A Life of Picasso
Page 62
Virtually all his biographers3 have overlooked the fact that Picasso had a very distinguished “uncle”—in fact, his mother’s first cousin. General Juan Picasso would unwittingly play a behind-the-scenes role in events leading up to the removal of the King and the outbreak of civil war. In 1922, Uncle Juan had been responsible for a report on the military disaster at Annual that had taken place the year before. Known as the “terrible papers of General Picasso,” the report would put the King in an embarrassing light and have far-reaching political consequences.
Although the cousins may never have met—the artist thought they had, the general’s family think they hadn’t—Pablo Picasso took pride in his uncle’s courage on the battlefield as well as in the role of investigator. The two Picasso cousins had inherited many of the same genes: both were small, tough, charismatic, and driven— albeit by compulsions of a very different stripe. The general’s forte was military reform and the honor and destiny of the cavalry; he was also an accomplished topographical draftsman and a lucid writer of reports. Xavier Vilató, the artist’s nephew, remembered him as lively and witty—not the least highfalutin.4 The general had the unusual virtue, at least in fin de siècle Spain, of being fearless and loyal to the ethos of the military rather than king and country.
General Juan Picasso González. Collection Heirs of Juan Picasso González, Madrid. Courtesy of Rafael Inglada.
Juan Ricardo Ramón Fabriciano de la San-tísima Trinidad Picasso was born in Málaga in 1857.5 He owed his promotion to an act of suicidal heroism in the course of one of the earlier Moroccan wars, when he galloped through a line of Rifeño riflemen and relieved a beleaguered garrison. After becoming a general, and later under-secretary of war, Juan Picasso declined the Prime Minister’s offer of the ministry. “Thank you very much,” he said, “but I prefer to continue being who I am, an honorable soldier.”6 And he went off to Geneva to represent Spain on the League of Nations Military Committee, only to be summoned back to Madrid to head the inquiry into the Army’s infamous defeat by Moroccan rebels at Annual in 1921. His report would be far harsher in apportioning blame than anyone had expected.
The Annual disaster was the last dismal act in the decline and fall of the Spanish Empire. In a vainglorious pretense that he still wielded imperial power, Alfonso XIII had secretly encouraged a gung-ho favorite of his, General Manuel Fernández Silvestre, to bring the fractious Moroccan Rif under military control so that greedy settlers could exploit the country and found a new capital to be called Ciudad Alfonsina. When the Moroccan leader, Abd-el-Krim, rebelled, Silvestre rushed in to crush him, although he had no mandate beyond secret telegrams from the King and the pusillanimous support of another royal favorite, General Dámaso Berenguer, the high commissioner of Morocco and chief of the Army in Africa. At the first sign of attack, more than 4,500 of Silvestre’s Moroccan troops promptly deserted, most of them to Abd-el-Krim, leaving his Spanish troops—poorly trained, poorly supplied, underpaid, and utterly demoralized—to be routed and massacred.
General Picasso’s blistering report established that most of those in command were either cowardly, corrupt, or inept, interested only in saving their own skin—in some cases their baggage—at the expense of their men. Abd-el-Krim’s victory was total. Silvestre committed suicide. The High Command had expected General Picasso to exempt his fellow generals from his strictures, to whitewash the meddlesome King, and limit the investigation “to obvious cases of dishonorable conduct during the panicky retreat.”7 Besides rocklike integrity, General Picasso had the all-important backing of the minister of war, Juan de la Cierva, who was able to deflect the old guard’s attempts to derail the inquiry. “Los terribles papeles,” which the general submitted on April 18, 1922, confirmed the High Command’s worst fears. It compromised the King and many of the King’s men, including General Berenguer and other military and civilian authorities. General Picasso denounced “the procedures followed in the Spanish zone of Morocco [as] misguided in every respect.”8 His report was further vindicated when Abd-el-Krim’s prisoners of war were repatriated in 1923 with yet more stories of their superiors’ cowardice and betrayals.
To save himself and his minions, the King managed to have the report suppressed and, to General Picasso’s fury, granted pardons to the inept Berenguer and the cowardly Colonel Jiménez Arroyo, whose surrender had left the Spanish line of defense untenable. Alfonso suffered no harm; in return for surrendering his royal prerogatives, he was allowed to go on playing at being king. Henceforth, absolute power would be vested in the military dictator, General Miguel Primo de Rivera, who took over the country in 1923. Rather than act on the report, he kept it up his sleeve.
For France, which shared Morocco with Spain, the Annual disaster would have very different but no less far-reaching consequences. The left—socialists, Communists, and the increasingly politicized surrealists—vociferously supported Abd-el-Krim and his Rifeños. The right was terrified that the rebellion would spread to their protectorate and that France would suffer the same fate as Spain unless the Rifeños were put down. When, on May 15, 1925, President Poincaré decided to send French troops to help Spain regain control of Morocco, there were massive demonstrations, including some sixty thousand protesters at Père-Lachaise on May 24. For the surrealists, opposition to the war in Morocco became a defining political cause. Despite his attachment to the beau monde, the young surrealist poet René Crevel became one of the most fervent activists. “The more brutal the better,” he said of the protests he helped to organize.9 Neither Crevel nor his surrealist or leftist associates were aware that the artist had a cousin who had played a heroic role in Moroccan affairs. In 1926 the French enabled the Spanish to crush the insurrection and force Abd-el-Krim to surrender to Marshal Pétain. Thirty years later, history would repeat itself, when outrage on the left put a stop to de Gaulle’s brutal policies in Algeria.
Perceived as a whistle-blower, General Picasso was reviled for his courage and honesty and shunted off to the Reserva with the rank of lieutenant general. However, his courage did not go unperceived. A cartoon by Bagaría in El Sol portrays Pablo Picasso, palette in hand, glowering at a large cubist painting on his easel. The caption reads, “I’m angry with my uncle, the general. Previously only my art was dismissed as too dark. Now they complain of his clarity. Whatever catches the public eye!”10 General Picasso came from the same Andalusian background as Miguel Primo de Rivera and had worked with him, which might explain the artist’s surprisingly uncritical attitude toward the dictator as well as his son, José Antonio.
As military dictators go, Miguel Primo de Rivera was relatively humane—at least at first. Although born to a family of reactionary landowners, he differed from his neighbors, as Gerald Brenan writes, in his
desire to remedy the condition of the poor within the rather narrow framework of what was possible to him. As a general too he was something of a pacifist. He stood out against the strong feeling in the Army for a revanche in Morocco and began a withdrawal of the troops to the fortresses on the coast. And he was humane: although his six years of rule had their share of plots and risings, on only one occasion were there executions.11
However, power did not take long to corrupt the dictator. Forced to resign in 1930, he retired to Paris, where he soon gorged his life away in bars and brothels.12 Berenguer replaced him, but not for long. The Picasso report was dusted off and used to help remove him from power, and also to taint the monarchy. Alfonso XIII’s reign had started with the blast of an anarchist’s bomb decimating his wedding cortege; his exile was greeted with a national sigh of relief: no bloodshed and few tears. Municipal elections in March 1931 brought the Republicans to power. It was hoped that “the Golden Age of a Socalist-led Second Republic” would bring peace, prosperity, and democracy to Spain.13 Republicans went boldly ahead with their liberal agenda. They wrenched control of education away from the church, built thousands of new schools, and instituted agrarian reforms and cultural initiatives, including an exhibition o
f Picasso’s work in Spain. Plans for this fell through when it turned out that a squad of the Guardia Civil (National Guard) on the train bringing the paintings to Madrid was all the insurance the Republican government could afford.
In August 1933, Picasso, accompanied by Olga and Paulo,14 paid a state visit to Barcelona to celebrate the acquisition by the Palau de Belles Artes of Lluis Plandiura’s collection of his early works. Besides being reunited with some of his oldest friends—the de Sotos, Manolos, Reventoses, Junyer-Vidals—he traveled around attending bullfights and encouraging his son’s afición. The delight the Catalans took in their “Golden Age” was turning to foreboding at rebellious rumblings from the right. In the face of fascism the parties of the left coalesced into the Popular Front, whose members organized strikes, demonstrations, and such subversive acts as derailing trains. When coal miners in Asturias came out on strike, they were brutally put down by General Franco and his troops. Chaos ensued. To stave off revolution, a general election was called for in February 1936, and the Popular Front won, but it did not hold together. After the murder of Calvo Sotelo, a leading right-wing politician, in July 1936, civil war was inevitable. A mismatched coalition of liberal idealists, socialists, anarchists, and Communists stood no chance against unified totalitarian might. By the elections of November 1933, the church, the military, and the landowners had joined forces. After two and a half years of rickety utopian democracy, the Republicans were ousted and the Right regained power—power that was vested in a fascist party named the Falange, under the leadership of Primo de Rivera’s son, José Antonio.
Just as he had liked Miguel Primo de Rivera for not disliking his work, Picasso warmed to the son. “El Jefe,” as he was known, was notoriously charming. Far more sophisticated than his “glorified café politician”15 of a father, he realized the public relations advantage that Mussolini had derived from harnessing Marinetti and the futurists to his “new order,” so he promptly set about attracting avant-garde painters, poets, and intellectuals to promote his endeavor. José Antonio took on the dynamic Ernesto Giménez Caballero, owner-editor of the prestigious Gaceta Literaria, which had employed Buñuel as a film critic, published Federico García Lorca, and even a work by Picasso. Formerly one of the most progressive intellectuals in Spain, Giménez Caballero had experienced a radical epiphany and reinvented himself as a fascist ideologue who would forsake avant-garde involvement to write proselytizing Catholic tracts, including La nueva catolicidad (1933) and Roma madre (1939), as well as Franco’s speeches. After recruiting Dalí—he filmed the artist and his “arachnid” wife on the rooftop of his Madrid office —Giménez Caballero set about winning over Picasso and Lorca to the fascist side. In this endeavor he had the support of an ambitious young modernist architect, José Manuel Aizpurua, whom José Antonio named as delegate for press and propaganda to the Junta Nacional de Falange Español.1617 Aizpurua would be one of the first important Falangists to be shot in the civil war.
For all his liberal beliefs, Lorca had been almost as careful as Picasso to avoid overt political commitment. As the poet told Rafael Martínez Nadal, he was “an anarchist—communist—libertarian, a pagan catholic, a traditionalist and monarchist who supports don Duarte of Portugal.”18 To another friend Lorca said “I greet some people like this”—he raised his hand in a fascist salute—“and others like that”—he raised a clenched Communist fist. “But to my friends, this”—he cried and held out his hand.19 Nervous of being cornered by José Antonio’s advances, Lorca left for South America. Back in Spain, he was warned by friends to stay in Madrid, but he could not keep away from his beloved hometown of Granada, where “a small but determined Falangist party”20 was in power. Lorca was soon obliged to go into hiding, but the Falangists found him and executed him. The assassin did the rounds of the Granada cafés boasting of having shot the poet “up the ass.” A month before his death, Lorca had told a friend, “As for me, I’ll never be political. I’m a revolutionary, because all true poets are revolutionaries … but political, never.”21
Picasso felt much the same way. In 1932 he had been asked by Eluard to sign a petition in support of Aragon, who had been charged with inciting violence in his poem Front rouge. Fearful that the secret police might use his signature on a petition as an excuse for expelling him from France, he insisted on consulting his lawyer before signing. If he failed to do so, Eluard threatened, in a shockingly revealing letter to his former wife, Gala Dalí, “to denounce him, attack him violently”22 No wonder Picasso mistrusted the surrealists. So did the Communists. An article in their newspaper L’Humanité accused the surrealists of being “pretentious intellectuals” out to exploit Aragon’s plight to their advantage.23 As for Picasso, the Soviet embassy in Paris had discouraged Moscow from taking any interest in this artist who was “little more than a leftist bourgeois.”24 Had he known this, Picasso would have been greatly relieved.
Picasso’s lack of political involvement gave José Antonio cause for hope. Hearing that the artist was returning to Spain, at the end of August 1934, for another tauro-machic tour, El Jefe invited him and his wife and son to San Sebastián—Spain’s smartest resort—to be guest of honor at the inaugural dinner of a “cultural and gastronomic club” called the GU. Twenty years later, Picasso told his Argentine friend, Otero, that he found José Antonio “muy simpdtico.”25 He had not, however, realized that GU was the propagandist arm of the Falange. The dinner was held on the premises of the Club Náutico (the Royal Yacht Club), a stylish Corbusierish pavilion, “hanging over San Sebastián’s La Concha beach,”26 which had been designed by Aizpurua. Giménez Caballero was in charge of the arrangements. This should have put Picasso on his guard. He must surely have recalled that in 1931 Giménez Caballero had attacked the eminent philosopher Dr. Gregorio Marañón for calling on Picasso to consider returning to Spain or, at least, to consent to be buried there when his brilliant career ended.27 Among those who lent their names to this petition were Eugenio d’Ors, Gómez de la Serna, the Duke of Alba, Pedro Sainz Rodríguez (assistant editor of La Gaceta), José Ortega y Gasset, and Gregorio Marañón.
Giménez Caballero assailed the petition in a front-page editorial in La Gaceta attacking Picasso’s artistry. Picasso had achieved fame “thanks only to the bourgeois class, the capitalists and their army of critics and merchants, the agents of the stock exchange of paintings…. Promoters of the petition were representatives of Spanish ‘snobbism,’ who simply could not comprehend the direction of Vanguardist art.”28 In his differing accounts of his meetings with Picasso, there seems to have been no mention of past history. Giménez Caballero first encountered the artist lunching at the Club Náutico with Olga and Paulo and someone he identifies as either Aizpurua or a lawyer.29 Although Olga spoke good Spanish, they were talking French out of courtesy to her. “I have been here for several days,” Picasso reportedly said, “more than I thought. I came for twenty-four hours, but I have stayed much longer so that I can get back to the heart of Spain.”30 He had been amused to discover that “the nuns take their girls to the bullfights. Since the Republic, they have free passes as if it were a feast day and they were going to be blessed.”31 Picasso had also been struck, he said, by all the “lost children on the beach and by the voice from a loudspeaker telling them what to do.” “Perhaps Picasso was no more than a lost child on a Spanish beach,” Giménez Caballero fantasized32—as if he were the official with the loudspeaker.
Three days of Giménez Caballero’s attempts at indoctrination confirmed Picasso in his distaste for fascism. The man’s questions were surprisingly dim: “Which book do you prefer of all those written about you?” “One in Japanese that I couldn’t read.” “Do you believe that art should be abstract?” “No, simple and direct, like a bridge connecting two different points.”33 Someone else asked why he lived in Paris and not in Spain. “One carries one’s passport on one’s face.”34 Picasso’s habit of combing his graying forelock over his forehead reminded Giménez Caballero of a picador. The gold wa
tch chain on his lapel, the handkerchief in his breast pocket, and “the waist-coated belly exploding from his jacket” were more reminiscent of “a priest in a casino.”35
José Antonio was more suave than his henchman. “What would you say if in the distant future an encyclopedia defined you as a great Andalusian poet—better known in his lifetime as a painter?” he asked. Picasso would recall this incident in the 1950s, when Otero asked the very same question that José Antonio had put to him at “the banquet in my honor at the San Sebastián Yacht Club. Strange, isn’t it? Strange, indeed, in that Picasso did abandon painting for poetry a year later. The artist never explained why he had accepted the Falangist invitation, but the reason can only have been that he wanted a retrospective of his work to be held in Spain—something the Falange was very keen to promote. When Picasso complained about the Republican government’s failure to come up with enough money, only guards, to insure such a show, José Antonio promised a detachment of the Guardia Civil as an escort, “but only after we have insured your work.”3637
To further the prospects of a show, Picasso told José Antonio that “the only Spanish politician who spoke well of me as a national glory was your father.”38 Miguel Primo de Rivera had supposedly made this statement in an article in “a North American newspaper,” no trace of which has been found. Besides arranging for an exhibition in the land of his birth, Picasso wanted to show his wife and son how highly regarded he was in his own country. The excuse he gave Otero for accepting José Antonio’s compromising invitation was political naïveté. He claimed that he had been “set up” by Giménez Caballero:
Just listen to what [Giménez Caballero] said about my eyes … that I had the same expression as Mussolini. Of course, that was a compliment of sorts, coming from him. However, for me it was anything but. I knew the people wining and dining me that night were very dangerous and as I remember I boarded the train for France that same evening. And that was my last day in Spain.39