Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  The process had begun earlier, with imitated or mechanically-reproduced capitals: at Céret the year before Picasso had painted a large “Nature morte sur un piano” with the first four letters of Cortot’s name carefully stenciled in the top left-hand corner; and of course “Ma Jolie” had already appeared on a number of canvases. And the introduction of a piece of printed oilcloth, not broken down in any way, was a decisive step towards synthesis; yet curiously enough at Sorgues he did not pursue the technique of collage that he invented for the “Chaise cannée,” but turned back to these letters and indeed whole words. They inhabit the summer pictures of 1912 in great numbers: one of the best-known canvases, “L’Aficionado,” which is connected with bull-fighting in the great Roman arena at Nîmes, has the name of that city neatly written, then on shifting planes “Le Torero,” and then the half-swallowed capitals TOR. Other pictures show his delight in imitating the grain of wood, a technique that Braque, trained as a decorator, possessed in all its ludicrous perfection; and there are examples of the new textures and surfaces that the two of them produced by adding dust and grit.

  At the same time both Picasso and Braque were fascinated by three-dimensional constructions: sculpture is scarcely the word for these frail assemblies cut out of colored paper or cardboard or thin metal and then glued together; the few that have survived, dusty, more or less crumpled, rusted away, suggest that at this time Picasso’s approach was essentially that of a painter, and of a painter whose mind was still grappling with the possibilities raised by his first collage with its ready-made facsimile of a cane seat.

  It is odd that neither of them hit upon the idea of sticking paper to their canvases that summer: not until late September, after Picasso and Eva had gone back to Paris, did Braque suddenly produce the first papier collé. In a shop in Avignon he chanced upon some wallpaper that imitated oak paneling, and an answer to their problems came to him: he bought it, cut it carefully into shapes, and combined them with a charcoal drawing to make a picture of a glass and a fruit-dish standing against a paneled wall and upon a wooden drawer. The technique, as he said later, enabled him to dissociate form from color and to see that they were independent of one another. “That was the great revelation. Color and form make their effect simultaneously, though they have nothing to do with one another.”

  A few weeks later he showed it to Picasso, who was delighted and who at once saw that these anonymous, ready-made, submissive pieces of the phenomenal world not only did away with all personal virtuosity, but—much more important—that in their new context they could set up a wonderful series of reverberations in the beholder’s mind and eye, the various realities echoing to and fro in his perception, heightening one another and disturbing all his preconceived notions of the truth. They would also provide a new wealth of texture and surface: there was obviously a great deal to be done with papier collé, and he began his experiments at once.

  He began them not in Montmartre but in Montparnasse. He had written to Kahnweiler from Sorgues, asking him to find a new studio and move his belongings: Kahnweiler had done his best, choosing a place in the boulevard Raspail right over on the other side of Paris, and supervising the removal-men. It must have been an appalling task. Even when he was poor Picasso accumulated papers, books, old ties, catalogs; now that he had been comfortably solvent for several years the quantity of objects in decaying cardboard boxes, old trunks and cupboards, the tottering, dust-covered pyramids had reached unnatural proportions; and by this time the merchant was well enough acquainted with his prize painter to be sure that Picasso knew every one of those heaps, boxes, and containers intimately and would demand an account of any valuable old postcard lost or thrown away. Poor Kahnweiler: he loved Picasso, but like most people who loved Picasso he paid for it heavily at times. The studio did not suit, of course; in the whole history of painting no studio found by a friend ever has suited; and Picasso was out of it in a few months. And then quite apart from finding the new home in Montparnasse and seeing to the move, Kahnweiler had another disagreeable, anxious, time-consuming job: Picasso had painted a Picasso on a wall at Les Clochettes: the wall had to be demolished, the picture recovered, backed with wood, brought to Paris; and the endless negotiations with the old lady who owned the villa, with her relations, with the artisans and experts, fell to Kahnweiler.

  Yet even if his real esteem and affection for Picasso are left out of the account it is not surprising that Kahnweiler should have taken so much trouble. Picasso’s fame was growing fast: fame in small but influential circles in Paris, Germany, and Russia, notoriety elsewhere. The 1912 Salon des Indépendants had an unprecedented display of Cubist pictures, including Juan Gris’ “Hommage à Picasso” and the works of three important newcomers to the movement, the Russian Leopold Survage, the Dutch Piet Mondrian, and the Mexican Rivera. Diego Rivera, by the way, brought a very remarkable Tlatilolco head to Paris, a dual head some two thousand years old with three eyes and two mouths so that a full face could be seen at the same time as a profile with no discontinuity of the whole; he showed this symbol of duality to Picasso, and in time it bore strange fruit.

  Then the Salon d’Automne showed many more, while under the title of the Section d’Or several of the Puteaux group had an important exhibition at the Galérie La Boëtie, an exhibition that included Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Nu descendant un escalier.”

  The outcry was immense, far greater than before. The senior member of the city council wrote to the minister of fine arts, begging him to go to the Salon d’Automne, from which he would emerge “as sickened as many people I know; indeed, I hope you will murmur to yourself, ‘Have I the right to lend a public building to a gang of malefactors who in the world of art behave themselves just as apaches do in everyday life?’ When you come out, Monseiur le Ministre, you will wonder whether nature and the human form have ever been subjected to such an outrage … and whether the dignity of the government of which you are a member is not seriously affected when it seems to countenance the scandal by sheltering these horrors in a building belonging to the nation.” And in parliament a deputy rose to say that it was intolerable that public property should be made use of for “manifestations of such a markedly anti-artistic and anti-national character.”

  On the other side the poor Cubists were abused for their prim conventionality. “Although we will have nothing whatsover to do with Impressionism,” said the Futurists, “we very strongly disapprove of the present reaction which, in order to kill Impressionism, is bringing painting back to the old academic formulas.… There is no possible doubt that many of the aesthetic statements of our French colleagues display a kind of veiled academicism. We declare ourselves totally opposed to their art. They stubbornly persist in painting the motionless, the frozen, the static aspects of nature; they worship the traditionalism of Poussin, Ingres, and Corot; they are turning their art into something old-fashioned and fossilized.”

  Picasso did not exhibit at the salons, but he was known, a little unfairly, to be the chief of the Cubists, and it was as the leader of what was dimly to be seen to be a significant new movement that he was asked to contribute to the second Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London this year. Two of his pictures had been seen at the first show in 1910, “La Fillette à la corbeille fleurie” and the modest “Clovis Sagot”; mild though it was in comparison with the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the portrait gave offense and it was at once caricatured, together with some Cézannes and others less clearly identifiable, in a derisive counter-show put on by the Chelsea Arts Club. And the exhibition as a whole had been badly received. “The walls are hung with works … like the crude efforts of children, garishly discordant in colour, formless, and destitute of tone,” said the Connoisseur, which regretted that men of talent “should waste their lives in spoiling acres of good canvas when they might be better employed in stone-breaking for the roads,” while some time later G. K. Chesterton told his readers that if there were something comprehensible in Pi
casso’s art, that something could be described in a comprehensible manner in writing: a statement that seems to me to sum up the difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.

  This time there were thirteen Picasso paintings and three drawings, all, except for one Blue portrait and the Gósol “Composition,” between 1908 and 1912; and apart from the splendid section devoted to Matisse the exhibition was largely Cubist. In 1912 by no means all the English were bogged down in Georgian good taste: Impressionism had been fairly well digested; Cézanne had his devotees; and both Gauguin and van Gogh had reached the middlebrows. But even the most percipient were still too firmly held by tradition to make anything of Cubism. Roger Fry thought the new painting was essentially Expressionist; and he saw Cubism, carried to its logical extremity, as “an attempt to give up all resemblance to natural form—a visual music; and the later works of Picasso show this clearly enough … with the exception of Braque none of them push their attempts at abstraction of form so far.” Since Fry had helped to write the catalog he was obliged to be civil: The Times was not. Having dealt with Matisse, the paper said,

  the art of M. Picasso is a very different matter. He, too, is not a charlatan, but we do not believe that he is an artist of narrow and intense originality like M. Matisse. Rather he seems to us to be by nature extremely imitative, and to have endeavoured to preserve himself from imitation by the pursuit of a theory scientific rather than artistic in its origin. We see him in an early portrait an imitator of Goya, but without Goya’s wit or spontaneity. In his large composition we see him produce a work as cleverly eclectic and as sophisticated as some Italian pictures of the seventeenth century. And lastly we have his purely theoretic experiments which are unintelligible to the eye and the mind. Forgetting that these are meant to represent anything, we see very little abstract beauty of colour or design in most of them, although the still life is an exception. They depress us as if they were diagrams of a science about which we know nothing; and whereas in “La Femme au Pot de Moutarde” a human form is obscurely discernible, it seems, but for the obscurity, to be commonplace. He has every right to make his experiments, and they may perhaps prove useful to other artists in the future. He is, in fact, such a scientific experimentor as Paolo Uccello might have been if he had had no original talent of his own, or if in him a slight original talent had been overlaid by intellectual curiosity.

  (Sixty years later the same paper called Picasso “the most famous, the most controversial, in many ways the most influential and undoubtedly the richest artist of his age. He was a draughtsman of genius, and there is probably no single artist except Giotto or Michelangelo who can justly compare with him in being responsible for so radically altering the course of art in his time.”)

  Of course the popular press was ribald; and it continued to be ribald, in all countries, until at length it was crushed into a servile respect by the sheer weight of money paid for Picasso’s works. In 1912 however the sums were modest enough: that year the Stafford Gallery showed drawings, mostly of the Blue and Pink Periods, and while the most important cost£22 a small one might be had for£2.50.

  None of this depressed Picasso, nor yet Kahnweiler: there is a kind of abuse that is a guarantee of excellence and almost of success, for surely people do not utter such shrill and vehement protests unless some Freudian resistance is at work—unless at some level they are aware of the validity of what they see. Deeply untruthful painting is deeply boring; it meets with a flaccid rather than a passionate response, and no one has ever suggested burning the limp canvases, the hanging ropes, and the solemn array of boots that now crowd provincial galleries. Besides, the Cubist exhibitions this year in Berlin, Munich, Cologne (where Picasso showed sixteen works of between 1903 and 1911, having a whole room to himself), Moscow, and Barcelona evoked a more directly encouraging response, and in Paris the more intelligent journalists were beginning to support the movement, as Apollinaire had done from the first.

  The young merchant was full of confidence; and he and the painter signed a contract, a most unusual contract, since it was drawn up by the painter and since it contained a clause laying down that Picasso alone should decide whether a painting was finished or not; but once it was signed Kahnweiler had achieved his ambition—he was now Picasso’s exclusive dealer. Now, as far as money was concerned, the future seemed assured: Picasso returned with more than usual zeal to the new world opened up by papier collé.

  Apart from a brief visit to Le Havre with Braque in the autumn of 1912, Picasso spent all the rest of that year and the first part of 1913 in Paris, his work interrupted only by another removal, this time to a dismal modern house in the nearby rue Schoelcher, a cold street that runs along the side of the Montparnasse cemetery. He had known Montparnasse ever since he came to Paris, and he had friends there, but it was quite unlike his old village on the Butte, where he knew everybody, every street, and every café; yet at least it had this advantage, that fewer people disturbed him: and the flat was comfortable, the studio well-lit.

  Although he did not confine himself to papiers collés, nor anything like it, he turned out a surprising number, many of them concerned with bottles, bottles of rum, marc, maraschino, Dubonnet, Pernod, Suze, and Bass. He had great fun with them, sometimes sticking the real label on, sometimes imitating it: he had fun with visiting-cards too, particularly with those that were dog-eared to show that the person named had been there in the flesh; he used them as signatures and as allusions to his friends—André Level’s is built into one picture, and the joint card of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas into another—thus obtaining a pleasant to-and-fro of identities.

  At this stage Braque used papier collé only in combination with drawing: Picasso took it much farther—his paper forms part of his paintings, and generally speaking he handled the new technique more freely and more wittily than his friend. Newspaper titles, or fragments of them, had appeared in his pictures well before this, but now they multiplied to a remarkable degree, and now they were accompanied by pieces of the printed text, sometimes cut into strips, sometimes into shapes more obviously pictorial. It has been suggested that the words they contain should be examined for hidden meanings that may have a bearing on the picture itself. Countless hours of research have hunted down the puns in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; the same talents have been turned to the Cubist papiers collés, but with disappointingly meager results in Picasso’s case. (Gris is more rewarding.)

  Perhaps it is just as well. In one of the 1913 pictures, “La Bouteille de Suze,” the paper almost entirely covers the canvas; the legible columns of print, many of them upside down, contain something like two thousand words, and it would be a strange, time-laden painting that required the spectator to stand on his head with a magnifying-glass. Patient ingenuity can strain something out of the newspaper-cuttings, and in this case the left-hand columns deal with a huge Socialist, pacifist, trade-union, Communist, and anarchist meeting at Pré-Saint-Gervais, with red flags, black flags, and the Internationale, while on the right hand, inverted, there is an account of the Turco-Bulgarian war and a cholera epidemic. But the elaborate splicing of the literary and the plastic does not seem to match with what one knows of Picasso’s mind: his wit was lively enough in all conscience, but it was never laborious. On the other hand, words and phrases that the eye takes in at once belong to a different category; and it is difficult to believe that the headline LA BATAILLE S’EST ENGAGEE in the “Guitare et verre,” for example, is the effect of hazard.

  Where the pasted paper is the predominant element these are not his most considerable paintings, but they are never facile and they are rarely flippant; again and again they achieve a rare, strange beauty of their own; and the “Bouteille de vieux marc,” which uses a cut-out print of patterned cloth, would be a continually-renewed delight upon one’s wall, in spite of Picasso’s strong words about the function of painting.

  It was not these collages, however, that traveled across the Atlantic to represent Picasso in the
United States, but six paintings, a drawing, and a bronze. Leo Stein lent two undated still-lives; Kahnweiler the 1903 “Madame Soler,” a 1907 gouache called “Les Arbres” (it was sold for $243 and now belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art), the famous “Femme au pot de moutarde” of 1910 (offered in vain at $675), and a 1912 “Tête d’homme”; Alfred Stieglitz the 1910 charcoal drawing of a nude that is now in the New York Museum of Modern Art and the bronze head of a woman that is to be seen in Chicago. They were to form part of the huge, epoch-making Armory Show that opened in New York on February 17, 1913, and then moved on to Chicago and Boston, giving many Americans their first view of what had happened and of what was now happening in the European studios: and as far as the Cubists and near-Cubists were concerned the exhibition also included works by Braque, Delaunay, Duchamp, Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Leger, and Picabia.

  To return to the “Bouteille de vieux marc”: the cloth imitated in the papier collé is of the traditional Catalan kind, woven at Arles-sur-Tech, not far from Céret; and it was at Céret that Picasso painted the picture.

  He had come down with Eva and Max Jacob in the spring of 1913, the year in which Vollard brought out a large edition of the Saltimbanques suite and in which Apollinaire, the unfortunate lover, published Les peintres cubistes, méditations esthétiques, a muddled, enthusiastic appreciation of the leaders and some others, including Marie Laurencin, and Alcools, his finest collection of poems. Then came the Braques, and Juan Gris.

  Gris is generally named with Picasso and Braque as one of the chief figures of Cubism, but he was a late comer to the movement and it was not until 1912 that he abandoned direct representation. Once he did become a Cubist, however, he remained a Cubist, the purest of them all; and to the end of his short life he carried on along that severe path, traveling longer if not farther than any of his companions. He has been represented as an intellectual rather than an intuitive painter, a theoretician; and it has been said that his pictures leave a feeling of cold calculation. On the other hand Kahnweiler, no mean judge, loved him and his work, while many respectable critics rank him very high. It is not his merits that are my concern, however, but his relation with Picasso. Fernande disliked him: she accuses him of being an opportunist who copied the tricks of Cubism, and although Picasso cannot have taken this seriously, her attitude may well have increased his initial reserve. Picasso liked flattery, but Gris set about it the wrong way: he called Picasso maître, which, with its implications of age, established respectability, and academies, irritated him; and in spite of the “Hommage à Picasso” which Gris had exhibited at the Indépendants in the spring of 1912 this irritation increased, eventually turning into an odd mixture of affection and antipathy, with the antipathy sometimes predominating.