In his Completa y verídica historia de Picasso y el cubismo and elsewhere Gomez de la Serna dwells upon Picasso’s essential Spanishness. “In the great nation of the Gypsies of art, Picasso is the most Gypsy of them all. You have to understand Spain to know how rugged, blasphemous, and ungovernable is the background from which he springs,” he says, though it must be admitted that his words sound nobler and more convincing in Spanish. And in another place he speaks of “the Spanish Moor crossed with the Moorish Christian yet never losing what he inherits from the Roman citizen or the unfathomable Iberian: four genes in the foundation of his being, fighting and stimulating one another.”
But Olga had no notion of being a Gypsy’s mort nor of sleeping in damp grassy lanes; she had had enough of the ballet’s version of Bohemia and she meant to lead an entirely different life from this time on.
She suited well enough with Picasso’s newer acquaintance such as Eugenia Errazuriz and those from Cocteau’s world; or at least they were willing to accept her as Picasso’s necessary accompaniment. But she dismayed some of his older friends and angered others. When Alice Derain said, “The first time I saw her I took her for a maid-servant; she was a plain little woman with freckles all over her face,” she may not have been wholly candid, for others speak of Olga’s beautiful skin, but she was certainly expressing a sincere and probably mutual dislike. The men were naturally more tolerant or more discreet, and although both Apollinaire and Max Jacob had long practiced the cutting remark, they did not leave any harsh judgment of Olga upon record.
In any case, Apollinaire was too busy and it is to be hoped too happy to demolish his friends. Although 1918 began with an attack of pneumonia, it had all the appearance of being a most auspicious year for him. Not only was he in love again, this time with the red-headed nurse who had looked after him both at the time of his wound and of his illness and for whom he wrote his poem “La Jolie Rousse,” but he also brought out his Mamelles de Tirésias, damned as a play, praised as a book, and his second important collection of poems, Calligrammes, which was received with great applause. And then on May 2, with Picasso and Vollard as his witnesses, he married his jolie rousse: Jacqueline Kolb was her name. It is true that he was engaged at the time to Madeleine Pages; but she was in another country and he had made his offer long ago; and it did not seem to affect his happiness. With death so near, and in these days of the great Ludendorff offensive when every morning had a casualty-list with thousands of names in it, men married easily.
Three months later Apollinaire, Cocteau, and Max Jacob took turns in the arm-breaking duty of holding crowns over the heads of the servant of God Pablo and the servant of God Olga as they stood before the altar of the cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky in Paris amid a cloud of incense while the deep-basses of the choir intoned the Old Slavonic liturgy and the bearded priest married them. In the Orthodox service the couple walk round the altar three times, returning to the carpet in front; and among the Russians it is believed that the first to set foot on this carpet will have the upper hand throughout the marriage. It does not seem that Picasso was ever warned that he should mind his step.
But the sorrow and woe that is in marriage did not affect the Picassos immediately. They spent their honeymoon at Madame Errazuriz’ splendid villa in Biarritz, and if one may judge by his work Picasso was thoroughly happy. He was only some twenty miles from Spain, almost as far from the war as he could possibly be in France, and in those days of unlimited servants his patron’s wealth had full scope to show him just how comfortable a certain kind of life could be.
Happiness in Picasso released his natural generosity, which was sometimes repressed by the more unfortunate sides of his often tormented and always complex temperament—by extreme susceptibility, secretiveness, odd fits of parsimony, and possessiveness—as well as by sadness imposed from without, and when he wrote to Gertrude Stein to announce his marriage he sent her a wedding-present, a watercolor of a guitar, as well as a photograph of the new portrait of Olga that he had painted at Montrouge, a large, naturalistic picture of her holding a fan and sitting in an armchair whose bold flower pattern is worked out with all the painstaking care of a Rousseau: a puzzling “fashionable” portrait, in which the sitter looks so like a stubborn doll that one wonders whether Picasso was making game of her, of himself, of that kind of painting, or whether connubial bliss had blinded him for the moment. In his letter he used the expression une vraie jeune fille, which in French usage means a virgin; even now the Mediterranean way of life sets what might be considered an exaggerated and even an unhealthy value on this state, and if Picasso’s vraie jeune fille is to be taken at its face value it would account for part of his esteem for his wife. The esteem was real and lasting; and another part of it derived from his opinion of her talents in society and as a hostess: some observers thought her pushing, too obviously ambitious, and even histrionic, as though she were over-acting a part that did not naturally belong to her; but Picasso, who in any case possessed little social discrimination, having had no training in it during his youth and having no use for it in his later days, was impressed. Very late in his life, after all the horrors of separation and long-drawn-out wrangling, he could still say to an old Catalan friend who had known Olga during their marriage, “She really was a lady, wasn’t she?”
At Biarritz, apart from decorating Madame Errazuriz’ walls with cheerful scenes calculated to give her pleasure, he made some astonishing drawings, astonishing not only for their virtuosity but even more because they show him breaking out into yet another form of expression: one of these is a composition of at least a dozen figures—young women on a beach—a linear drawing, all contours, far more like Ingres than the realistic drawings of the year before: Ingres in the subtle disproportion, more than Ingres in the pure delicacy of line. At the same time he painted another group of women by the sea, these in bathing costumes, employing a completely different manner; and here the beach is strewn with those isolated, strangely significant stones that the Surrealists were soon to use so very often. Then again in this same year he finished a Cubist “Femme en corset” that he had begun in 1914 and he painted still another strictly Cubist guitar, close cousin to the one he gave to Gertrude Stein, but much larger and painted in oils with a good deal of sand mixed in. Looking back still farther he remembered the peasant of his Gósol composition and used him again for a half-naked fisherman carrying his catch in a broad flat basket on his head: and these are only a few examples of the work he did in each of these different idioms.
Biarritz is not the Mediterranean, but it can be warm there, and the Atlantic sweeps the beach clean twice a day, leaving wonderful shapes lying on the low-tide sand. He enjoyed himself: there were quantities of Madame Errazuriz’ friends and acquaintances, many of whom he drew, and they were far more cheerful than holidaymakers had been in France these last three years, for the war was going well. It seemed that there might be some end to the bloody nightmare at last: in July Mangin’s great tank offensive drove the Germans back, capturing thirty thousand of them; in August the British stormed the Siegfried Line; and in September Pershing took the field with six hundred thousand Americans. Picasso was not directly concerned—his country lay to the south—but their happiness added greatly to his.
Among the summer visitors was Paul Rosenberg, Léonce’s brother, with his family. At this time Picasso was not tied to any one dealer: Paul Guillaume, for example, had shown both him and Matisse earlier in the year, with a preface to the catalog by Apollinaire. Paul Rosenberg had been brought up to the trade by his father, an important dealer, and he was in a large way of business: a thoroughly able merchant with a harder head and perhaps a harder heart than his brother, who had kept Gris and the minor Cubists alive. He came to an arrangement with Picasso, and for many years he handled much of the painter’s work.
In Picasso’s view, a dealer owed many duties to a painter apart from selling his pictures; and just as in 1912 he had called upon Kahnweiler to move him from the bo
ulevard de Clichy so he now desired Rosenberg to find him a more suitable dwelling than the house in Montrouge. Rosenberg saw the relationship in the same light, and when he returned to Paris in the autumn Picasso was the tenant of a flat in the rue de la Boëtie, quite a grand street that runs into the Champs-Elysées.
It was a fine spacious flat on the sixth floor with a splendid view over the roofs of Paris to the distant Eiffel Tower; but it was not spacious enough for two such strong and divergent temperaments—they disagreed almost from the start. Happily the flat above was vacant, the top floor, Picasso’s natural habitat, and he took that too, turning its five rooms into a desolation of his own: not so much a studio as it is ordinarily understood as an interconnecting series of little echoing deserts, their death as rooms made even more emphatic by the remaining marble fireplaces with their pier-glasses above. This was quite a good arrangement for a semidetached couple, and it worked for a long time. Picasso had been there for fifteen years when Brassaï first went to see him:
I had expected an artist’s studio, and this was a flat turned into a glory-hole … four or five rooms emptied of their ordinary furniture and filled with stacks of pictures, heaps of cardboard boxes, parcels, bundles (mostly containing moulds of his sculpture), piles of books, packets of paper, miscellaneous objects higgledy-piggledy on the floor along the walls, covered with a deep layer of dust. The doors of these rooms were open, or perhaps they had even been taken off their hinges; and this turned the whole great flat into a single workshop, broken up into a number of separate compartments for the painter’s many activities. You walked on a dull, stained parquet, long starved of wax and covered with a carpet of cigarette-ends.....Picasso had set up his easel in the largest, best-lit room, which was the only one that had a few scraps of furniture in it—no doubt it had once been the drawing-room. Madame Picasso never came up into this flat. Picasso admitted no one at any time, apart from a few friends. And the dust could fall and gather as it pleased, never dreading the servant’s feather brush.…
Long before Brassaï saw the studio, Picasso had drawn it, or at least a corner of one of the rooms; and although this is a somewhat idealized study, showing three of the palettes that he never used except as symbols, it is clear that as early as 1920 the tide had reached something near high-water-mark: the pictures leaning against the wall, against one another, on easels or on a Spanish chair, already made it impossible for anyone but the nimble Picasso to thread his way among them without knocking something down.
But in November, 1918, these rooms were gaunt and bare: the fiat, particularly Olga’s white salon and the other deeply respectable parts of her domain, were not yet ready. The Picassos waited for the workmen’s inevitable delays in the grand, new, and expensive Hôtel Lutetia. In spite of the victory and the imminent armistice, joy flooding through the streets of Paris, Picasso was sad and worried, for Guillaume Apollinaire was seriously ill with the Spanish influenza that swept Europe at the end of the war like a plague. Picasso hated illness; he was terrified of it, and this influenza was extremely infectious. Yet he and Olga spent the evening of November 9th by Apollinaire’s bedside.
Perhaps he did not expect Apollinaire to die: a man of thirty-nine, even one so badly wounded and brought so low, might very well survive a bout of flu. In any case he was shocked when the news was telephoned to him; terribly shocked and terribly grieved. He was standing in front of the bathroom mirror at the time, and he was either shaving or drawing a self-portrait—the accounts differ. But in either event he saw mortality reflected in his own features. He had drawn or painted them ever since he was a child; and whether the pictures were self-exploration or another kind of exercise altogether, they form a fascinating series, and anyone who values Picasso’s work must regret that from that moment on there were none or very, very few.
“Picasso has painted no self-portrait for many years,” wrote Antonina Vallentin in 1957. “When I asked him the reason he said, ‘If mirrors did not exist I should not know my age,’ and gestured towards his deeply-lined face in explanation.… I asked him the date of his last. Without hesitating he answered, ‘The day Guillaume Apollinaire died.’”
It was not only Picasso who was so deeply affected: a great many people had admired Apollinaire as a poet and had loved him as a man: on November 12 Max Jacob wrote to Rene Fauchois:
Within a few hours of each other I received the news of your wife’s concert and of my poor friend’s death. You will have seen in the papers that we have lost Guillaume Apollinaire from pneumonia and perhaps a heart-attack. I watch night after night by all that remains of him. We spent hours enough laughing together for me to pass some hours now weeping by his side.
I tell you all this—and it is a poor description of my heart—so that you will not be surprised if I do not come on Thursday. I tell you truly, neither my friends’ successes nor the victorious triumph of France can revive what this death has withered in me forever. I had not known he was my life to that degree.
I feel that somewhere there is something broken. If I were a little less numbed it would seem to me that it was I who was the corpse.
Picasso had expressed his grief when Casagemas died; he expressed it again in the anguished “La Danse” when he lost Ramon Pichot (though long estranged) in 1925. But no specific picture marks the death of Eva nor that of Apollinaire. Did he feel them too deeply? It may be that of all the languages he had at his command none was adequate.
Certainly the poet’s death marked him as few things had done: it may also be described as a turning-point in his career. Not indeed as an obvious crisis that set off the past very sharply from the future but rather as a date that most decisively marked the gradual change in his pattern of life. The loss of Apollinaire was the loss of one of Picasso’s few strong links with a time of the most intense and exalting struggle. Max Jacob was still there, but like so many close, long-standing relationships their friendship was a complex matter and hidden resentments, odd rancors, and unresolved tensions formed part of it, the more so because of Jacob’s some-what exclusive and jealous temper and his comparative lack of success: at this time it was badly strained. Braque and Derain were gone almost as far as Apollinaire. They had lived in a dimension that no neutral civilian could possibly understand to the full, and although this was not the direct cause of the coldness between Braque and Picasso it had a strong and undoubted influence. The direct cause seems to have been their long-masked incompatibility and some plain jealousy, and the immediate pretext talebearing by common friends; but five years earlier not even such a wounding remark as “Braque is only Madame Picasso” would have set them apart. There was no open, lasting break; they were civil when they met; but after so very close an intimacy, so unparalleled a collaboration, politeness must have been painful indeed. And of course their work diverged, so that presently not even the most uninformed spectator could wonder whether he were looking at a Picasso or a Braque.
Fernande and Eva were gone; they were replaced by a woman from a completely different world. And although minor figures from the heroic days of Cubism survived by the score, even by the hundred, not many of them came to the rue La Boëtie. Far more important, the heroic days themselves were gone. The victory had been won.
By the time of Guillaume Apollinaire’s death Picasso was just over thirty-seven, the age of Raphael, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec at theirs. If he too had died his reputation as a revolutionary would have been as high as it is now: perhaps more than any man he had overthrown the academy, and by 1918 everything that flowed from that revolution was well in train. The new vision, the new freedom, the benign anarchy, or what Apollinaire called I’esprit nouveau, had spread far beyond the few studios in Montmartre and Montparnasse where it was conceived; the Cubists’ name was Legion, Dada had already made its appearance, Surrealism was not far away. The twin worlds of art and anti-art were now in permanent revolution; there was no longer any need for heroic figures and in fact no man to be compared with Picasso, Matisse, and Braq
ue has emerged since those days.
It has been said that Picasso has few followers among the young, that he is not an influential figure; and in a narrow sense it is true: a painter who destroys all rules, all requirements except for that of genius, integrity, and vision cannot have many followers; but all those who have come after him walk in a post-Picasso world, as he did himself from at least 1918.
From this time onwards he repeatedly revolutionized his own painting, drawing, and sculpture; but these were personal revolutions, since by definition he could not throw down what was already laid in ruins.
For the moment his private revolution consisted of an approach to a new colossal style, a mannerism in which the figures swell to gigantic proportions and which was soon to merge with some aspects of his neoclassical period: but at the same time he carried on with his Cubist pictures, some as taut and severe as any yet painted in this synthetic phase, though never as impersonal and ascetic as the pale canvases of the high days of analysis; others so relaxed that their Cubism seems one element among many others rather than the full expression of his mind. Many are variations on that continually-recurring theme of a window giving on to a balcony with the sea and sky beyond: he painted such pictures at intervals throughout his life, and it is surely significant that in the early days of his attachment to Françhíse Gilot he likened their relationship to “a window that is opening.” Then, as if he and Henri Rousseau had left something unsaid that haunted his mind, he turned to some curious little landscapes and interiors that might be called wholly representational if it were not for their dream-like quality. He also made more of those extraordinarily accomplished drawings that had so shocked Montparnasse in 1915. One is of Olga receiving guests at the rue La Boëtie: Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Clive Bell, all wearing spats and sitting prim, polite, and uneasy in chairs poised on the edge of a curious deep step in the drawing-room; there is no sign whatever of Picasso’s presence except for a fiddle on the wall reflected in the looking-glass, not a single heap of filth anywhere in that neat, comfortless apartment. Another shows a most elegant Diaghilev in a top-hat standing by the fat, wary, cynical lawyer who looked after the interests of a wealthy American backer. The Ballets Russes were back in Europe: they reached London just before the end of the war, and Diaghilev was preparing new works for the particularly brilliant season of 1919; one of these was Le Tricorne, and as Martínez Sierra’s libretto was set in his native Spain, while the music was written by the Andalusian Manuel de Falla, Picasso was the obvious choice for the scenery and costumes.
Picasso: A Biography Page 32