Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  In our day the prophet is honored even in his own country: Rousseau is in the Louvre, and it is universally acknowledged that his painting is of a very high order indeed. It cannot be classified: to call it the best children’s painting raised to the highest degree is to say something valid about its spontaneity, innocence, and directness of vision, but it is to ignore Rousseau’s remarkable technique, his wholly personal and magic perspective, his masterly use of black (Renoir’s touchstone for a very good painter), and many, many other factors. Certainly he was an unworldly man, as well as a lovable one; and his own words show his nature better than any description. There is his often-quoted remark to Picasso, “We are the two greatest painters of our age, you in the Egyptian, I in the modern style,” but this conversation with Vollard on the subject of ghosts tells us more about him, and about Apollinaire:

  Vollard: No, I don’t believe in them.

  Rousseau: Well, I do. I’ve seen some. There was one that persecuted me for quite a while.

  Vollard: Indeed? What did it look like?

  Rousseau: Just an ordinary man.… He used to come and defy me when I was on duty at the octroi. He knew I couldn’t leave my post, so he used to put out his tongue or make long noses at me and then let off a great fart.

  Vollard: But what makes you think he was a ghost?

  Rousseau: Monsieur Apollinaire told me so.

  Rousseau was not unknown, although Picasso had never heard of him. He had exhibited for years at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne; Jarry had reproduced one of his pictures in L’Ymagier; and Uhde, a man of exquisite sensibility in spite of his foolish theories, was buying his works. Yet his was a very modest reputation, overshadowed by gross mockery; and Picasso, deeply impressed by his value, determined to do him honor—to offer a banquet to Henri Rousseau.

  It was a perilous undertaking. Rousseau was as vulnerable as a child, and few of the people to be invited had any real appreciation of his painting. Apollinaire, for example, put “Le Poète et sa muse” (a portrait of himself and Marie Laurencin, a present from Rousseau) in his cellar, and several of them were capable of treating the whole thing as a cruel hoax. Fernande herself was so ignorant of Picasso’s mind and so unaware of Rousseau’s merit even after she had lived with his work for years that she could say that the group, the bande à Picasso, was “delighted to pull the Douanier’s leg”; while through the mouth of Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein says it was to be a “jokeful amusement.” Furthermore, neither Picasso nor Fernande had the least notion of how to give a banquet.

  Still, they set about it: the studio was cleaned to a point that satisfied Picasso; crockery, glasses, tin forks and spoons were borrowed from Azon; Yadwigha was hung among the larger African carvings, with Chinese lanterns and colored garlands on the pillars and the beams, and a great streamer, surrounded by flags, reading HONNEUR À ROUSSEAU. Food was ordered from the caterer Félix Potin (an excellent move, if either Picasso or Fernande had told Félix Potin the right day), Fernande prepared a paella to eke it out, drink was laid in on an heroic scale, the people were invited. Marie Laurencin and Apollinaire (he was to bring the guest of honor), Leo and Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Braque, Ramon Pichot and Germaine, Agero, Cremnitz, Raynal, and many more including a number of young women. Some say that Max Jacob was not asked, he having had one of his periodical quarrels with Picasso; but nevertheless his studio—for he now lived in the Bateau-Lavoir—was taken over as one of the cloakrooms.

  There were about thirty guests in all, and several of them have left accounts of the banquet, accounts that differ widely, not only in detail but in their view of the nature of the feast, some seeing it as general fun, others as an elaborate practical joke, so that one reads them with a mounting anxiety for the good, ingenuous, unarmed old man, their potential victim. But it ended happily, and this I believe was due to Picasso’s real determination to do him honor: Picasso was in his own studio, he had an ascendancy over most of those present, and with Braque’s powerful help he was perfectly capable of dealing with anyone who grew out of hand.

  It began badly. The guests assembled in a bar for apéritifs while the dinner was preparing; the wait was strangely prolonged, and a somber Dane passed out. while others poured drink into the pretty young Marie Laurencin (a new arrival in that world, and already hated by Fernande), so that on reaching the studio she plunged into a dish of tarts on the divan and then, covered with cream and jam, tried to embrace the company. Meanwhile, Potin’s dinner not having appeared, Fernande and Alice Toklas scoured Paris to supplement the paella: with reasonable success.

  In time everybody was seated at the long rickety trestle table: amidst cheers Apollinaire arrived with Rousseau, who gazed at the lanterns and whose shy face broke into a delighted smile. He was placed on a throne made of a chair on a little platform, and the banquet began. After the paella and some unrecorded dishes came poems, declamations: Apollinaire produced what he swore was impromptu verse—

  Tu te souviens, Rousseau, du paysage aztéque,

  Des forits ou poussaient la mangue et l‘ananas

  Des singes repandant tout le sang des pasteques

  Et du blond empereur qu’on fusilla là-bas.

  …

  Nous sommes réunis pour célébrer ta gloire.

  Ces vins qu’en ton honneur nous verse Picasso

  Buvons-les donc puisque c’est l’heure de les boire

  En criant tous en choeur: “Vive! Vive Rousseau!”

  [You remember the Aztec landscape, Rousseau, the forest where the mangoes and the pineapples grow, the monkeys shedding the water-melon’s blood, and the fair-haired emperor who was shot over there. We are gathered to celebrate your fame. And since now is the time for drinking let us drink this wine that Picasso pours out in your honor, crying all together “Long, long live Rousseau!”]

  More poems, toasts; and Rousseau, who had drunk more than he was used to, dozed gently under his lantern, which dropped wax onto his head, though from so considerable a height that it did not hurt him, but formed an unnoticed mound.

  The night wore on, and if anyone had gone to bed in the Bateau-Lavoir Salmon put an end to their sleep: all at once he sprang on to the table, pronounced a eulogy, drained his glass, and instantly became violent—he and Cremnitz had agreed to simulate an attack of delirium tremens with the help of soap for the froth, but it seems that Salmon’s zeal, prompted by measureless wine, carried him away. In the ensuing battle the Negro figures were threatened; but Braque protected them, while Picasso dragged Salmon away and locked him in a cloakroom, where he went to sleep, having eaten Alice Toklas’ new hat and a box of matches. Rousseau dozed throughout.

  Then came songs, some by Marie Laurencin, some by Rousseau, who also played his fiddle. At times he dropped off again, waking to listen to his neighbors with particular civility and attention, and quietly telling them of his days in Mexico. At some point the tall, gaunt, bearded Pichot danced a Spanish mime of the Passion; and at some other point Frédé came in with his ass from the Lapin Agile; and again a horde of Montmartre acquaintances appeared, seizing upon the remains of the feast; but it is difficult to establish the sequence of events or to state how the evening came to an end for some of the guests. At about three in the morning the Steins went away, taking Rousseau with them in a cab; and it is certain that Picasso had achieved his aim—Rousseau had had the happiest time of his life; his candor had seen nothing but the good in the banquet; he felt that he had been deeply honored and he wrote Picasso a beautifully penned letter to tell him so.

  Some of his contemporaries say that this marked the end of Picasso’s most sociable period, and it is true that in 1908 and 1909 he was working even harder in the direction of explicit analytical Cubism. But during these last years at the Bateau-Lavoir he still saw a great deal of his friends: being gregarious by nature, he could not do without company after the intense solitude of work. And there was no lack of it. Quite apart from his old Catalan friends—and he lost few of t
hem from sight—there were all the people of the crowded Bateau-Lavoir, where everybody visited everybody else and where he was now one of the senior residents. Max Jacob had deserted his somber lair farther down the street for what had been Mac Orlan’s studio, and here he carried on with his new practice of palmistry, of reading cards and coffee-grouts, casting horoscopes, fabricating talismans, terrifying his friends, who in spite of all their rational doubts dared not abandon his charms: Picasso, for one, kept Jacob’s reading of his hand with religious care to the very end of his life.* Presently André Salmon moved in too, and Modigliani and Freundlich made their appearance. Another arrival was a young German called Wiegels who came to Paris persuaded that Impressionism and Modern’ Style were the very latest thing, discovered his error, and took to evil courses. Van Don-gen was still there, with his Dutch wife and their little daughter, for whom Picasso made a sinister doll out of a black stocking; but van Dongen’s days of extreme poverty, his diet of spinach alone, were almost at an end, for he had painted a fine erotic nude of Fernande (though its origin was never acknowledged) which excited a great deal of comment and launched him on his career as a fashionable “modem” portraitist.

  When the nineteen-year-old and utterly destitute Gris arrived from Madrid, where he had studied under Carbonero, Picasso housed him, helped him to place his humorous drawings in L’Assiette au Beurre and Le Charivari, and Fernande fed him. She disliked young Gris however, and she says that “he studied what might be called the dodges of Cubism, made use of them with a sort of cleverness but without art, and contented himself with that.”

  Many of Fernande’s other judgments were, if not grotesque, then certainly unkind: Marie Laurencin, for example, vexed her extremely, and she not only demolishes her painting but says that the tip of her nose was often red. It was Braque who first brought Marie Laurencin into the bande a Picasso; they were fellow-students at the Academié Humbert and one day he took her to Sagot’s, where she met Picasso and Apollinaire. (Some say that Apollinaire was not there, but that Picasso introduced him to Marie Laurencin later, meaning to do him a kindness: all the sources of information for Picasso’s earlier years, except perhaps Sabartés, are unreliable for detail, date, and often truth.) Hitherto Apollinaire had been uniformly unfortunate as a lover, but he and Marie Laurencin were happy for several years; and she moved on to a more ambitious painting. She continued to live a very proper, even a prim, bourgeois life with her mother, being allowed out from time to time to plunge into tarts or hashish parties and to make love with Apollinaire in his armchair; for he carried neatness to such a pitch that he would not allow his smooth counterpane to be disturbed.

  In Fernande Olivier’s book more harsh words are reserved for Kahnweiler, a new and important factor in Picasso’s life, in fact his dealer: she represents him as “Very young, operating very much on the German method, clever, tenacious, cunning, though not so cunning as Vollard, a real Jewish businessman, capable of taking a risk in order to make a profit. Daring, busy. He wanted to have Picassos, Matisses, van Dongens, Vlamincks, and he got them … bargaining for hours on end until at last the exhausted painter agreed to a lower price.” By definition, a dealer cannot be wholly disinterested; but in addition to being a dealer Kahnweiler was also a highly cultivated man with a deep understanding and appreciation of art, and he remained Picasso’s friend for the next sixty years and more: yet on the other hand even after all these years Picasso did not use the intimate tu when speaking to Kahnweiler. It is true that the adult Picasso always maintained a certain distance, yet it is surprising to see this formality so early in his career, and it may be significant of his views on the relationship between a painter and a dealer.

  Then there were the visitors to the studio, continually increasing in number, for Picasso’s radical change had not thrust him back into obscurity, as it might reasonably have been expected to do: Schchukine came, and although he could not accept the “Demoiselles” he still bought pictures; so did Uhde. Many were foreigners, Germans, Russians, Hungarians, even Chinese, but some, like André Level, were French. And there were the evenings at the Steins, meetings with Matisse, Dufy, and many more, Poiret’s sensational parties, and above all Picasso’s eager, searching conversations with Braque, one of the few to whom he talked for hours and hours without any other company, (“The things Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain,” said Braque) for in general he liked to move about with a group. Gertrude Stein has a fine picture of him looking like a small but dominating Napoleon, followed by his four enormous grenadiers Derain, Apollinaire, Braque, and Salmon. She also uses the figure of a “bullfighter followed by his squadron.” And Fernande has another of Picasso with Max Jacob, Paul Fort, Princet the mathematician, Apollinaire, Marie Laurencin, and Salmon at Azon’s, all eating hashish pills. The evening finished at the Bateau-Lavoir, in Princet’s deserted room, his wife Alice having run off with Derain; their host wept, though not without a certain satisfaction; Jacob smiled quietly to himself; Apollinaire imagined that he was enjoying himself in a brothel (Marie Laurencin, totally unaffected, had gone home to her mother and Pussy Cat); but Picasso had a wretched trip—it came to him that he had invented photography, that he had nothing more to learn, and that worst of all he had come to a dead end, painting the same thing over and over again.

  These experiments ceased abruptly as far as Picasso was concerned: not only was there the threat of entering the creative artist’s hell forever, but one day the inhabitants of the Bateau-Lavoir found poor Wiegels dead, hanging by the neck from a beam in his studio: opium, said some, ether-drinking, hashish, said others.

  Picasso was appalled, and one of the reasons for his decision to spend his summer in the uncongenial damp, fungus-smelling north French country was the crippling depression that came down on him after this suicide. Another was his health, a source of constant worry all his life. He smoked far too much, at first a pipe and then Gauloises for the rest of his days, and in the mornings he had a smoker’s cough: he was persuaded that this was the onset of consumption, and when one night his coughing broke a small blood-vessel so that he spat red, the mortal disease became a certainty—he was near his end. He was seized with panic, and André Salmon ran for a doctor, a nearby friend. The medical man inspected his patient, laughed, and said, “He is as sound as a bell.” Picasso did not believe him, and from that time onwards his diet grew more abstemious still and his aperitifs were replaced by mineral water, though he never abandoned either wine or tobacco.

  He and Fernande found a primitive cottage or outbuilding belonging to a farm in the hamlet of La Rue-des-Bois; it was only about twenty-five miles from Paris, but it was surprisingly remote; and it stood on the edge of the forest of Halatte. They took it for the summer and moved in with the big bitch and a she-cat near her time. Friends came to stay, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Derain; but not Braque, for he was away in the far south, painting at L’Estaque.

  Picasso was just as busy at La Rue-des-Bois: it would have been strange if he had not painted with at least equal zeal, and it would have been strange if his mind and Braque’s had not moved on roughly similar lines.

  For some time now Picasso’s painting has been tending more towards the sculptural and the static and away from the active figures of what had been called the barbaric part of his Negro Period. Many of the canvases are painted in varying shades of reddish-brown and in all the color is subdued, compared with the violence of the postscripts to the “Demoiselles.” But La Rue-des-Bois was a green world: green filled the forest; and the fields, so unlike the sun-baked pastures of Horta, were an even stronger green; green reflected from innumerable surfaces into the damp northern air; it gave him a green colic, he said: and green suffused his canvases. Before the summer ended he had painted a large number of pictures—landscapes, portraits and still-lives. Most were landscapes, which were unusual in his work since
Horta: but for Picasso a landscape was a particular form of statement; he was not concerned with making remarks about the weather nor about the light at that time of the day, not with the contingent aspects of what lay before him but rather with what he knew to be its essential bones. And these bones he arranged with the classical rigor of a Poussin, though without the earlier painter’s convention of perspective to give his picture depth. Picasso was looking for what he conceived to be a truer relation between volumes, and this he achieved by a variety of methods, including the use of superimposed planes and naturally of a high degree of simplification, a stripping away of all accidentals. Here and there a deliberate array of leaves or a black, sinuous branch gives a hint of his admiration for Rousseau; but, leaving Picasso’s overwhelming personality aside as far as such an abstraction is possible, it is Cézanne that comes to mind, especially in the deceptively simple still-lives, one of which actually used the tall billycock hat so familiar in Cézanne.

  Towards the end of his stay he painted the farmer’s wife, wearing a blue dress and sitting in a chair. It was a picture that Shchukine particularly admired, a powerful great motionless form built up of largely symmetrical angular planes, emphasized by shadow and standing away from a green and purple background. Superficially it is far removed from Cézanne’s woman in a blue dress, “La Femme à la cafetiére,” but a second glance shows the kinship: the Cézanne is more accessible to the citizen’s eye, but it would be interesting to know what Picasso’s peasant made of her own picture. It is the portrait of a figure outside time, perhaps of one so unaffected by recent convention that she would have gone directly to its significance, just as Catalan peasants go straight to their fierce archaic black Virgins.

  But before this he painted one of the most significant pictures of 1908, of what some historians prefer to call the Proto-Cubist rather than the Negro Period: a wooded landscape with figures—two great trees embracing a dell—in which the rocks, the sloping ground, and above all the recumbent figure in the foreground are treated according to the geometry of Cézanne as interpreted and expanded by Picasso: the picture is fully Cubist in all but name.