Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  Je te embrasse et t’aime

  toutjours PABLO

  [My dear Fernande

  All day yesterday I had no letter from you and none today though I was expecting one let’s hope I shall be luckier this afternoon.

  From a letter Braque gave me this morning I see that K. has already reached Paris so I hope you will be here in a very few days

  It is rather cooler here and in the evening the warmth is pleasant.

  Don’t worry too much about money it will be all right.

  Take the train I took it is the best. Now I really believe you will be coming soon. Braque tells me you will be here next week

  My people have been at Mahon for some time now.

  You would be wise to bring your parasol if you mean to go out in the daytime

  The monkey is really amusing he was given the lid of a tin and he spends the day looking at himself in it he is very clever

  Work still goes well I am still working on the same things.

  Love and kisses

  always PABLO]

  Fernande came at last, and she brought with her the latest news from the artistic world: the Salon d’Automne was setting aside a whole room for the Cubists, and Marcel Duchamp, La Fresnaye, Gleizes, Kupka, Le Fauconnier, Léger, Lhote, Metzinger, Picabia, and Jacques Villon were going to exhibit; and the “Gioconda” had been stolen from the Louvre.

  She came, but it was to do little more than gasp in the heat for a few days, pack up their belongings, and then take the train once more. They were back in Paris early in September; and on the day of their arrival Picasso ran into Apollinaire, but an Apollinaire whose pear-shaped face was haggard, terrified.

  The wretched Iberian figures that Géry Piéret had produced in 1907 came from the Louvre: he had stolen them from the Louvre. Now the “Gioconda” had been stolen too. The connection was obvious. Apollinaire was a suspect: the police had already searched his flat: and Picasso was deeply implicated.

  Chapter IX

  EVERY book on Picasso speaks of these figures, but as far as I know no one has ever seen them since they were recovered by the Louvre. They are not exhibited, nor are they easily to be found: however, it appeared to me that in addition to their slightly morbid interest as stolen goods they might be of some value as evidence in the question of the relative importance of Negro and Iberian sculpture to Picasso, so I asked the authorities if I might be allowed to see them. The curator of Oriental antiquities could not have been kinder or more helpful, and eventually I was led across a muddy courtyard and into a vast dim barn: my guide turned on a light, and innumerable pots and stony objects sprang into view, some of them of enormous size and all packed close together, Baal nose-to-nose with Ashtaroth, cuneiform tablets, amphorae, lovely bowls, a whole regiment of Phoenician gods, carved perhaps by some Punic proto-Picasso (the Carthaginians colonized his part of Spain in the third century before Christ). There we wandered about the shelves, gazing up at Tanit, Moloch, Eshmun, and Melkarth, all deeply covered with dust; at last, high up, we found the right reference-numbers, and standing on tiptoe I edged the larger head forward until I could bring it down. It was only about a foot high, but it was surprisingly heavy, and as I blew off the dust I thought of Picasso trailing it about the quays of the Seine. It was a straightforward female head with an elaborate coiffure topped by a smooth kerchief, carved in a pale, compact freestone and apparently designed to be seen only from the front as it stood in a niche: I thought it an uninteresting piece of rather mechanical late Hellenistic work: its weight and its associations (it is labeled as having been “temporarily in the possession of M. Picasso”) were the most impressive things about it. But the second head, far older as I understood, proved to be completely different: here was no run-of-the-mill example of the provincial stonemason’s craft, but an object with another kind of life entirely, a rough, “primitive” carving in somewhat darker stone, with no facility or prettiness about it at all, a free-standing head on a long neck, a stronger sculpture by far. And as I tilted the ancient, battered face so that the light fell glancing from above, emphasizing what features time had left, I saw two great almond eyes that seemed to me akin to those of the woman on the left-hand side of the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” while the stony, masklike quality of the whole had a distinct relationship to Picasso’s painting of 1907 and 1908.

  The most probable recent history of the Iberian figures seems to be this: Géry Piéret stole them from the Louvre sometime after the exhibition in 1906; two of them passed either directly or through Apollinaire to Picasso; and at least one remained with Apollinaire. It is said that they came with a warning that they should not be freely shown; and that later Apollinaire told Picasso of their origin, suggesting that they should be returned by way of a newspaper, a course that would get rid of the statuettes and at the same time bring about favorable publicity. According to this account Picasso replied that he had broken them up to discover the secret of their making.

  Fernande, who describes them as stone masks, says they were kept in the bottom of a cupboard, where with the passing of the years they were forgotten. During these years Piéret went to America, where he made a considerable amount of money: returning to Paris he lost it all at the races and turned for help to Apollinaire, who employed him as a secretary. In May of 1911 Piéret took another figure, which made Apollinaire uneasy: and then on August 21 the “Gioconda” was stolen. There was an enormous and universal uproar; and Piéret carried his latest statuette to Salmon’s paper, Paris-Journal, which published an indignant, righteous article on security, the nation’s heritage, and civic duty. Piéret was a featherbrained creature, and although at first he seems to have had some notion of taking advantage of the situation he now panicked and ran away. He traveled southwards, recovering his confidence as the distance grew; and presently he took to sending facetious letters to the authorities at every stop.

  The first impulse of Picasso and Apollinaire was to imitate his example and fly; but Fernande, who remained wonderfully calm, persuaded them to do nothing of the kind. Their position was ludicrous; it was also extremely unpleasant. They were both foreigners in a somewhat xenophobic country: Apollinaire, like any other man brought up in France, knew that preventive detention might last for months and even years before a trial; Picasso had first-hand experience of the forces of order in action—the repression in Barcelona had been terrible. Neither could have been described as a man of the world, of the bourgeois world whose powerful machine might be preparing to crush them, and neither knew what to do. Manolo would have been the most valuable counselor among their friends, but Manolo was far away, and the best thing they could think of was to destroy the evidence. They sat in a state of the most intense anxiety, waiting for the dead hour of the night when they could throw the figures into the Seine unseen. Midnight came, and they left, carrying them in a bag: early in the morning they returned, worn out and desperate, still carrying the incriminating evidence. The banks of the river had been lined with watchers; they had certainly been followed; Paris had been full of suspicious lurking forms.

  The next day Apollinaire took the figures to Paris-Journal. The newspapermen were delighted and no doubt they promised to keep Apollinaire’s name to themselves; but within twenty-four hours the police were at his door. A little later he was in a cell.

  Picasso had no news of his friend; he was deeply anxious, but he dared not to go to Apollinaire’s flat. Two days passed, and then his fears were realized: at seven in the morning a figure in plain clothes rang the bell, woke the household, showed his police-card, and desired Picasso to come with him to the investigating magistrate. Picasso huddled on his clothes, in such agitation that Fernande was obliged to help him with the buttons, and he was taken away.

  At first Apollinaire had denied everything, but the French police were accustomed to dealing with far tougher characters than the poet, and the Apollinaire with whom Picasso was now confronted, a pale, terrified Apollinaire, his shirt and collar torn, had confessed
to everything and more. Picasso did much the same. Neither meant to incriminate the other; there was no sort of treachery; yet each acknowledged, with tears, the truth of every accusation, however monstrous, however false. In Fernande’s account Picasso is less than heroic: she may exaggerate, but it is generally acknowledged that he dreaded the law, the police, and any threat to his freedom—he always took great care to have his papers in order.

  Once he was convinced that he had not caught the stealers of the “Gioconda,” the magistrate was not unkind; and although he kept Apollinaire in jail he let Picasso go, only requiring him to be ready to appear when he was called for.

  The interrogation had been shattering, but Picasso soon recovered, and with Max Jacob, Salmon, and a few others he began a campaign for Apollinaire’s release, collecting signatures to a petition. But many of Apollinaire’s friends kept studiously away from him until the whole sordid business came to an end early in 1912, when the charge was dismissed; and whether the statuettes had any influence on her or not, Marie Laurencin took against him, so much so that in June she resolved to see him no more, and to his despair she kept her word.

  The year 1912 did not begin well for Picasso either: the affair of the statuettes so preyed on his mind that he would not go out in the daytime—he was sure he was still being followed and he would change taxis to throw his pursuers off the scent. Then somewhat later in the year his long relationship with Fernande Olivier came to an end. Yet the first did not bring his painting to a halt, and the second, or rather its consequences, stimulated him to a fresh outburst of creative activity.

  At the height of his anxiety about the Iberian figures he produced not only some of the purest examples of analytic Cubism, including the “Pigeon au petits pois” and the “Homme à la mandoline,” but a most surprising “Nature morte à la chaise cannée,” in which he glued a piece of oilcloth that imitated chair-caning to an oval canvas; then over and around it he painted some ordinary café objects—a glass and a sliced lemon, severely analysed, a newspaper with the first three letters of Journal large and plain, a trompe-1’oeil pipe-stem. The result, which he framed with rope, is a bewildering array of different realities at a variety of levels, fused into a whole by some magic peculiar to Picasso: it is also the very first of all the collages and the forerunner of what the theorists, though neither Picasso nor Braque, were to call synthetic Cubism.

  As for his break with Fernande, all that can be said with any certainty is that it happened. What third person can give a true account of what is in its nature secret and often incommunicable, the essential causes of a divorce? At the most he can only record the visible effects.

  Picasso’s café was at this time the Ermitage in the boulevard Rochechouart, just along the street from his studio; it was also the favorite haunt of the Futurists; and as the Ermitage and the Futurists were connected with the break it is proper to make some mention of them here.

  The café was a large, noisy, cheerful place with an orchestra and a mixed clientele of bourgeois, painters, pimps and whores from the nearby Pigalle, and some boxers. The Futurists were an Italian group of writers and painters, who had launched their first manifesto, announcing a revolution in art, a complete break with the past, as early as 1909; this manifesto was followed by thirty or forty more, some of which Picasso may have seen—the Figaro published the earliest almost as soon as it appeared in Milan. In any case, since Apollinaire was much taken up with the Paris Futurists and since Picasso was acquainted with several of them himself, he knew that their ideas differed from his: the Futurist painters were in favor of a dynamic rather than a static art; for them a running horse should have not four but twenty feet, and the movement of those feet should be triangular; they also wished to express mood and even sound. None of this disturbed Picasso, who was always willing to let any man paint as he saw fit: besides, although the Futurists were very unkind to Cubism, accusing it of being academic, reactionary, and bourgeois, it is difficult to believe that Futurism would ever have come into existence without Picasso and Braque; and in any case a few of them, with or without the help of their theories, painted unusually interesting, living pictures.

  Some of these Italians had been in Paris as long as Picasso; Ardengo Soffici, for example, had met him during his earliest days at the Louvre, where they had admired the Egyptian and Phoenician sculpture together; and when they brought their Futurist compatriots to see him he received them kindly, though some may have been a little tedious. Fernande speaks of being taken by Picasso and Apollinaire to see Emilio Marinetti, who talked throughout the night, never stopping until sunrise, ten hours without a pause: it is true that she says they were not bored, but not all the Futurists had Marinetti’s talent, though many had an equal flow.

  The main wave of Futurists reached Paris about 1912; and they frequented the Ermitage, wearing socks of one color on their right foot and of another on their left. Among them was the young, charming, intelligent Oppi, who knew Severini, an old Paris hand, and who begged for an introduction to Picasso. Severini took him to the Ermitage, where Picasso, Fernande, Marcoussis, and Marcelle Humbert, his companion, were spending the evening, just as they often went to the Cirque Médrano together, Fernande and Marcelle being great friends. “Fernande,” says Severini, “was far from being a serious-minded woman. She fell in love with … Ubaldo Oppi.”

  Was this before Picasso fell in love with Marcelle? There is no telling. Gertrude Stein only gives the vague date of “the spring of 1912” when she says that shortly after Picasso, Fernande, Marcoussis, and Marcelle had been to see them at the rue de Fleurus, Picasso told her he was going to work at the Bateau-Lavoir again. She and Alice Toklas called on him there: he was out: she left her card. A few days later they called again, found him painting a picture with the words “Ma Jolie” in large letters above a musical score and in the lower corner an imitation of the visiting-card, Miss Gertrude Stein. She was a modest woman as far as her looks were concerned and it never occurred to her to connect the two: “Fernande is certainly not Ma Jolie,” she said as they went away. “I wonder who it is?”

  Fernande may have known, for according to Crespelle she now ran off with Oppi, her idea being to make Picasso jealous and thus to reclaim him from Ma Jolie. She had miscalculated, however; Picasso was relieved rather than jealous, and he at once left Paris with Marcelle, taking her to Avignon. Marcoussis was surprised, disturbed, displeased, but he neither cut his throat nor gave up Cubism; the height of his resentment was a drawing which shows Picasso loaded with chains while a free Marcoussis gambols happily, as though liberated from a wearisome companion, perhaps a shrew.

  Yet Picasso never felt those fetters. He was deeply attached to Marcelle, and he called her Eva for the obvious reasons. And although he never drew or painted her directly she appears in many of his pictures as the words “Ma Jolie” (they come from a song they must often have heard together, either at the Médrano or at the Ermitage or indeed anywhere else in Paris, it having been very popular—O Manon, ma jolie, mon coeur te dit bonjour) or “Pablo-Eva” or “Jolie Eva” or “J’aime Eva”; and perhaps to his private eye she was there in the forms he used. They are often as light and graceful as any young woman could wish, and Eva was the antithesis of Fernande, small, tender, and gentle rather than tall, Junoesque, and confident.

  From Avignon they went to Céret; but in spite of the marvelous spring this was not a success. For one thing Frika had to be killed: she was replaced by a large kind of Alsatian, as far as a dog who has shared eight years of one’s youth can ever be replaced. Then the Pichots arrived, and with them Fernande. Ramon Pichot took Fernande’s side: there were scenes between the women: life was impossible. Before the end of May Picasso and Eva fled, going back to Avignon and beyond Avignon to the small unattractive town of Sorgues-sur-l’Ouveze, where his spirits revived. He took a grim comfortless little box like a railway station called Villa les Clochettes and settled down to work.

  Picasso had always been a prodigious work
er, but now, stimulated by his new happiness he painted harder still, and with a fresh approach. In July Braque joined him, a Braque in much the same situation, for he had just married. Marcelle Lapre. Picasso had nothing against marriage, and there was probably some unsatisfactory Humbert in the background to prevent his official union with Eva: her maiden name was Gouel.

  Braque took another villa close at hand; and although he was so unlike Picasso in so many ways, he chose an equally hideous house. In this instance it may have been Hobson’s choice, but the fact remains that very good painters often resemble one another in a strange indifference to their immediate surroundings. Even when Picasso could afford anything he wanted, he picked upon La Californie, one of the ugliest houses on the Côte d’Azur, a country rich in horrors; and Braque went on returning to the unlovely Sorgues for the next fourteen years.

  It is clear that there are regions into which the literary man cannot follow the painter, and I should be happy to think that housing was the most important; but this much is certain, both were happy in their villas, both were in complete agreement as to how they should work, both painted some of their finest pictures during this long summer of 1912, and between them they began to give the course of modern painting a new direction.

  To say they deliberately brought analytic Cubism to an end and moved on to the synthetic phase would be absurd: the process was infinitely more complex than that, and it was spread over the following years. But the change is obvious, partly in the greater legibility of the pictures and partly in the gradual reintroduction of color, but of color as a form of construction, not as a statement about light, and even more in the use of collage, of sand, sawdust, and metal filings mixed into the paint, of papier collé, wood-graining, false marble, pieces of genuine or imitated “reality”; and in the fact that the process of putting together rather than taking apart gives these later pictures a greater inventiveness and an autonomous reality of their own. Then again these pictures are happier, less austere: many are light-hearted, and there can be no doubt that Picasso and Braque had great fun painting them.