A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  31. Buffet-Picabia, 52.

  32. Picasso did not allow Zervos to publish it until 1952 (as Femme assise), by which time Picabia was dying.

  33. MP Carnets II, cat. 31 (MP 1870).

  34. Z.V.445.

  35. Picasso told Rubin (Rubin 1972, 221) that “the toy theater in this picture is an absolute accurate representation of the one he had made for Paulo, except for the omission of a human figure originally placed at stage right.” When Cooper questioned Picasso about the similarity between the toy theater and the various designs for the ballet Pulcinella, the artist allowed that Paulo’s toy theater might have started life as a maquette. That the artist should have gone to the trouble of reconstructing a scale model with a new set of steps for a set he had done four years earlier is hard to believe. That he played around conceptually with an existing model for the purposes of this painting as opposed to his son’s amusement is more likely.

  36. According to Paloma Picasso in conversation with the author.

  37. Rubin 1972, 120.

  38. Gasman, 836.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Z.V.443. Meyer Schapiro coined the term “still lifes of cruelty.” Rubin 1972, 121.

  41. Gasman, 761 n 1.

  42. Gasman, who devotes seventy-five pages of her thesis to the severed ram’s head, sees it in the context of classical myth, Christian and pagan religions, as well as Masonic symbolism (Ram-Hiram was the Masons’ name for their “Divine Architect of the Universe”). She also suggests that the ram’s head stands for Picasso and also for Satie, whose death a few weeks earlier had been a terrible blow.

  43. Z.II.134.

  44. Cabanne 1977, 244,

  45. The late Gustav Zumsteg collection, Zurich.

  46. Rowell, 92.

  47. Ibid., 102.

  48. Z.V.461.

  49. Also see Chapter 24, with reference to the death of Gris.

  50. JSLC 88.

  51. See Chapter 26.

  52. Z.V.188; this painting is usually dated 1924, but it was more likely done at the same time (summer 1925) as Z.V.262.

  53. Z.V.262.

  54. Z.V.459.

  CHAPTER 24

  Masterpiece Studio

  1. Letter from Paul Rosenberg to Picasso, September 16, 1925, Archives Picasso.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Leiris 1946, 116.

  5. Pellequer’s correspondence is not available to scholars, so very little is known about Picasso’s finances.

  6. Brassaï, 5.

  7. Ibid., 7.

  8. Letter from Olga’s mother, February 1925, private archive.

  9. Although he had long since ceased to reside there, Picasso would be outraged in 1951, when the government took over a great many apartments in Paris, including his own, because they were no longer lived in.

  10. Gilot 1964, 150–1.

  11. Letter from Bell to Mary Hutchinson, October 21, 1925, Ransom Center.

  12. See Raczymov, 147.

  13. Bell sent Picasso a postcard (October 18, 1925, Archives Picasso) inviting him to dine at the Boeuf on Friday, October 23: “vous trouverez un homme charmant—qui ressemble un peu à Lord Byron—qui veut bien faire votre connais-sance.”

  14. Letter from Bell to Mary Hutchinson, October 29, 1925, Ransom Center.

  15. Letter from Bell to Mary Hutchinson, October 25, 1925, Ransom Center.

  16. George Vandon (pseudonym for George [known as Peter] Harcourt Johnstone III, later Baron Derwent); see Return Ticket: Reminiscences (London: William Heinemann, 1940), 110–11, where the author describes the dinner. Bell, 183, wrote a huffy rebuttal.

  17. Virginia Woolf described Juana as “very stupid, but so incredibly beautiful that one forgives all” (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 1912–22, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Traut-mann, 467); and Lytton Strachey as having “the finest underclothes in Europe” (The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. Paul Levy [London: Viking, 2005], 479).

  18. Krauss 1986, 116.

  19. The exhibition included Man Ray, Picasso, Arp, Klee, Masson, Ernst, Miró, Pierre Roy, and Chirico; see Loeb, 115–16.

  20. An exception is Maurice Raynal’s mean-spirited review, quoted in Loeb, 116.

  21. André Breton, Surrealism and Fainting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Icon Editions, 1972), 70.

  22. Z.III.354 and Z.III.98.

  23. Z.V.357.

  24. Gilot 1964, 89.

  25. Originally scheduled for fall 1925, the show was postponed until June 1926 as the renovations to Rosenberg’s premises were not ready.

  26. PF.III.1557, PF.III.1559, and PF.III.1583.

  27. See, for example, Musée Picasso, Paris (MP 1990-12).

  28. MP Carnets II, cat. 32 (MP 1871).

  29. Baer 242.

  30. See, for example, Z.VII.16, PF.III.1623–1624, and PF.III.1672. Baer thinks the bicycle is more likely to be a kiddy-car. Schwarz, 126, mistakes the rocking horse for Marie-Thérèse: “a high spirited white pony with a fringed mane and quizzical facial expression.”

  31. Zervos first published the painting in 1952 as Les Modistes (Z.VII.2); Maurice Jardot gave the work its present title, L’Atelier de la modiste, at the time of the retrospective exhibition in 1955 and added a note in the catalog concerning the subject matter: “Cet atelier se trouvait effectivement de l’autre côté de la rue, en face des fenêtres de l’appartement que Picasso occupait rue de la Boétie.” It was in fact a dressmaker’s rather than a milliner’s atelier. See Vallentin, 168. “Picasso could gaze directly into a workshop across the way and see customers and modistes moving to and fro behind the windows.”

  32. Schwarz, 101, is the source of the misiden-tification.

  33. Krauss, 118.

  34. Vol. I, 110.

  35. Cabanne 1992, 657.

  36. To emphasize this painting’s association with death, Gasman, 739, relates the figure at the right in the Milliner’s Workshop to the Pichot figure in La Danse.

  37. Musée Picasso, Paris (MP 1990-11).

  38. Z.VII.30.

  39. See Vol. II, 416.

  40. Marie-Laure Bernadac, in “Picasso 1954–1972: Painting as Model,” Late Picasso: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints 1953-1972 (London: Tate Gallery, 1988), 74, also associates the enormous foot emerging from the tangle of lines with the Balzac story.

  41. Z.VII.9.

  42. Anne Baldassari, Picasso: Papiers journaux (Paris: Musée Picasso, 2003), 141; and Picasso: Working on Paper (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 121.

  43. Penrose, 66–7.

  44. The nail in the wall in the Guitar serves as a fulcrum for the cord; the two horizontal bars on the right have been lengthened to compensate for the off-center placement of the sound hole.

  45. Z.VII.10.

  46. Boggs, 223, who sees the piece vertically, cites a vertical croquis (Z.VII.14) executed later as “evidence” of how the Guitar should be hung. The author sees this croquis as a red herring intended to cause further confusion.

  47. Cowling 2006, 360 n. 123.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Louis Aragon, “La Peinture au défi” (1930), Aragon, 27.

  50. Carlton Lake, “Picasso Speaking,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1957, 39.

  51. Z.VII.19; Musée Picasso, Paris (MP 86, 88–95).

  52. See Chapter 25.

  53. Letter from Cocteau to Jacob, November 20, 1926, Kimball, 453.

  54. Cowling 2006, 277.

  55. Many of the paintings in Rosenberg’s 1924 exhibition (March 28–April 17) had been shown the previous winter in New York and Chicago.

  56. Zervos had met Picasso as early as 1924 and first championed his work in the journal LArt d’aujourd’hui. See Rubin 1996, 98 n. 2.

  57. Gasman to the author.

  58. See Chapter 39.

  59. For standard canvas formats, see Vol. II, 457 n 7.

  60. FitzGerald 1995, 158.

  61. La Révolution surréaliste, no. 7 (June 15, 1926).

  62. Ibid., 21.<
br />
  63. FitzGerald 1995, 160.

  64. See Volume II, 387.

  65. Letter from Matisse to his daughter, June 13, 1926, quoted in Bois, 33.

  66. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 122.

  67. Bois, 36.

  68. Stein 1938, 42–3.

  69. Ibid., 38.

  70. Ibid., 5.

  CHAPTER 25

  Summer at La Haie Blanche

  1. Sachs, 152.

  2. See Kenneth Wayne, Impressions of the Riviera (Portland, Ore.: Museum of Art, 1998), 62.

  3. Z.VII.34.

  4. MP Carnets II, cat. 33 (MP 1872).

  5. Picasso in conversation with the author.

  6. See Ferran.

  7. See, for example, Z.VII.11, Z.VII.23, and Z.VII.31, among many others.

  8. PF.III.1715–16.

  9. PF.III.1707, dated November 20, 1926; Zer-vos mistakenly dated this work 1934 (Z.VIII.242).

  10. PF.III.1671–2.

  11. Unknown until included in the 1985 Montreal show as Interior with Easel (PF.III.1705). Rubin misreads a drawing for it (Z.VII.32) in Rubin 1996, 68, for a dressmaker’s dummy— although such things lack legs—and relates it to Chirico’s metaphysical work.

  12. The simile appears in the sixth canto of Les Chants de Maldoror.

  13. This mosaic floor prompted Rosenberg to request a similar mosaic for the entrance to his refurbished gallery in 1928. Picasso did nothing about it. See letter from Rosenberg to Picasso, August 5, 1928, Archives Picasso.

  14. Hugo 1983, 253. The Liotard is in the Musée d’art et histoire, Geneva.

  15. Ibid.

  16. The Noailles signed up Mallet-Stevens after failing to interest Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in the project.

  17. Gilot 1964, 61.

  18. Undated letter [August 1926] from Sara Murphy to Picasso, Archives Picasso.

  19. Cline, 183.

  20. Interview with Archibald MacLeish, Paris Review 14, no. 57 (spring 1974), 69.

  21. Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to the Mur-phys, January 30, 1937, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribner, 1963), 447.

  22. In a letter to Picasso (July 24, 1926, Archives Picasso) Rosenberg warned of an absurd rumor that said he was going to Russia to paint the Soviet leaders. Any attempt to associate him with communism terrified Picasso.

  23. In 1926 La Publicitat was owned by Acció Catalana; the editor was Martí Esteve i Gual.

  24. See Ferran.

  25. Picasso’s comments appeared in L’Intran-sigeant, October 19, 1926, reproduced in Kim-ball, 452 n. 2.

  26. Telegram from Cocteau to Picasso, October 24, 1926, Archives Picasso.

  27. L’Intransigeant, October 27, 1926, reproduced in Kimball, 452 n.2.

  28. Letter from Cocteau to Picasso, October 29, 1926, Archives Picasso.

  29. Stein 1933, 222.

  30. Letter from Jacob to Cocteau, November 14, 1926, Kimball, 50.

  31. Letter from Cocteau to Jacob, November 20, 1926, Kimball, 453.

  32. The publication of Cocteau’s Lettre à Mari-tain and Maritain’s reply had caused a stir earlier in the year.

  33. Arnaud, 375.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Letter from Bell to Mary Hutchinson, October 26, 1926, Ransom Center.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Severini, 284.

  38. Cocteau called his collages têtes aux punaises (punaises can mean thumbtacks or fleas).

  39. Severini, 284.

  40. Ibid.

  41. History would repeat itself in 1950. James Lord recalls an incident chez Picasso after the inauguration of the Man with the Lamb at Val-lauris. The artist had pointedly wounded Cocteau by presenting him with a phallic knob of a ceramic pot, decorated with a face, after presenting an unknown photographer in quest of a souvenir with a fine drawing. This slight had launched Cocteau into a litany of Picasso’s misdeeds, including the broken limb story. James Lord, Some Remarkable Men (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 110.

  42. Severini, 385.

  43. Daix 1977, 208 and 214 n. 6.

  44. André Masson, “Correspondance,” La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 5 (October 15, 1925), 30.

  CHAPTER 26

  Marie-Thérèse Walter

  1. Marie-Thérèse Léontine Deslierres is the name given on her birth certificate. According to Widmaier Picasso 2004, 28, the name Deslierres was taken from the Villa Deslierres at Perreux, where Marie-Thérèse was born out of wedlock in 1909. Legally recognized two years later, she took her mother’s surname, Walter.

  2. In a previous interview with a Life magazine reporter, Marie-Thérèse had been much more guarded. See Barry Farrell, “His Women: The wonder is that he found time to paint,” Life 65, no. 26 (December 27, 1968), 74.

  3. See Gasman, 39, 58, etc.

  4. Collars used by girls in the 1920s and 1930s to enliven a plain dress.

  5. Gasman, 954.

  6. Cabanne 1974, 954.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Schwarz, 133.

  9. Jeanne, unlike Marie-Thérèse, took the name of her father.

  10. Schwarz, 119.

  11. See, for example, the essays by Rubin, Rosenblum, and FitzGerald in Picasso and Portraiture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996).

  12. Schwarz, 113.

  13. Ibid., 120.

  14. Baer 1997, 34.

  15. Widmaier Picasso 2004, 27. Rightly or wrongly, Jeanne believed her father to have been Léon’s brother, Eugène Volroff. Jeanne’s boast to Schwarz that the Volroffs were a distinguished Franco-Swedish family, whose ancestry went back to the reign of Louis XIII, was somewhat exaggerated.

  16. Victor Schwarz’s sister subsequently became Burkard Walter’s fourth wife.

  17. Schwarz, 120.

  18. Widmaier Picasso 2004, 33.

  19. Pointed out by Gasman; see “Silence ivre mort” in Bernadac and Piot, 393.

  20. Cabanne 1974, 7.

  21. Not least by the author of these pages in “Picasso and L’Amour fou,” New York Review of Books 32, no. 20 (December 19, 1985), 59–69.

  22. Her family name is unknown, hence rumors, now disproved, that she never existed. Polizzotti, 265, 283–5.

  23. Ibid., 264.

  24. Ibid., 269.

  25. Ibid., 285.

  26. Daix 1993, 418 n. 2, maintains that Breton’s Nadja had no influence on Picasso.

  27. See Vol. I, 49–50.

  28. Marie-Thérèse also told Cabanne 1974, 7, “J’étais gentille.”

  29. Widmaier Picasso 2004, 28, reports that Marie-Thérèse’s taste for sports was the result of attending a German boarding school.

  30. Gasman, 64.

  31. Museu Picasso, Barcelona (MPB 50.493).

  32. Gasman, 64.

  33. Alice Paalen, who was Picasso’s mistress for a time in the 1930s, reported that “one of [the artist’s] joys was to deny women their climaxes;” Cabanne 1977, 254.

  34. Gasman, 1444.

  35. Another mistress, Geneviève Laporte, told Schwarz, 57, that “when introducing his partners to sex,” he gave them books by the Marquis de Sade.

  36. Gasman, 1442.

  37. Laporte, 76.

  38. MP Carnets II, cat. 34 (MP 1873), is dated on the cover “December 1926–May 8, 1927.”

  39. Baer 124.

  40. MP Carnets II, cat. 34 (MP 1873).

  41. Z.VII.59.

  42. Z.VII.78–9.

  43. Rowell, 102.

  44. Z.VII.40.

  45. MoMA deaccessioned another more schematic, less poignant Seated “Woman—same date, same size, same pose—to the Toronto Art Gallery. Dated on the back 1926–27, this painting (Z.VII.77) started as a portrayal of the unidentifiable blond model and ended up as a transitional Marie-Thérèse.

  46. MacGregor-Hastie, 118.

  47. Gilot 1964, 235.

  48. See Gasman, 729–48, for the significance of doorknobs for Picasso.


  49. Reproduced in Markus Müller, Pablo Picasso and Marie-Thérése Walter (Bielefeld, Germany: Kerber Verlag, 2004), 71.

  50. The Picassos’ favorite weekend destination was the Ferme Saint-Siméon outside Honfleur.

  CHAPTER 27

  Summer at Metamorphosis

  1. Letter from Gris to Kahnweiler, February 6, 1926, Kahnweiler-Gris 1956, 180.

  2. Letter from Gris to W. Walter, February 1927, ibid., 211.

  3. Selected. “Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1946), 17.

  4. Stein 1933, 211–12.

  5. Letter from Gris to Picasso, August 18, 1918, Archives Picasso.

  6. Vol. II, 207–19.

  7. Art Institute of Chicago.

  8. Severini, 101.

  9. Assouline, 99.

  10. See Vol. II, 282.

  11. See Chapter 3.

  12. Letter from Bell to Mary Hutchinson, April 30, 1927, Ransom Center. In January, Picasso had told Jean Crotti (Duchamp’s brother-in-law) that he had been looking for a new car for Olga. “Did you buy the Panhard at Neuilly,” Crotti wrote, “or has the Hispano or Citroën won out?” Letter from Crotti to Picasso, January 10, 1927, Archives Picasso.

  13. Bacon Picasso: La Vie des images (Paris: Musée Picasso, 2005).

  14. Lucian Freud to the author.

  15. See Gerald Murphy’s letter to Picasso, September 19, 1927, Archives Picasso, regretting they had not seen him in Cannes.

  16. Letter from Paul Rosenberg to Picasso, August 5, 1927, Archives Picasso.

  17. The Chalet Madrid is located on the boulevard Alexandre III.

  18. Letter from Picasso to Stein, September 17, 1927, Beinecke Library.

  19. Letter from Beaumont to Picasso, September 2, 1927, Archives Picasso.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Confirmation of this visit to Paris is a letter dated September 6 from Rosenberg to Picasso in Cannes. It had been forwarded to Paris and then sent back to the Chalet Madrid. (Archives Picasso.)

  22. Musée Picasso, Paris (MP 1874 and MP 1990-1907). See Robert Rosenblum, “Picasso and the anatomy of eroticism,” Studies in Erotic Art (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 144.

  23. Vol. I, 280.

  24. Postcard from Picasso to Apollinaire [June 1914], Caizergues and Seckel, 112–13.

  25. Christian Zervos, “Projets de Picasso pour un monument,” Cahiers d’Art, 1930, 342.