Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  He could not finish “Vive la France,” and that winter saw the end of rococo Cubism. It also saw a striking decrease in his production: the pictures that he did paint were far more severe, and among them was a tall gaunt harlequin. This harlequin was signed: he had also put his name to some of the recent, cheerful, personal, rococo pictures, but here the identification may have a significance of its own.

  Materially he was affected, too. Kahnweiler had not attended to Picasso’s advice about adopting French nationality: he was still a German, and his belongings, his shop, and his stock in trade were seized as enemy property. He himself would have been interned if he had not happened to be on holiday in Italy: he succeeded in reaching the safety of neutral Switzerland, but there was nothing that he could do for his painters, and some of them were reduced to near starvation. Juan Gris, for example, who as a deserter from the Spanish army had no passport, was caught in Collioure, where he had been seeing Matisse, and he kept alive only by eating raw sardines on the shore; while Herbin, rejected by the army as being too small, did not have even that resource, and he nearly died in the Bateau-Lavoir from mere want of food. Picasso, however, like many people who have been wildly extravagant when poor, had grown if not penurious then at least careful with wealth; he had taken his precautions, and he did not suffer to anything like the same extent. Still, his merchant was gone; Uhde and his fellow-countrymen were the other side of the firing-line; the Russian millionaires might as well have been in the moon; and with the Germans deep in France—their guns could be heard in Paris—few French collectors were in the mood to buy. Vollard did not even trouble to open his shop.

  Matisse was in Paris part of the time, trying to get the army to accept him in spite of his forty-five years, and Picasso saw something of him. And among the diminished band there remained Max Jacob, too sickly and purblind for service; González and Gargallo. Spaniards and therefore neutral too; some other foreigners, and farther off Serge Ferat and his sister, Modigliani (when he was not dead drunk), Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall for a while, Moise Kisling, Chaim Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, and Pinchus Kremegne.

  Just before the war Gargallo had carved a portrait-head of Picasso for a keystone that is still to be seen on the façade of the Cinema del Bosque in Barcelona, together with the likenesses of Nonell, Ramon Reventós, and the sculptor himself; and it was Gargallo who carved the equally cheerful and better-known head of 1917 that is so often reproduced. He had known Picasso since the days of the Quatre Gats, and unlike many of these old friends he had a delicacy about selling the drawings and pictures that Picasso scattered right and left so long as there was no attempt at forcing his natural but capricious generosity. But in the first winter of the war Gargallo found that he could no longer make a living in Paris; furthermore he was passionately eager to marry a young Provençale called Magalí. He came to the rue Schoelcher and asked whether he might in decency part with a drawing that Pablo had given him. Certainly he might, said Picasso, and at once helped him to find a purchaser; when all was settled he accompanied the now-solvent Gargallo and his bride to the station, and as the train moved of! he thrust a tube through the window into their hands—a Cubist drawing to replace the first.

  Autumn brought Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas back to Paris, to the rue de Fleurus and the diminished collection. It was diminished not by any act of war but by Leo Stein’s decision, taken late in 1913, to go and live in Italy. Since many of the pictures had been bought out of their common fund there had to be a sharing: but although it was agreed that Leo should have the Matisses and Gertrude the Picassos there were a great many other pictures and the division could not be made without some heartburning, particularly as Leo insisted upon having a Cézanne still-life with apples to which Gertrude was deeply attached. “The Cézanne apples have a unique importance to me that nothing can replace,” he said. “… I’m afraid you’ll have to look upon the loss … as an act of God.”

  But he was reckoning without another creator; for Picasso, observing Gertrude Stein’s distress, painted her an apple, a single apple, not indeed a Cézanne, but a picture in its way as deeply satisfying, one that almost fulfilled his promise, “I will paint you an apple and it will be as fine as all of Cézanne’s apples”; and he produced it, inscribed Souvenir pour Gertrude et Alice for Christmas, 1914.

  From time to time he and Eva dined at the rue de Fleurus, although she was far from well; and on one of these occasions there was an air-raid alarm. They put out the lights and took shelter with the concierge for a while, then returned to the studio and sat there with a single candle, shaded by the table. Gertrude Stein and Picasso talked until the all clear sounded at two in the morning: they talked then and upon hundreds of other occasions, but how much did they communicate? Neither of them understood the language well: she “rarely read french newspapers, she never read anything in french,” and Picasso’s resistance to the finer points can be seen from his letters. When one considers the infinite possibilities of mistaken expression in the first place and of mistaken comprehension of that error in the second, it may be thought that Gertrude Stein is not the most reliable authority on Picasso’s views, at least where delicate shade of meaning is concerned.

  Yet there was one point, not without its delicacy, where there was no misunderstanding whatsoever. Among the people Picasso saw at the rue de Fleurus there was Juan Gris, who had managed to get back to Paris and who was now living in abject poverty at the Bateau-La voir. In spite of his being, as she puts it, “a tormented and not particularly sympathetic character … very melancholy and effusive and as always clear sighted and intellectual” Gris and Gertrude Stein grew very friendly; she used often to go to the Bateau-Lavoir. Picasso did not like it. He had always had strong reservations about Gris; and now it may be that he did not altogether trust his clear-sighted intellect. The she-bear is often held up as the type of possessive affection; but neither the she-bear nor yet the tigress can compare with the average artist protecting his patron. This deeply-rooted sense of property readily merges with a more commonplace emotion; and Picasso was somewhat given to jealousy. He was not at all sorry, for example, to have supplanted Matisse in Gertrude Stein’s esteem.

  Matisse and Picasso were in agreement on the sacred importance of painting; on almost every other point they were far, far apart. Matisse’s way of life was the antithesis of Picasso’s; so was his attitude towards patrons, as he had proved by his magnanimous introduction of Shchoukine; and so, in this particular case, was his attitude towards Juan Gris. He was much concerned about the young man’s desperate state. In a letter to the remote Kahnweiler Gris said that Matisse was d’un dévouement extrême, and certainly he did his very best to provide some kind of a living, some kind of a pension, to tide Gris over this difficult period. What he could not do himself he hoped to induce Gris’ friends and admirers to do: among those who were in Paris he called on Gertrude Stein. He represented to her, with all the force of a man who has known bitter hardship, that if Gris were not fed he must die; she was convinced, but she deferred the arrangement of the details to another day. As Matisse reached her door at the appointed time he met Picasso coming out: inside Gertrude Stein was waiting for him with the news that taking all things into consideration she had decided that she could not see her way to granting his request. The implication is obvious: I do not know whether it is sound, but Matisse believed it was.

  Shortly after, in the spring of 1915, Gertrude Stein decided to go to Majorca “and forget the war a little.” Among other consequences, this left Picasso with scarcely any “respectable” dinner-giving acquaintance apart from Serge Gastrebzoff and his sister Madame d’Oettingen, who lived nearby in the boulevard Raspail. Both painted (he had been a Cubist since 1910), both wrote, both had difficulty with their names: Gastrebzoff signed his pictures Serge Férat, and she signed her writings Roch Grey or Jean Cérusse or Léonard Pieux. They were well-to-do and appreciative—they bought everything that Henri Rousseau left in his studio when he died
—and it was they who had provided the backing for Apollinaire’s Soirees de Paris. It is said that Picasso learned the Cyrillic letters that appear in some of his paintings from them: for Kahnweiler their origin was the paper that wrapped his pictures when they returned from Moscow in 1910. No doubt both accounts are true.

  Apollinaire was seen from time to time when he came on leave; so were Braque, Léger, Derain, La Fresnaye, Jacques Villon, and many more; and letters arrived, sometimes bringing souvenirs—an engraved piece of shell-case from Léger—but they were letters and objects from another planet, and mercurial though he was, Max Jacob was almost the only unchanging figure remaining from the world Picasso knew.

  Although to the superficial view his life seemed chaotic, it was informed by a certain order, and Picasso was a creature of habit, profoundly conservative in his ways. His deep affection for the emotional and sometimes trying Jacob increased, in spite of his friend’s even greater preoccupation with religion, a subject that Picasso did not care to touch.

  Jacob had recently had another vision, that of Our Lady this time: he had also found the more sympathetic Fathers of Notre Dame de Sion, who were particularly concerned with the conversion of the Jews, and early in 1915 he was baptized, Picasso being his godfather and Sylvette Filassier, of the Théâtre des Variétés, his godmother.

  Picasso had wanted to call him Fiacre, after the seventh-Century Irish saint who lived in a forest in the Brie, near Meaux; he would have nothing whatsoever to do with women, and he is much invoked by gardeners and those who suffer from hemorrhoids—as good a saint as could well be imagined, and of an excellent Milesian family; but unhappily the first person in Paris to let out hackney coaches in 1620 did so from a house named after the saint in the rue Saint-Martin, and by extension all French cabs came to be called fiacres. This distressed Jacob, so Picasso chose from his own array of names, and in the Imitation de Jésus-Christ that was his christening-present he wrote: A mon frère/Cyprien Max Jacob/souvenir de son/Bapteme/jeudi 18 Febrier 1915/Pablo.

  Somewhat later Picasso paused in his work, set his Cubist pictures to one side, and made a pencil drawing of his godson sitting in a chair, wearing a high-necked pullover, a double-breasted waistcoat and a jacket, bald as an egg and looking deeply thoughtful and benign—a wholly realistic drawing that Don José would have loved and whose virtuosity made his friends cry “Ingres!” If the war had not been raging perhaps they might have cried “Holbein!” or any of the other names that are synonymous with total mastery of the flowing line: however Ingres was what they said, apart from Level who said Picasso, and the rank and file of the Cubists who said Traitor, seeing this realism as a betrayal of their movement.

  Unperturbed, Picasso moved on to an even more precise drawing of Vollard and then to another of Léonce Rosenberg. Rosenberg was the dealer who eventually stepped in to take over Kahnweiler’s painters, succoring the unhappy Cubists and saving Juan Gris. He also managed Picasso’s affairs, though even at the worst of times that represented no great difficulty: at no stage did wealthy collectors, such as the Chilean Madame Errazuriz, entirely neglect his work. Léonce Rosenberg was a generous, good-hearted man, and even when he was called up he went on looking after the Cubists’ interests as well as he could, buying their pictures every time he came on leave.

  This abrupt and almost entirely unheralded reversion to a style reminiscent of his wonderfully accomplished student drawings or of his drypoint circus horse of 1905 was incomprehensible to his friends. It is true that he had a great admiration for Ingres; and it is true that Henri Mahaut says, “In 1915 Picasso told me he wanted to see if he could draw like everybody else”; but surely his return to a world immediately accessible to others, to a traditional manner reaching back to the time when the artist’s dialogue was between himself and the whole community—a community of which he was a full, accepted member—has at least some relationship with Apollinaire’s voluntary plunge into the French army?

  Braque had been wounded seriously in the head, fighting near Arras in May, 1915, although the news did not reach Paris for some time. Men were being killed by the thousand in the great offensives; the field-hospitals and those in the rear were crowded with shockingly mutilated figures; his friends despaired of his life.

  There are times when even the highest human activities—peace-time activities—must seem futile: Picasso’s work did not come to a halt, but 1915 was his least fruitful year since he came to Paris. During some relatively happy interval he finished “Vive la France”; in his other Cubist paintings he still used these dots a little, but for variegation of texture, not for gaiety, and although he never retreated from color the pictures of 1915 and 1916, often very large, are angular and severe: not perhaps as ascetic as those of the high analytic phase, but painted with at least an equal gravity. The harlequin I have already mentioned is a canvas six feet high, and although the mass of brilliant color—vermilion and ultramarine lozenges and planes—is very great, it stands against an even more important area of black. The little pin-like head is somber: the one round eye expressionless. Collages almost died away, and the constructions were seen no more. But there were these new wonderful cool realistic drawings of his friends: why did Eva never appear in them?

  Answer comes there none. Her frail slim little figure, her doe-like eyes, are known to us only from two unskilled photographs; and apart from Max Jacob’s “charming woman” and Gertrude Stein’s “I could perfectly understand Fernande’s liking for Eve. As I said Fernande’s great heroine was Evelyn Thaw, small and negative. Here was a little french Evelyn Thaw, small and perfect” and a few other passing references, Picasso’s friends tell nothing. She drifts in and out of his history like a gentle ghost.

  In the autumn she became very ill. By November, as he told the distant Gertrude Stein, Picasso was spending half his time in the Metro, going to and from the clinic where she lay. Nevertheless he said that his days were full, that as usual he was working hard—“enfin ma vie est bien remplie et come toutjours je ne me arrete pas”—and that he had painted a harlequin, perhaps his best. Yet, as well as the harlequins of 1915, he also made one of his very rare religious drawings, a Christ crucified. Neither its exact date in the year nor of course its significance to Picasso can be stated; yet there it is, an enigmatic testimony open to many interpretations, worked upon with the utmost care.

  Tuberculosis was an almost certain killer then, particularly when both food and fuel were hard to find; and in the winter Eva died. A few friends went to the graveyard with Picasso—pitifully few, when one thinks of his immense acquaintance—among them Jacob and Juan Gris. Gris wrote to Maurce Raynal, far away in the trenches, to tell him about the day: “There were seven or eight friends at the funeral, which was a very sad affair except, naturally, for Max’s witticisms, which merely emphasized the horror.… Picasso is rather upset by it.”

  In January, 1916, Picasso wrote to Gertrude Stein, “My poor Eva is dead … a great sorrow … she was always so kind to me,” and he said he should be happy to see Gertrude and talk to her again after their long separation. That spring he did see her, but he can have derived little comfort from her presence; she seems to have been quite unmoved by Eva’s death and she draws a strange picture of a cheerful Picasso in a cheerful Paris—of an equally unmoved Picasso who brought not only Blaise Cendrars and Erik Satie to the rue de Fleurus, but also “Paquerette a girl who was very nice or Irène a very lovely woman from the mountains who wanted to be free.”

  This picture is entirely contradicted by everything that is known of Picasso’s nature and by the written evidence. For example, Crespelle says, “Picasso felt completely isolated, and although he sought the company of other artists, he kept himself apart from them. He used to arrive in the evening at the Rotonde, wearing an old brown raincoat and a black-and-white checked cloth cap. Silent and unsmiling he would go and sit down in the back room reserved for regular customers and watch people coming and going with his dark eyes. He might not have been there,
he showed so little interest in the conversation going on around him, but as at Els Quatre Gats, he sometimes spoke up suddenly when something caught his attention.

  “Gabriel Fournier, who met him about this time, has left us a record of one of these occasions: ‘One evening I saw him emerge from his usual silence and suddenly come to life. His eyes lit up as he fixed his dilated pupils on the ribbon of the Médaille militaire pinned on a comrade’s dark jacket. Pointing at it, he cried: “That yellow between those green stripes looks red to me; it is red!”—after which he returned to his gloomy thoughts.’”

  In Gertrude Stein’s account it is not Paquerette or Irene who ring false but Picasso’s gaiety: of course he sought out women as well as artists, and one he found was a fine black girl from Martinique. They lived together for a little while, but in a matter of weeks she left him, unable to bear his unhappiness. “Il était sinistre,” she said. The contradiction between the two versions may be accounted for by Gertrude Stein’s real in-difference to Eva, by her impercipience, and by her imperfect memory: at this time she was much excited by the idea of “getting into the war” (she delivered American comfort-bags in the south of France) and by learning to drive a car; and she confuses her dates.