A Life of Picasso

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A Life of Picasso Page 69

by John Richardson


  8. Baer 1997, 48.

  9. Gilot 1990, 291.

  10. Xavier Vilató to the author.

  11. Tomkins, 37.

  12. Palau 1999, 379.

  13. Letter from Bell to Picasso, October 15, 1923, Archives Picasso.

  14. Z.VI.1435.

  15. Z.V.30, for example, and Z.VI.1429.

  16. Tomkins, 39.

  17. Stein 1933, 221.

  18. Tomkins, 41.

  19. Christian Zervos, “Conversation avec Picasso,” Cahiers d’Art, 1935; see Bernadac and Michaël, 35.

  20. Z.V.141.

  21. See Vol. I, 443 (Z.I.305/Z.VI.715). For another possible source for this painting of The Pipes of Pan: photographs of Sicilian boys by Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden; See Robert Judson Clark and Marian Burleigh-Motley “New Sources for Picasso’s ‘Pipes of Pan,’ ” Arts Magazine, October 1980, 92–3.

  CHAPTER 19

  Cocteau and Radiguet

  1. Salvadó’s address appears at the back of MP Carnets I, cat. 25 (MP 1990-101).

  2. Palau i Fabre to McCully

  3. Salvadó 1995, 18.

  4. The date for Derain’s Harlequin and Pierrot was 1923 and not 1924–25, as the artist claimed. The misdating seems to have been intentional. Derain’s contract with Kahnweiler ended in February 1924, when he signed up with Paul Guil-laume, who had commissioned this work and modeled for it as Pierrot. Had Kahnweiler discovered that the painting dated from 1923, he might have had a a legal claim to it.

  5. Salvadó 1995, 18.

  6. Ibid., 18–19.

  7. Z.V.17, Z.V.23, Z.V.37, and Z.V.135.

  8. Salvadó 1995, 19; he mistakenly identifies the dealer as Kahnweiler.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Letter from André Breton to Picasso, September 18, 1923, Archives Picasso.

  11. Letter from Breton to Picasso, October 9, 1923, Archives Picasso.

  12. Baer 111.

  13. Baer 110. Letter from Breton to Picasso, October 29, 1923, Archives Picasso.

  14. Polizzotti, 194.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Cousins and Seckel, 175.

  17. Ibid., 231.

  18. Letter from Breton to Doucet; November 6, 1923, in ibid., 177.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid, 178.

  21. Ibid., 177.

  22. Both Musée d’Orsay Paris.

  23. Chapon, 298–9. Before hanging the Demoiselles in his staircase, Doucet contemplated displaying it in his fanciful art deco bathroom.

  24. Ibid., 305.

  25. Letter from Roché to Picasso, January 24, 1924, Archives Picasso.

  26. Roché journals, January 31 and February 10, 1924, Ransom Center.

  27. Letter from Edith de Beaumont to Picasso, [June] 20, 1923, and undated note from Sert, both Archives Picasso.

  28. Stein 1938, 31.

  29. FitzGerald 1995, 127.

  30. Letter from Quinn to Roché, June 9, 1922, Ransom Center.

  31. Letter from Quinn to Roché, March 14, 1924, Ransom Center.

  32. Letter from Paul Rosenberg to Picasso, November 21, 1923, Archives Picasso.

  33. Letter from Paul Rosenberg to Picasso, November 26, 1923, Archives Picasso.

  34. Letter from Paul Rosenberg to Picasso, December 11, 1923, Archives Picasso.

  35. FitzGerald 1995, 128.

  36. Letter from Quinn to Roché, December 6, 1923, Ransom Center.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Letter from Quinn to Roché, June 25, 1924, Ransom Center.

  39. FitzGerald 1995, 126.

  40. Ibid., 151.

  41. Hugo 1983, 212–14. For Valentine’s account of the same evening, see Hugo 1953, 22–3.

  42. Steegmuller 1970, 308.

  43. Nemer, 476, 478. Though still alive, Bronia Clair refuses to discuss this period of her life.

  44. Russell Greeley was a descendant of Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, whose “Greeleyisms,” such as “Go west, young man, go west,” are still quoted today.

  45. Hugo 1953, 24.

  46. According to Nemer, 491, “Food poisoning is unlikely to have been the cause, three months later, of both [Radiguet’s] typhoid and [Valentine’s] peritonitis.”

  47. Ibid., 484.

  48. Léon Daudet never accepted the death of his son as a suicide and accused the anarchists among others of shooting him. For wrongly accusing a taxi driver he was fined and sentenced to some months in prison.

  49. Billot, 426.

  50. Recounted in letter from Radiguet’s father Maurice to Poulenc, December 15, 1923, Poulenc, 216.

  51. Hugo 1983, 227.

  52. Steegmuller 1970, 317.

  53. Cocteau wrote on January 2, 1924, from Monte Carlo to a Paris editor. Steegmuller 1970, 321.

  54. Erik Satie, “Les Ballets Russes à Monte Carlo,” Paris-Journal, February 15, 1924, reprinted in Erik Satie, Ecrits (Paris: Champ Libre, 1977), 70.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Laloy’s book was published in 1913. Steeg-muller 1970, 323.

  57. Ibid., 324.

  58. Ten years old at the time his father shot himself, Cocteau would be haunted by dreams that his father had turned into a parrot.

  59. Morand 2001, 81.

  60. Arnaud, 326. Thirty years later, the artist made the same remark to Cooper and the author, substituting soap for sugar.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Jean Cocteau, Oeuvres poétiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 509.

  63. A draft of stanza 13 was found on the last page of Cocteau’s copy of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés n’abolira le hazard.

  64. Steegmuller 1970, 336.

  65. Ibid., 346.

  CHAPTER 20

  Mercure

  1. The Théâtre de la Cigale was nicknamed the Beaumont Palace (a play on “Gaumont Palace”) for the duration of this season.

  2. Letter from Beaumont to Satie, February 20, 1924, Volta 2000, 591–2.

  3. Letter from Beaumont to Picasso, February 21, 1924, Archives Picasso.

  4. Volta 1989, 160.

  5. Gillmor, 245.

  6. Whiting, 524.

  7. Letter from Elizabeth Polunin to Picasso, May 20, 1924, Archives Picasso, about the signs of the zodiac they had in the studio, which were subsequently used in the ballet. (See Whiting, 535.)

  8. Whiting, 523. When performed in London, Mercure’s Graces reminded Horace Horsnell, the (London) Observer critic, of “life on a submerged houseboat as lived by three Edwardian barmaids with hypertrophied period busts.” Gillmor, 246.

  9. Whiting, 527.

  10. Cooper, 58.

  11. The Soirées de Paris spectacles benefited two charities—war widows and Russian refugees—hence the presence of high-ranking officials.

  12. Serge Lifar quoted in Buckle 1979, 434.

  13. Ornella Volta, Satie et la danse (Paris: Editions Plume, 1992), 75.

  14. Later productions had different choreography and different décor.

  15. The Mecure drop curtain is in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; documentary photographs are in the Fondation Erik Satie, Paris. Some of the pastel studies are in the Cramer collection, Geneva, in addition to studies and a sketchbook in the Musée Picasso, Paris.

  16. Aragon quoted in Picasso and Theater (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2006), 212.

  17. “Hommage à Pablo Picasso” was published in Paris-Journal, June 21, 1924; Le Journal Littéraire, June 21, 1924; and 391, no. 18 (July 1924).

  18. Z.IV380.

  19. The 1922 panel of two bathers was first used as a rideau de scène for Nijinska’s ballet Les Biches, before becoming identified with Le Train bleu. See Buckle 1979, 576 n. 147.

  20. Dolin, 80.

  21. Buckle 1979, 428.

  22. One of these Soirées de Paris ballets, Trois pages dansées, was choreographed by Eti-enne de Beaumont, who had once trained as a dancer.

  23. Letter from Stravinsky to C. F. Ramuz, June 26, 1924, Walsh, 392.

  CHAPTER 21

  Still Lifes at La Vigie<
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  1. Donnelly, 29.

  2. See, for example, Z.V.262–5.

  3. The garage that Picasso used as a studio at La Vigie was demolished in 1956; it was later reconstructed after the road had been widened.

  4. According to Tomkins, 39, the scrubbing of the “oil cartoon” off the garage walls cost Picasso 800 francs. Also see Bell’s letter to Mary Hutchinson, October 26, 1924, Ransom Center.

  5. Gilot 1964, 150.

  6. Vaill, 148, suggests that the Beaumonts stayed in Juan-les-Pins during the summer of 1924.

  7. Z.V.254-5.

  8. Letter from Olga to Stein, October 23, 1924, and postcard from Picasso to Stein, July 29, 1924, Beinecke Library.

  9. This drawing was presented to Alice and Gilbert Seldes on the occasion of their wedding, which the Picassos attended, in the Bois de Boulogne, in June 1924. Kammen, 107.

  10. Gilot 1964, 149.

  11. Cline, 245.

  12. Vaill, 147.

  13. Charles Scribner III, “Introduction,” Tender Is the Night (New York: Scribner, 1982), 13.

  14. Musée Picasso, Paris (MP 999). Evidently baffled, Palau 1999, 414, entitles this drawing Arabesque.

  15. Cowling 2002, 460.

  16. A rough sketch of a reclining nude with a vagina dentata of a mouth (PF.III.1478), done around the same time, confirms this reading of the beach towel drawing.

  17. PF.III.1474.

  18. See MP Carnets II, cat. 30 (MP 1869).

  19. Z.V.224.

  20. Z.V.228.

  21. Letter from Sara Murphy to the Picassos, undated [September 1924], Archives Picasso.

  22. Z.V.220.

  23. Elizabeth Cowling, Matisse Picasso (London: Tate Gallery, 2002), 151–4.

  24. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  25. Cowling 2002, 461.

  26. Gilot 1964, 74.

  27. The wormlike thread that unites the three oranges is more baffling. Might it refer to the thread that unites the three Norns representing past, present, and future in Wagner’s Götterdäm-merung?

  28. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (London: Penguin, 1975; first published 1934), 199.

  29. Apollinaire took Meyerhold on a visit to various artists’ studios, including Boccioni’s— and most likely Picasso’s. According to Ilya Ehrenburg, “Apollinaire understood that in the theater the point was neither D’Annunzio nor Ida Rubenstein nor the décor of Bakst, but the moral concerns of a young theater director from Saint Petersburg.” Ilya Ehrenburg, Un Ecrivain dans la révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 172. See also Peter Read, “Guillaume Apollinaire et Vsevolod Meyerhold,” La Revue des lettres mo-dernes, Guillaume Apollinaire, 15 (1980), 159–64.

  30. Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, Vol. 2, 1909–1954 (London: Penguin, 2006), 244.

  31. On eye-teasing devices such as these, see Adelbert Ames Jr. in Gombrich, 209–10.

  32. Guillaume Apollinaire, “LEsprit nouveau et les poètes” (November 1917), Euvres en prose complètes, III (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 906.

  33. Z.VII.3.

  34. Z.V.416.

  35. Pierre Daix, “On a hidden portrait of Marie-Thérèse,” Art in America, September 1983, 127.

  36. PF.III.1512, 1514, and 1547. Palau has invented strange titles for the first two: Face of Irritated Woman and Face of Perplexed Woman. He thinks the last one was done later in Paris.

  37. Z.V.285.

  38. PF.III.1503 and PF.III.1507. A vaginalike sun makes its first appearance in a similar view painted on Picasso’s 1920 visit to Juan-les-Pins (see PF.III.777).

  39. MP Carnets II, cat. 30 (MP 1869).

  40. Braque in conversation with the author.

  41. It is surely no coincidence that certain experimental musical scores resemble Picasso’s “constellations.”

  42. In confirmation of this, Gombrich, cites the ethnologist Koch-Grunberg’s study of the different ways different Indian tribes interpret the same constellation (the lion constellation, for instance, as a crawfish or lobster). Gombrich, 91.

  CHAPTER 22

  La Danse

  1. Letter from Bell to Mary Hutchinson, October 26, 1924, Ransom Center.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Vladimir Mayakovski had first met Picasso in 1922, when he visited the artist’s studio. See McCully, 154.

  4. Letter from Bell to Mary Hutchinson, November 9, 1924, Ransom Center.

  5. Picasso was mentioned in Paris-Journal (December 5, 1924) as being among the reportedly three thousand people who had turned up for the “opening night” of Relâche on November 27. In fact the opening was postponed until December 4.

  6. Gillmor, 256.

  7. Ibid., 258.

  8. Volta 1989, 205.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Gasman, 762.

  11. Shattuck, 183.

  12. Z.V.426.

  13. Letter from Eduardo Marquina to his wife (Pichot’s sister), December 26, 1924 (Pixot family archives, Cadaquès): “Picasso will return next Monday or Tuesday if the slight improvement continues.”

  14. See Vol. I, 211.

  15. See Chapter 18.

  16. According to Penrose, 250, who persuaded Picasso to sell the painting to the Tate Gallery.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Cowling 2006, 276. Picasso always referred to the painting as La Danse, Penrose as Les Trois Danseuses. Given Penrose’s role in its acquisition, the Tate continues to call it The Three Dancers; elsewhere it is known as La Danse.

  19. Z.V.367. Cecchetti wrote Olga the following year (March 15, 1926), thanking her for photographs of the drawing: “c’est un très agréable souvenir de notre cher Picasso trèsjoli, très ressem-blant et je l’aime beaucoup.” Archives Picasso.

  20. Kochno, cited by Gasman, 799–800.

  21. PF.III.1541.

  22. Buckle 1979, 451.

  23. For drawings of Lifar, see “Dessins de Pablo Picasso: Serge Lifar et la danse,” Double carnet critique no. 280-1, La Revue Musicale (1971).

  24. Cooper, 62.

  25. In 1960, Picasso finally did a portrait of Lifar. see Cooper, 420.

  26. Z.V.415.

  27. The opening had been postponed. See pages 178 and 309.

  28. Sokolova 1960, 192.

  29. Bois, 33.

  30. Buckle 1979, 211.

  31. Paul Morand, Lettres de Paris (July 1924) (Paris: Salvy 1996), 77.

  32. Buckle 1979, 450.

  33. Dukelsky’s score was criticized by Prokofiev as too amateurish, “Too much Glazunov,” Buckle 1979, 452.

  34. Danchev, 161.

  35. Letter from Poulenc to Picasso [July 19, 1925], Poulenc, 258.

  36. Danchev, 162.

  37. According to Poulenc, quoted in Danchev, 161.

  38. Dolin, 106.

  39. Letter from Paul Rosenberg to Picasso, April 30, 1925, Archives Picasso.

  40. See Ferran.

  41. Duke, 146.

  42. Cowling 2002, 465.

  43. Kochno, quoted in Gasman, 637.

  44. Stein 1933, 107.

  45. Letter from Breton to Picasso, June 9, 1925, Archives Picasso.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Villa Belle Rose

  1. Cowling 2006, 146.

  2. See the July 15, 1925, issue of La Révolution Surréaliste.

  3. See cat. 249 in André Breton: La Beauté convulsive (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1991).

  4. A[gnès Angliviel de] L[a] B[aumelle], “André Masson,” in Monod-Fontaine, 134.

  5. See Vol. II, 35.

  6. Zette Leiris kept the gallery functioning throughout the Occupation, while the Kahnweil-ers hid in a farm in the Southern Zone.

  7. Leiris 1946, 127.

  8. Ibid., 128.

  9. Armel, 571– 2.

  10. Donnelly, 19. The gardens had beenplanted by the former owner, a colonial official who had brought back exotic trees and plants from his travels.

  11. Tomkins, 117.

  12. John Dos Passos, The Best Times: An Informal Memoir (New York
: New American Library, 1966), 150.

  13. See Vaill, 162, “After one such exhibition Honoria sent Picasso a note in … phonetic French: ‘Chere mecie picaso,’ she wrote, ‘vous vous le que je vous decine une animal’ with a drawing of a hippopotamus-like horse and rider which…. Picasso reportedly admired.”

  14. Ibid., 184.

  15. Palau 1999, 448.

  16. Stainton, 93–5.

  17. Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño, La pintura española del siglo XX (Madrid: Ibérico Europea, 1972), 55–6.

  18. Cabanne 1977, 269, based on Peinado’s account in Brassaï, 175.

  19. Francis Picabia, “Le Cubisme est une cathédrale de merde,” La Pomme de Pins (Saint-Raphaël), February 25, 1922.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Francis Picabia, “Le Salon des Indépen-dants,” La Vie Moderne, February 11, 1923.

  22. Buffet-Picabia, 53.

  23. Picabia never married Lorenzo’s mother. See Everling for an account of the years they spent together.

  24. Ibid., 165–6.

  25. Z.V.460.

  26. Cowling 2002, 476–80. Cowling invokes Freud and interprets The Kiss as an oedipal image: “The mother is rousing her child’s sexual instinct and preparing for its later intensity. Her maternal caresses … are sexual in character and transform the child into a lover.” Picasso had no time for Freud or Freudian interpretations of his work. The cramming together of these two kissing figures into a single erotic entity will become more and more of an obsession.

  27. Cowling 2006, 246.

  28. Musée de la Ville de Paris.

  29. Letter from Picabia to Pierre de Massot (reprinted in Francis Picabia: Singulier idéal [Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2003], 298). Ripolin is the shiny house paint that Picasso was the first to use as an alternative to, or in conjunction with, traditional oil paint. It allowed the artist to apply local color to a specific object instead of representing it tonally. Picabia had copied Picasso and used Ripolin in some of his recent compositions. See also Vol. II, 225.

  30. Picabia’s letter to Massot (see above) was written around the time of the Mi-Carême—that is to say in March 1925. Picabia thus embarked on the series in Cannes shortly before Picasso’s Easter trip to Monte Carlo, during which they may have met.

 

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