There would have been far more consolation in the company of Apollinaire. He was now an infantry-officer and a French citizen: he passed through Paris on January 11, 1916, after a leave in Oran; a little later his regiment moved up into the front line and on March 17 he was very badly wounded, also in the head. They brought him back to Paris, to the Italian hospital on the quai d’Orsay, where Serge Férat, now a male nurse, helped to look after him. After a trepanning operation he slowly improved, and Picasso drew him, still in this perfectly realistic manner, sitting in the chair that had served for Vollard, wearing a forage-cap over his bandage and the Croix de guerre on his bosom—a thinner, somewhat Hebraic Apollinaire. He had suffered a great deal, both from his wound, which troubled him for the short remainder of his life, and from his many love-affairs: this is not the place for an account of Apollinaire’s wounded heart—Marie, Lou, Madeleine—but it hurt him so much that he could sympathize with a friend in great emotional stress.
Gertrude Stein describes the Paris to which she returned as gay, and in this she is borne out by other writers. By 1916 and even earlier the first great wave of solidarity and altruism had receded; the patriotic fervor was still intense but many civilians had settled down to making the best of the new life and some were doing remarkably well out of the war: Paris was full; the restaurants and theaters crowded; a very great deal of money was in circulation. From the point of view of the picture-dealers and some of the painters this was excellent: the dark days were past.
The soldiers returning from their unimaginable hell, the inhuman landscape of the western front, saw it with different eyes. They relished the lights and the gaiety, but they were staggered by the “business as usual” attitude of the civilians. That two such infinitely remote worlds could exist within a short day’s journey of one another passed their understanding: Apollinaire spoke with bewilderment of the “feverish activity in painting and sculpture—Cubism of course … they can sell anything, at ridiculous prices.”
Yet like so many others he too was reabsorbed by the common world in time—within a few months in fact—just as Picasso took to women again. Both were thirty-six in mid-1916; both artistically mature; both emotionally adolescent—“undeadened” is the better word—as perhaps creative artists must necessarily be.
Not all the painters were doing well, however. Soutine hanged himself from despair in the Ruche, the left-bank equivalent of the Bateau-Lavoir, filled with Slavs, and was cut down by Kremegne; and Sevcrini, the best-known of the Futurists, was near to dying of tuberculosis and want of food, although he had excellent contacts in Paris, having married Paul Fort’s daughter, with Apollinaire as his best man. Max Jacob helped him, as he invariably helped all his friends; and it was probably in relation to this fund-raising that Picasso wrote:
MY DEAR GODSON MAX,
I am sending you the money you ask for and I shall be very happy to see you again soon. I am deep in house-moving and you will arrive just right to give me a hand such as you have always offered as a friend. You know how little I ask on these occasions: only your moral support, encouragement, in short the friendly hand of Max Jacob. Meanwhile, here is mine,
Your old friend,
PICASSO
The letter is undated, but it must have been written in October, 1916, since we know that Picasso moved house in that month. His reluctance to stay in the rue Schoelcher is understandable; his decision to leave the heart of Paris less so. He chose a suburban house, grim, square, and prim, out at Montrouge, beyond the Porte d’ltalie and the limits of Paris.
He was not the only artist to bury himself by any means—Matisse had lived at Clamart, Vlaminck at Chatou, and at this very time Erik Satie was living even farther out in the same direction, at Arcueil—but the suburbs do not seem to match with Picasso’s nature, and in fact this was his only experiment in living there. It was almost his only experiment in living alone, too: he was no good at it, although someone, perhaps the wealthy Madame Errazuriz who supplied his pink silk counterpane, eventually found him a reliable servant. Nor was he good at moving alone: many of his .constructions were broken in the process, and then thieves came and took away not his pictures but his linen. Yet they might easily have had the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” for the great canvas that had dominated the rue Schoelcher, where it had astonished Cocteau, among so many others in the last ten years or so, was now lying there, taken off its stretcher and rolled up, ready for them.
He may have chanced upon the house in Montrouge when he was seeing Erik Satie home. Satie was an assiduous frequenter of the Dôme and the Rotonde, and late at night his friends would often see him back to Arcueil, a two hours’ walk. At this time Satie was fifty, though he looked older, and he was perhaps the most advanced composer of his day, or rather of his tomorrow. His music was appreciated only by a few, and Picasso was not one of those few: “I am no musician,” said Picasso to Stravinsky, “I know nothing whatever about music”: and he said it as though he did not mind at all. Neither Picasso nor Satie took much notice of the other’s work, though in time Satie came to love Cubism; their acquaintance was of long standing, and although each had a difficult character, quick to take offense (Satie quarreled with Debussy after a friendship of half a lifetime, and with Georges Auric and many more), they had never fallen out.
At first sight there was nothing striking about Satie: with his pince-nez, his little beard, and his formal clothes he looked like a minor civil-servant. But the gleam of his extraordinarily knowing, young, intelligent eye changed all that; and when he began to talk it became evident that a most uncommon and entirely modern spirit inhabited the dusty, old-fashioned shell. For dusty it was: Satie felt that a composer should dress respectably, and he put on clothes that were no doubt respectable at first. That was the limit of his concession to the world, however. He never brushed them afterwards; he rarely changed—his high stiff collar was usually gray; nor did he feel the need to wash. And although he was exceedingly poor for most of his life he did not open letters either; when at last he died, his den-like room in a working-class tenement was found to be full of still-sealed envelopes, some of them containing checks.
Jean Cocteau, on the other hand, made an immediate impression on the beholder: it was his intention so to do, and he had been suceeding in his aim for some years now. When he was introduced to Picasso in 1916 he was twenty-seven and he had a considerable reputation as a poet. He had been launched not as an infant but as a stripling prodigy in the salons so familiar to Proust, and he was very well with Madame de Noailles, Etienne de Beaumont, and their friends: industry, wit, and somewhat equivocal good looks rather than a steady flow of verse maintained his reputation, but youthfulness and modernity were essential ingredients and sometimes he seemed rather to labor to acquire or to retain them. The war might have broken his career, but it did not. After a brief and irregular though not inglorious campaign in more or less official ambulances, some run by his friend Misia Sert, he was allowed to put aside his Poiret uniform and return to equally well-cut civilian clothes.
His appearance recommended him among the leaders of a certain society, but not in the Montparnasse which he began to haunt in 1915. Many of the painters disliked his air of fashionable wealth, his restless avidity for notice, and his incessant flow of words, witty though they sometimes were.
Picasso did not mind him, however: rather the reverse. Although there were only some eight years between them, young Cocteau was particularly deferential, as to a much older man; he could be far more diverting in talk than he was in verse or prose, and Picasso always liked being flattered and amused. In any case he did not object to a touch of the charlatan or adventurer in his friends: Apollinaire had something of it; so had Max Jacob, who described himself with poetic rather than literal truth as a translator from the Old Breton, as an aged seadog, a great voyager, and as a quartermaster from Macao; and “Baron” Mollet, who lived solely by his wits, was dear to Picasso for fifty years and more. Besides, Cocteau possessed flair to th
e pitch of genius: nothing less could have decided him upon the extraordinarily improbable course of persuading Picasso and Satie to collaborate with him in a ballet.
Cocteau knew about ballets. He had been in contact with Diaghilev ever since the first astonishing Paris season of the Ballets Russes, and with Frédéric de Madrozo he had written the scenario for Le Dieu bleu, a ballet with music by Proust’s particular friend Reynaldo Hahn and choreography by Michel Fokine that was danced by Tamara Karsavina and Nijinsky at the Châtelet in 1912. It had not been successful; but now he had the powerful backing of Etienne de Beaumont and many of the salons, and although his suggestion sounded outrageous there was good sense in it.
Picasso could not see it at first, and the avant-garde painters of Montpamasse, particularly the Cubists, could not see it at any time: for them, the obstinate followers of a man who declined to lead, the idea of Picasso’s painting scenery and designing costumes for a ballet was sacrilegious, far worse than realistic drawing. Nor could Max Jacob: while Cocteau employed all his arguments and all his charm to convince Picasso, Max forgot his Christian charity and wrote to Jacques Maritain, “God hates Cocteau.”
Whether or not Max Jacob was right on this point, Cocteau succeeded, and Gertrude Stein records, “One day [in the winter of 1916/17] Picasso came in and with him leaning on his shoulder was a slim elegant youth. It is Jean, announced Pablo, Jean Cocteau and we are leaving for Italy.”
Italy, because the Ballets Russes were to reach Rome in February, 1917, coming from America, where they had spent much of the war. But before leaving France Picasso made models of the stage and his settings for the ballet, which was to be called Parade, ballet réaliste, and which, in Cocteau’s original idea, was to be based upon a music-hall performance with a Chinese conjurer, some acrobats, and an American girl. Picasso had never seen a ballet, but he had seen music-halls and circuses by the hundred, and he set about his models with confidence and enthusiasm, much helped by his long practice with constructions.
Even in peace-time Paris to Rome is a weary run; with both France and now Italy at war it was tedious beyond measure. But Picasso, with his experience of the Spanish railway, was hardened to such things, and he instantly revived upon getting out of the train. They found Diaghilev installed in the great Palazzo Theodori with his company around him, including Massine, who was to provide the choreography for Parade. Stravinsky was there too, working on the music for Feu d”Artifice, and Bakst: Picasso drew their portraits—only quick sketches, however, because the ballet took up almost all his waking hours at first.
It is scarcely believable that so complex a performance, with its split-second timing, should ever get organized among such hopelessly impractical people as those that inhabit the ballet world, many of them Russians with little sense of time. Diffident and peace-loving souls have been destroyed by the total disorder, the extreme nervous tension, the indecision, the hurry, and the fits of temperament; and Gris’ days were shortened by his contact with the ballet. But on Picasso it acted as a powerful stimulant. His chaos suited their chaos; his demoniac energy redoubled; he flung himself into the task. It might have been less arduous if he had started with a classical ballet; but Parade was not classical. Far from it: indeed, its main aim was to knock classical ballet sideways, much as Picasso’s painting had done with academic art. It called for frenzied toil, and as they worked upon the shifting mass of ideas, sketches, and suggestions so it changed and grew. There were to have been only four characters, the conjurer, the acrobats, and the girl, with voices off; but Picasso insisted upon three more, the managers of the troupe, a Frenchman, an American, and a horse. These characters were essential to his view of the ballet: the two human managers were to be huge architectural figures ten feet high, something in the nature of his constructions, who would lurch about the stage bawling through megaphones, more real than common reality, dwarfing the ordinary performers, and imposing an essentially Cubist conception on his otherwise fairly traditional sets, costumes, and curtain.
It may be doubted whether, with all his volcanic energy, conviction, and strength of personality, Picasso could have persuaded Diaghilev to accept these revolutionary ideas but for the fact that in March, 1917, while the ballet was in gestation, the Tsar and the imperial government of Russia were swept away. It was clear to the more intelligent Russians that the revolution would not stop half way to the left, and that in all probability they could never go home again. If they were to stay in the West, then Western modernity was required; and Picasso was the pace-setter of the Western avant-garde.
The background against which these tremendous figures were to appear was conventional enough: monochrome houses with a gap in the middle for depth. As for the dancers’ costumes, the two acrobats, blue and white with stars and curving stripes, were reminiscent of Picasso’s earlier circus people; and only the conjurer was really startling in his brilliant orange and yellow, black and white, with asymmetric curves and spirals. And the curtain was a gentle mockery of such compositions, with an added charm of its own. It was an enormous expanse of cloth, over fifteen hundred square feet; and it is difficult to imagine how Picasso ever painted it, even with the help of a team of Italians: there is a photograph of them sitting about on it as it lies on the floor of some vast building, and three men fit easily into the harlequin’s lap. Yet no branch of his trade was out of Picasso’s reach, and when it was done the curtain was as professional as if he had painted dozens.
It has survived, and it was to be seen, rather dusty and battered, at the Tate Gallery’s retrospective exhibition in 1960. One either side of the background there are conventional great curtains, looped back to show a pillar and far away an arch, perhaps a ruin; in front of these and on the right a group of strolling players including this harlequin, sit on boxes and trestles drawn up to a table, while one of them, a traditional Spaniard, plays his guitar. Over on the left a gentle winged mare suckles her foal, while standing on her back a winged girl reaches up to a monkey on a striped ladder. In the foreground, an acrobat’s ball, a sleeping dog, a drum, circus impedimenta. Red and green predominate, and a mild happiness.
The amount of hard labor on the curtain alone was prodigious; and then there were the costumes, particularly the ambitious great constructions for the managers, to say nothing of the frequent and shattering conferences, arguments, defeats, and victories, mostly victories; and the rehearsals. Yet still Picasso found the time to visit Naples and Pompeii with Massine, to catch a glimpse of Florence, to see his Futurist friends, and to paint at least one Cubist picture, “l’ltalienne.” Although the greater part of it is black and gray the picture is eminently cheerful, decorative, and superficially legible: an elegant black woman with a long neck carrying a blue basket and wearing a papery coif of three planes—green, white, and blue—holds a blue mask in profile up to the full-face pink mask that already covers her face. Behind her is a small St. Peter’s and part of the lower background is strangely disrupted by amorphous rents that contrast with the many straight-edged planes. When he chose to show the power of his hand Picasso could paint a wonderfully clean, spontaneous, incisive picture, and this is a good example of his effortless technique. It is perhaps the first in which masks appear, those masks that were later to assume such a great and even sinister importance in his work; but in “l’ltalienne” they seem to be there for the fun. At any rate he was enjoying himself in Rome, and he also found time to walk in the moonlight with the dancers.
In the green-room the white bosoms and the silk stockings of the actresses did not arouse Cocteau’s amorous propensities, nor yet Diaghilev’s; they were not gifted in that way; but Picasso was, and of those with whom he walked in moonlit Rome he chiefly prized Olga Koklova.
It is very useless to inquire why a man should like a particular woman; the spectator can only wonder and exclaim. Those who offer to account for this connection say that Picasso was attracted to Olga Koklova by her beauty, her virtue, and her birth. The beauty of her face, as he de
picted it during the early days of their courtship and their union, barely achieves prettiness, in spite of a good complexion; and it is sadly marred by an habitual expression, still more evident in photographs, of stupid determination, dissatisfaction, and sullenness, an expression, emphasized by a somewhat undershot jaw, that was to grow far, far stronger with the years. The beauty of her person may have been more alluring: the rigid discipline of the ballet gives the dancers firm, supple bodies and an elegant carriage; but there were many lithe young women in the company, far better dancers than Olga Koklova, who had taken to the ballet late and who never rose above mediocrity. Her virtue, surprising in such a world, certainly resisted Picasso’s first advances; and it certainly raised her in his esteem, accustomed as he was to a brisk and willing submission. As for birth, Olga is said to have been the daughter of a colonel of artillery, of a distinguished officer, of a general; in any case of a noble family. It would be halve indeed to expect noble conduct as the necessary consequence, the evidence of noble birth; and in the event of Picasso’s ever having entertained such hopes he was soon to be disappointed. All observers agree that Olga, though socially eager, was bourgeois to the core. But what is more to the point as far as technical nobility is concerned, a diligent search in the Russian equivalent of Debrett or Burke has failed to discover a Koklov, Khoklov, or any variant of that name. Yet if she had been an authentic daughter of Rurik, would that have made any difference to Picasso? In those days perhaps it might: at the age of thirty-six he knew little or nothing of the great world; he was still absurdly young in many ways and the unknown is often much the same as the wonderful.
Picasso: A Biography Page 30