ. The sculpture commemorates both Picasso’s shamanism and his paradoxical Spanish faith. This might well explain why, after his death and burial in 1973, his second wife had the original plaster of Woman with a Vase smashed—whether at his or her behest, we do not know.

  By April 1933, Marie-Thérèse had fully recovered, to judge by her lover’s magnificent down-to-earth drawings in which Picasso portrays himself as a Minotaur, plunging his monstrous, taurine penis into Marie-Thérèse’s tumescent folds. These are surely the most ecstatic and celebratory images of sex by a great artist.8687

  Since 1933 was the only year in which Picasso confessed to being a surrealist, let us see how next year’s work differs from previous years’. It is no coincidence that his brief capitulation coincides with the first appearance (June 1933) of Minotaure. Originally intended as an organ for surrealist dissidents (like Documents), Minotaure turned out to be refreshingly nonpartisan and eclectic, thanks to Tériade’s deft handling of Breton and other surrealist contributors. Since the first issue was primarily devoted to his work, Picasso had designed a sensational, self-referential cover: a collage of a Minotaur set off against corrugated paper and some faded trimming from one of Olga’s hats.

  Picasso’s contributions to the all-important first number of Minotaure dazzled more than they shocked, and did much to enhance the artist’s fame. Minotaure’s most revelatory feature was Brassaï’s series of dramatic photographs of the hitherto unknown Boisgeloup sculptures.88 Over the years these photographs would do much to establish Picasso as a great sculptor as well as a great painter. No less revelatory were the Crucifixion drawings and the astonishing sequence of his twenty-eight Anatomies (February 25-March 1, 1933). These conceptual sculptures of Marie-Thérèse are all the same size, set out in rows like samples in a pattern book, as if viewers were expected to take their pick. Although Picasso had given up on the Apollinaire memorial, this group might be said to constitute his last thoughts on that ill-fated project. The Anatomies are composed of a variety of disparate elements: legs in the shape of the Etretat cliffs; and torsos in the shape of potatoes and gourds, which sprout cogwheels, bananas, and other exotic extensions. Although many of these combines had figured in recent works, the figures take on a surrealist air en masse. Picasso doubtless wanted to show Breton and his followers how he would go about being a surrealist.

  Far more intrinsically surrealist than the Anatomies are the whimsical yet disquieting drawings and watercolors that Picasso would do at Cannes in July 1933.89 Like the 1929 beach scenes, which pit Olga and Marie-Thérèse against each other, these works portray the sun shining down on a breezy beach where Picasso has set up confrontations between his two women: each one an assemblage of bric-a-brac, bits of sculpture, gloves, stockings, picture frames, children’s balloons, forks, and so forth. These works are all too evidently inspired by Lautréamont’s celebrated metaphor for a boy’s beauty. Picasso’s exploitation of this surrealist mantra must have delighted Breton. After eluding him for all these years, the artist had come over to his side without, of course, joining his movement.

  The shadow of surrealism did not rest on Picasso’s paintings and drawings for long, but it would leave a permanent mark on the still
too little appreciated poetry, which was about to become his principal form of expression. After the breakup with Olga, Picasso’s campaign to bridge the gap between painting and sculpture seemingly prompted him to bridge the gap between word and image. After briefly ceasing to paint, in 1935, the blinded Minotaur—a surrogate for Picasso in some of his finest engravings—would devote himself to writing poems of such vividness and color that a blind man would be able to see them. This was how the surrealists should write poetry. Breton’s poetasters disagreed.

  Olga, Doña María, and Picasso at Boisgeloup, c. 1932.

  Epilogue

  Treacherous generals, see my dead house, look at broken Spain.1

  —Pablo Neruda

  If readers wonder why politics play such a small role in this volume, it is because the artist was determined not to get involved in them. As Kahnweiler said, Picasso was “the most apolitical man I have ever met.”2 Insofar as he was Spanish and Spain was a kingdom, Picasso claimed to be a monarchist. He was not being ironical. As a pacifist, he had approved of the King for keeping Spain out of World War I; but his monarchism had more to do with his view of himself as “yo el rey”—the inscription on an early self-portrait—than fealty to Alfonso XIII. Until the outbreak of civil war forced his hand, a royalist stance enabled him to withstand pressure from both right and left, refrain from any ideological commitment, and yet keep faith with his inherent humanism.