10. Though usually entitled Acrobats, these paintings represent contortionists.
11. Z.VII.310.
12. Z.VII.307–8.
13. Cabanne 1977, 256.
14. Leiris 1930, 67.
15. Gilot 1990, 151.
16. Z.VII.309.
17. See Vol. II, 15; and John Richardson, “Picasso’s Apocalyptic Whorehouse,” New York Review of Books, April 23, 1987, 40-7.
18. The self-referential scaffolding is taken from a similarly self-referential feature in Matisse’s 1914 Goldfish and Palette. See Vol. II, 386–7, for an account of how Picasso used this source for his great 1915 Harlequin.
19. Z.VII.252; Z.VII.306.
20. See Z.VII.298–305 and Z.VII.311–14.
21. These panels are virtually all the same size (64 X 47 cm), except the Crucifixion one, which is marginally larger, but still smaller than reproductions suggest.
22. Brassaï, 74.
23. Malraux, 42–3.
24. Picasso had based his great 1908 Dryad on Vesalius’s seventh plate of the muscles from the second book of De humani corporis fabrica. See Vol. II, pp. 88–9.
25. Aragon, 33 n 1.
26. Vol. I, 105–6.
27. Z.VII.206. Picasso told Rubin that this Seated Bather is a portrayal of Olga. FitzGerald 1996, 324.
28. Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
29. The catalog of Picassos in the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art makes the same claim. Rubin 1972, 132.
CHAPTER 33
Golgotha
1. Although this painting (Z.VII.287) is dated February 7, 1930, layers of paint indicate that it was certainly not done in a day, as Gasman thinks, 1064.
2. Bernadac and Michaël, 128.
3. Z.VII.279–82.
4. See Vol. I, 71–88.
5. Kahnweiler 1956, 73.
6. Cowling 2006, 126.
7. Vol. I, 73.
8. Based on some of the June 1929 drawings, which show only Christ’s legs, Gasman, 1049, argues that the scene anticipates the Resurrection.
9. Anthony Blunt, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 26.
10. Thanks to his knowledge of iconography Picasso has portrayed the tiny crosses of the two thieves to right and left as T-shaped ones, to which miscreants were bound by the armpits, and not nailed like Christ to a Roman cross.
11. Some commentators see this green mass as a rock. Picasso liked his images to mean different things to different people. I see it as a sponge. It has also been seen as a reference to Bataille’s Anus solaire.
12. Picasso was doubtless aware of a book by Francisco Pacheco (the father-in-law of Velázquez) called the Arte de la pintura (1649), which details iconographical usage.
13. Cabanne 1977, 255.
14. St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (New York: Frederick Unger, 1957), 218.
15. The photograph was published in Bernier.
16. See Penrose’s account of a day with Picasso (February 24, 1955). Cowling 2006, 106–7.
17. Penrose, 259.
18. Z.IX.193.
19. See Chapter 34.
20. See Gibson 1997, pl. 62.
21. Ibid., 236.
22. See Kaufmann; Gasman, 958ff.
23. Z.VII.311.
24. MacGregor-Hastie, 125.
25. For further discussion, see Régnier 1993 and Régnier 2002.
26. Laporte, 2.
27. Régnier 2002, 19, points out that Picasso moves from Catholic to Mithraic to shamanic iconography, often blending one with another.
28. In his recent dissertation, Charles Miller has argued that the reference to Mithra in Picasso’s Crucifixion is a red herring, since Bataille’s article had appeared after the painting. He prefers to see the “reference-point” as the devotional image d’Epinal and the controversial and much discussed writings of Jacques Mari-tain; see Miller, 201–2 and 189.
29. Other interpretations include Rosenthal, 651, who envisions this configuration as “sunglasses” on the face of a woman with “an expansive smile;” and MacGregor-Hastie, 125, who sees it as “a grinning, Spanish, straw-hatted aficionado.”
30. Notably in Le Bleu du ciel; see Surya, 187–8.
31. Dora Maar to the author.
32. JSLC, 102.
CHAPTER 34
L’Affaire Picasso
1. Over the years, l’affaire Picasso—the theft of several hundred early drawings from his mother’s Barcelona apartment—had been virtually forgotten. Cooper had told the author what he had heard about the case at the time; this triggered his interest. After this chapter was under way, it transpired that Laurence Madeline, archivist at the Musée Picasso, was embarking on a similar project. Madeline generously made a draft of her Burlington Magazine article (May 2005) available. This has been of great help. Francesc Parcerisas has also provided information about the Catalan involvement.
2. In 1927 Doña María had moved to the apartment of her daughter, Lola, and son-in-law Dr. Vilató, at no. 7, Paseo de Colón, around the corner from the Carrer de Mercè home where Picasso had lived as a youth. Doña María and the Vilatós moved to 48, paseo de Gracia in 1938.
3. She was seventy-five, not eighty as Picasso claimed.
4. Letter from Picasso to the “Procureur de la République,” May 9, 1930, Archives Picasso.
5. Apropos the involvement of the Paris-based Catalan potter Josep Llorens Artigas in the theft, his son, Joanet Artigas Gardy, said that the best account of the affair was in Buñuel’s memoir, perhaps not realizing that Buñuel wrongfully believed that the “American companion” of the thief was his father. The first that Artigas knew of the drawings was when Calvet showed them to him in Paris. Communication from Elisenda Sala to McCully
6. Cowling 2006, 107.
7. Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 131.
8. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Salon des Artistes Indépendants (1910),” Euvres en prose complètes, ed. Pierre Caizergues and Michel Décaudin, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 152.
9. Gerd Muehsam, D. Edzard (New York: H. Bittner, 1948), 5.
10. Edzard’s dismemberment of the drawings appears only to have been reported in the German press, Germania, May 21, 1930, thanks probably to the Munich dealer, Georg Caspari.
11. Z.XXII.43.
12. Madeline 2005a, 318, claims that Brummer authenticated the drawings. Although the Galerie Pierre is mistakenly mentioned in Picasso’s letter to the public prosecutor, Madeline has found no evidence of this gallery’s involvement. Pierre Loeb was a modernist dealer exceedingly loyal to Picasso and would never have involved himself in this sleazy affair, as the artist wrongly assumed that he had. Their friendship would survive this malentendu.
13. Madeline 2005a, 323.
14. According to some reports, Picasso attended the vernissage.
15. The Vilató family’s drawings by Lola have been published in the exhibition catalog Lola Ruiz Picasso (Málaga: Fundación Pablo Ruiz Picasso, 2003).
16. Over fifty years later, unscrupulous art dealers tried to swindle the aged Maître Bacqué de Sariac out of a major Blue period Picasso, Les Noces de Pierette (Z.I.212). Sariac’s heirs got it back.
17. Gimpel’s account is dated May 12, 1930; Gimpel, 101.
18. Cabanne 1977, 160.
19. See Vol. I, 351.
20. Letter from Léonce Rosenberg to Picabia, May 19, 1930, Derouet, 49.
21. Letter from Picabia to Léonce Rosenberg, May 23, 1930, ibid.
22. Madeline 2005a, 316 n. 5.
23. The discrepancy in the numbers is probably due to Edzard’s cutting up of study sheets.
24. Madeline 2005a, 319 n. 19; the Blue period “Study of a Naked Man with His Arms Raised” was acquired from the Galerie Zak by the Musée de Grenoble in 1934.
25. Padilla’s letter (July 12, 1930, Archives Picasso) mentions that someone else had offered him a Blue period painting of a life-si
ze mother and child, which “belonged to a certain Ugarte, to whom Picasso had given it after hearing him play the guitar.”
26. Hamburger Fremdenblatt, May 12, 1930.
27. Madeline 2005a, 323 n. 60.
28. Ibid.
29. Two of the drawings Picasso mentioned were probably Z.VI.157 and Z.VII.156. Le Matin, May 13, 1980.
30. L’Intransigeant, May 12, 1930.
31. Madeline 2005a, 323, Appendix 2.
32. Le Petit Parisien, May 14, 1930.
33. Madeline 2005a, 322 n. 52.
34. The letter was published (May 12, 1930) in Le Petit Parisien and also in the Turin paper Stampa.
35. In a letter to Stein, July 1, 1930, Kahn-weiler reports that Picasso’s “mother has come from Barcelona (partly for that affair of stolen drawings) and is with him just Know [sic];” reprinted in Madeline 2005a, 320 n. 33.
36. Palau 1971, 179.
37. Ibid.
38. Letter from Christine Edzard to McCully, November 26, 2004.
39. Before Vol. VI of the catalogue raisonné appeared, Zervos published a selection of “Euvres et images inédites de la jeunesse de Picasso,” in Cahiers d’art 2 (1950), 277–331.
40. An exception was made for Alfred and Marga Barr. In 1955 the young German photographer Inge Morath managed to charm her way into the Vilatós’ apartment and do a reportage for L’Oeil magazine.
41. Quoted by Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr Jr., Missionary for the Modern (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), 3.
CHAPTER 35
Château de Boisgeloup
1. Arnaud, 441.
2. Since Cocteau’s father had committed suicide, this would have been very painful for his mother.
3. Arnaud, 442.
4. Letter from Cocteau to Picasso, December 12 [1930], Archives Picasso.
5. Quoted in Arnaud, 442.
6. Brassaï, 17.
7. The histoy of Boisgeloup dates back to the fourteenth century, when Philippe de Gamaches was Seigneur de Boisgeloup.
8. Brassaï, 109.
9. Gilot 1964, 153.
10. Z.VI.1331.
11. See Chapter 37, n. 31.
12. Another twenty years would go by before Bell would be received as before, and then largely because Jacqueline Picasso took a shine to Bell’s last love, Bloomsbury’s handmaiden, Barbara Bagenal.
13. Letter from Bell to Mary Hutchinson, August 2, 1931, Ransom Center.
14. “How does the furniture look and is it comfortable?” Errázuriz asks in a letter to Olga and Picasso, December 7, 1931, Archives Picasso.
15. Musée Picasso, Paris (MP 74). During World War II, the salon would be used to store logs. Paulo, who inherited it from his mother, did nothing to modernize it. Growing up at Boisgeloup in the 1960s, Bernard was scared of going into his grandmother’s old bedroom, which had cobweb-covered stacks of her suitcases.
16. Widmaier Picasso 2004, 42–3, confirms that Picasso took the apartment at 45, rue la Boétie, for Marie-Thérèse in 1935 (not 1930, as often stated).
17. Marie-Thérèse to Gasman.
18. González had a house at Monthyon on the Marne, east of Paris.
19. S.80.
20. MP Carnets II, cat. 39 (MP 1990-109). This carnet also includes drawings by González.
21. S.81.
22. See MP Carnets II, cat. 38 (MP 1875).
23. Rubin 1984, 322–3, 340, concludes that Picasso owned three Kota figures. He sees the colander head as representing Olga. Apart from two small plasters executed in Paris in the spring of 1929 (S.104 and 106), none of Picasso’s sculptures appear to stand for Olga, except insofar that some of them might be said to constitute fetishes designed to protect him from her.
24. S.408.
25. Braque to the author.
26. S.86–101; these wood carvings include a small bust of Marie-Thérèse and an embracing couple (S.102, 103).
27. Spies, 157.
28. Daix 1993, 217.
29. See Vol. I, 444.
30. See Chapter 37.
31. Madeline 2005b, 331.
32. Stein and Toklas had leased this house the year before and would continue to live there until it was requisitioned in 1943.
33. Besides Picasso, Dix portraits evoked Apollinaire, Satie, Virgil Thomson, Hugnet, Tchelitchev, Bérard, Kristians Tonny Bernard Faÿ and Eugène Berman. In a postcard on July 16, 1930 (Archives Picasso), Georges Hugnet inquired whether or not Picasso had received his copy.
34. See Alice B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 125. Photographs taken on the day of the Picas-sos’ visit do not confirm Toklas’s description of their clothes. See ed. Edward Burns, Gertrude Stein on Picasso (New York: Liveright, 1970), 52. Other photographs taken the following summer are reproduced in Burns, 50, 53, and Madeline 2005b, 340.
35. Chapon 1987, 146.
36. Baer 173.
37. Widmaier Picasso 2002, 55.
38. S.76–8, 117, 118, 118A, and 119.
39. Vallentin, 174, mentions the glove stuffed with bran. Brassaï, 109, notes that the glove was Olga’s.
40. S.119 is the only one done on the front of the canvas.
41. Kahnweiler describes these reliefs—“all done in the second half of August”—as “tableaux-sculptures,” in a letter to Max Jacob, September 24, 1930, Seckel, 220 n. 5.
42. S.76.
43. S.118.
44. Z.XXXIII.144–8.
45. See Cowling 2006, 119. Hence the great lunar sculptures of Marie-Thérèse that Picasso would execute the following year.
CHAPTER 36
The Shadow of Ovid
1. Klein, 10.
2. See Vol. II, 221.
3. Letter from Serge Férat to Ardengo Soffici, October 21, 1912, Soffici Archives, Florence.
4. For the full story of Fernande’s later life, see John Richardson’s Epilogue in Marilyn McCully, Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001).
5. See bill for delivery of copper plates, April 30, 1930, Archives Picasso.
6. See Florman.
7. The inclusion of one of the Torre de la Parada paintings in an obscure article, “Peter Symons, a Rubens Collaborator,” in the September 1930 issue of an obscure academic journal, Archivo español del arte, is most unlikely to have been seen by Picasso.
8. D.-H. Kahnweiler, “Huit entretiens avec Picasso” (December 10, 1936), Le Point, October 1952, 26.
9. Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Galli-mard, 1945), 1168.
10. Baer 144.
11. Ovid, 18.
12. Baer 148.
13. Ibid., 150.
14. Ibid., 156.
15. Ibid., 154.
16. Ibid., 209.
17. Christian Zervos, “Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide illustré par Picasso,” Cahiers d’Art 6, nos. 7–8 (1931), 369.
18. Baer 1997, 55.
19. Sketches of heads for the half-page illustrations fill many pages (all done in early April 1931) of JSLC 101. Skira claimed to have chosen the chapters for the half-page titles; see Albert Skira, “Souvenirs sur des Métamorphoses,” Picasso: Etampes 1904-1972 (Martigny: Fondation Pierre Gianadda, 1981), 29.
20. Brassaï, 105–6.
21. Tériade, whom Skira had lured away from Zervos, was responsible for the Matisse commission. Skira chose to publish Matisse’s Mallarmé exactly a year after he had celebrated the publication of Picasso’s Ovid on the latter’s fiftieth birthday.
22. Letter from Ambrose Vollard to Picasso, May 1931, Archives Picasso.
23. Letter from Salmon to Picasso, November 15, 1930, Archives Picasso.
24. Ibid.
25. See André Salmon, “Vint-cinq ans d’Art vivant,” La Revue de France (February-March 1931).
26. Lise de Harme, Les Années perdues (Paris: Plon, 1961), 92.
27. González quoted in Giménez, 286–7.
28. FitzGerald 1988, 274.
30. Concerning pedestals, see notes from González to Picasso, December 19, 20, 1929, January 5 and February 16, 1930, Archives Picasso.
31. Postcard from Stein to Picasso, November 10, 1930, Beinecke Library.
32. See Gertrude Stein: Writings and Lectures, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Penguin, 1967), 257.
33. Tomkins, 39.
34. Seckel, 219.
CHAPTER 37
Annus Mirabilis I
1. Bernadac and Michaël, 129.
2. Z.VII.328–9.
3. This is one of the paintings that Claude Picasso allowed Citroën to use in the promotion of their Picasso automobile.
4. A rich landowner and member of Parliament, Payne Knight was an avid collector of Etruscan vases, sculptures, and bronzes, which he would study exhaustively and donate to the British Museum. First published in 1786 for the edification of cognoscenti like himself (prurient details are in Latin), the Discourse was almost immediately suppressed by the author, who found that, like their counterparts today, conservative bigots were using his writings to demonize him in Parliament. Reprinted in 1865, the book came under even fiercer fire from Victorian prudes, who refused to believe that in antiquity phallic amulets were no more pornographic than a charm bracelet. A militant fanatic named Thomas Mathias denounced Payne Knight’s book as “one of the most unbecoming and indecent treatises which ever disgraced the pen of a man who would be considered a scholar and philosopher.” See Johns, 25.
5. See, for example, S.122, 122A, 123, and 124.
6. Johns, 24.
7. Letter from Paul Rosenberg to Picasso, January 6, 1931, Archives Picasso.
8. Exposition d’œuvres de Picasso: peintures, gouaches, pastels, dessins, d’époques diverses, Galerie Percier, June 23 –July 11, 1931.
9. Z.VII.327, Z.VII.326, Z.VII.322, and Z.VII.317.
10. For Picasso’s statement about his philo-dendron plant, see page 443.
11. See Vol. I, 502 n. 31.
12. See Chapter 11.
13. Barr was selecting works for MoMA’s 1939 Picasso retrospective.
14. Boggs, 234.
15. Rosenberg also included four earlier paintings, including Three Musicians and several plates from Skira’s Ovid.
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