Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  One apparently trivial point about these pictures is that the fiddle-playing harlequin holds his bow in his left hand: he may of course have been a left-handed harlequin, but as I have said before Picasso was never good at telling the difference between the sides, and in many of his self-portraits between 1902 and 1918 his forelock falls over his right eye, whereas all the photographs show it drooping over the other, just as it does in Max Jacob’s and Modigliani’s portraits of him: far be it from a layman to say what effect this uncertainty may have had on Picasso, but it seems that the sense of handedness is an important factor in perception, helpful but at the same time limiting, and that freedom from it may perhaps enlarge one’s powers.

  The two versions of the “Musicians” were the most important Cubist pictures of 1921, although the brilliant “Chien et coq” ran them close. For some people they are the most important pictures of that year without qualification and indeed of many years on either side of 1921; yet on the other hand it can be argued that the “Musicians” look back to earlier achievements, whereas the neo-classical figures, though less striking and to certain appetites less satisfying, look towards the Picasso yet to come.

  Of these no doubt the finest is the “Trois Femmes à la fontaine,” a monumental canvas that looks much larger than its six and a half by five and a half feet; it was the outcome of a great deal of thought and of many preliminary drawings and sketches in pastel and oils, a surprising number even for Picasso, who never spared himself when he knew that a great composition was forming in his head or heart. In these studies he arranged his three women in different positions and different relationships to one another; and when finally they fell into what now seems their necessary, inevitable, and effortless sequence, he took great pains with the smaller parts that were to make up the whole. At intervals during the last year or so, and at Fontainebleau itself, his interest in hands had received a fresh impulse, and he had made precise, realistic drawings of his own: now he turned to those for his three women.

  Some of the larger studies are complex and highly-detailed, particularly those which show reminiscences of Pompeii: but Picasso said himself, “in my case a picture is a sum of destructions,” and as the definitive version of the “Trois Femmes” took shape all the pleasant but unessential inventions disappeared, together with most of the Hellenistic echoes. The hands took on massive dimensions, devoid of apparent grace—fat hands with sausage-like fingers, three hands at the heart of the picture, around which all the rest is organized. The three women sit, stand, or lean about a source of water, a little piped jet coming from a rock: with her open palm one idly guides the stream into a pitcher that another holds with one finger hooked through its ear, while a third stands by with hers. Their arms and their short, columnar necks match their hands; so do their massive, pale terra-cotta bodies. The women do not look at one another; they do not converse. Their large bovine eyes gaze far away, but it is doubtful whether they see anything. Although the water flows they do not even seem to be waiting, but rather to be content with existing, motionless and outside time.

  These however were not the women who were expecting the Picassos when they returned to Paris: hostesses who wish to cultivate the latest values are necessarily poised on the utmost limit of advancing time as they perceive it. Far from damaging his reputation, the large number of Cubist Picassos thrown θnto the market had increased it: most of them had stayed in France—there were few foreign buyers at the Uhde and Kahnweiler sales—and because of the low prices men like Breton, Tristan Tzara, Eluard, and others very much in the foreground had been able to buy them. Incidentally, the low prices did not last as far as Picasso was concerned: Paul Rosenberg saw to it that his current work sold at such rates that there was not the least difficulty in keeping up the establishment at the rue La Boëtie.

  People who buy a painter’s work often wish to know him, and they often feel that their purchase gives them a right to do so: Picasso was therefore in even greater demand. Furthermore, in the course of 1922 he began work on the settings for Cocteau’s version of the Antigone, and this brought him into contact with the theatrical world and with even more of Cocteau’s innumerable grand friends. If he had chosen to do so he could have dined out every night of the week, and with his prodigious energy he often did choose.

  Some artists have been killed or sterilized by activity of this kind: others, like Picasso (a born night-bird) and Proust, have survived it very well—have survived it that is to say as artists—for physically poor Proust was a wreck by 1922, although he was only ten years older than the painter, whom he was invited to meet that spring. The occasion was a supper party given by Mr. and Mrs. Schiff, a wealthy English pair, after the first night of Stravinsky’s Renard: Diaghilev and his dancers were there as well as a host of other people, but the splendor of the evening was to be the appearance of the four men of genius the Schiffs most admired, Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, and James Joyce. The party and the unfortunate encounters between Proust and Stravinsky on the one hand and Proust and James Joyce on the other (Joyce “could not see any special talent” in Proust and Proust said, “I regret I do not know Monsieur Joyce’s work”) are described in George Painter’s definitive Life; here I am concerned with giving an example of Picasso’s social experience and with Proust’s earlier reactions to him, which I quote from the same valuable book. “In a letter to Walter Berry in 1917 Proust pointed out the affinity between prehistoric cave-painting and the art of Picasso. ‘Picasso is an artist whose work and person are by no means unknown to me,’ he declared to Blanche in 1919; and in his preface to Jacques-Emile Blanche’s De David à Degas he wrote of ‘the great and admirable Picasso, who had concentrated all Cocteau’s features into a portrait of such noble rigidity that, when I contemplate it, even the most enchanting Carpaccios in Venice tend to take a second place in my memory.’” Picasso’s views on Joyce, by the way, are contained in a remark to Gertrude Stein. “Yes, Braque and James Joyce, they were the incomprehensibles whom anyone can understand.” But the words were uttered at a time when he was vexed with Braque, and they probably did not represent his considered opinion of Joyce if indeed he had one, which is unlikely.

  At this time Picasso was a kind if not an uxorious husband, and in the summer of 1922 he gave up the Midi and agreed to take Olga and Paulo to the fashionable resort of Dinard. It is just in Brittany, on the Channel coast opposite St. Malo, a pleasant little place with a fine beach, charming when the sky is clear; but unfortunately Brittany is the cloudiest, wettest province in the whole of France, and even when the sun does pierce through it cannot blaze with the ardor of the south. Still, at that time Dinard did possess two casinos and quantities of grand hotels with palm courts, orchestras, and dance-bands for the rainy days; and these and the company satisfied most of the people who went there.

  Picasso’s good nature or good humor or happiness (an artist in full flow is often kind) bore up against the rain; his powers of concentration enabled him to work in spite of all the inconveniences of a summer villa, a child cutting its teeth and bawling, a socially-active wife, and a number of acquaintances in the little town. Besides, it did not rain every day: he painted at least one sunny little view of Dinard, looking out over the sparkling water to the steepled church on the other side, and others of St. Malo; and there were many drawings that show the place both clear and dry. He also painted some women and children, including one particularly gentle maternity, in which the mother, though still massive, is no longer carved from ponderous stone, and in which the kind pink and gray has the warmth of the Rose Period, a tendency that spread to many other pictures of this time. But most of his work that summer was Cubist still-lives, sometimes in the direct tradition, sometimes in what has been called the zebra manner, with stripes lying across and across a plane of color, not so much to variegate the texture as to affect the light that emanates from it. There were twenty or thirty of these, nearly all of the conventional Cubist glasses, bottles, tobacco, or cigarette packets, and m
any restrained in color, almost monochromatic. Others are as brilliant as can be, and one of the most cheerful shows the familiar open window, so wide that it cannot be seen at all, and the inevitable balcony and table; and on the table there are some fishes, lying on a piece of paper: painted paper, not papier collé. Why did the collages dwindle away? They certainly had not reached the end of their road. Picasso himself wondered, and some appeared in 1924.

  If one may judge by his painting, the holiday at Dinard was happy right up to the end: but the end was both premature and sudden. Olga fell ill. Had she eaten the fish? Probably not, since it was the surgeon’s knife rather than the physician’s draught that cured her; and in any case Picasso’s family no longer sat yearning, as once the little Matisses had sat, until an edible subject, sometimes showing desperate signs of age, was at last committed to paint.

  Sir Roland Penrose, my only authority for this episode, states that Picasso “was obliged to rush her to Paris, nursing her with ice-packs on the journey, while little Paulo was violently car-sick all the way.” I am sure Sir Roland’s account is exact: I am equally sure that if Picasso had time for reflection it would have occurred to him that the common lot was more attractive from a distance; that it was not at all suitable for a painter; that the entrance-fee to the community was far too high, the price for being an insider excessive. Yet if these thoughts did in fact come to him, they remained deep in his consciousness for the time, finding no outward expression for some years.

  Back in his studio, which was filled with things that might come in useful, he took a wooden panel, only about seventeen inches wide, and on it he made a tempera painting of two of his tremendous women, wildly distorted as they race across a beach, hair and bosoms flying, hands clasped high. They can scarcely have been a memory of Dinard, but as he painted them he may already have had some notion of using these giantesses, gigantically enlarged, for the theater curtain that they were eventually to become—the curtain for Diaghilev’s 1924 production of Cocteau’s old Train bleu.

  Even on the little panel the women are enormous: without being in the least obese they would tip an earthly scale at fifteen stone, and although they advance at this breakneck pace they do not seem to get much farther: in spite of the outstretched arms, the streaming locks, they share much of their sisters’ immobility. This may have something to do with the fact that their faces are directed to the beholder’s right. There is a theory, supported by much research, that our perception assumes figures facing leftwards to be in actual or potential motion and those facing right to be static. Perhaps Picasso, aware of this, meant his two women to run forever, never gaining an inch; or perhaps his own confusion of left and right was at the bottom of it all. In any case he had a particular affection for the little panel, and it joined the collection of his own Picassos, those that he would never part with.

  Cocteau and Cocteau’s version of the classical world and its pieties were much in his mind during the later part of 1922. Like Picasso and a great many other people after the war, the poet looked back to the ancient values, not so much abandoning modernity as giving it a classical ballast; and his Antigone, which brought the great Sophoclean tragedy down to a single act, was now in brisk preparation. The formidable, and fashionable. Coco Chanel was providing the costumes, Honegger the incidental music, and Picasso the stark decor. He was helped or hindered by the author, whose demoniac energy was almost equal to his own and who was now in a state of more than usual excitement, having met the young, death-bent Raymond Radiguet sometime before at Max Jacob’s flat. This excitement may account for the fact that within hours of the first night Picasso was confronted with a stage on which nothing was ready except the masks that he had prepared: they hung on either side of a hole high in a blue back-drop with a white wooden panel beneath them. What he was required to do, as Cocteau records, was to make use of this surface “to bring to mind a hot sunny day,” anything else, authentic or not, being too costly, above all in time. He walked to and fro upon the stage, then began to rub the rough white boards with a stick of sanguine: they assumed the appearance of marble. Then, holding a bottle of ink, he swept out some masterly lines: and then “all at once he blackened a few blank places and three columns started into sight. Their appearance was so sudden, so astonishing, that we all burst out clapping.”

  In its way this was a “Picasso miracle,” but it was scarcely on the scale of the one that had so surprised Stravinsky.

  When the play was presented at the Théâtre de I’Atelier just before Christmas it had the success guaranteed by the names of those concerned and the great number of friends they could bring to their support; but no more than that. Yet it was by no means a failure, and it did not disgust Picasso with the stage: indeed, not long after he undertook the scenery and costumes for Mercure, an enterprise of his and Cocteau’s wealthy, sociable, ballet-loving friend Count Etienne de Beaumont, one of the leaders of the “artistic” social world of the twenties.

  In tracing Picasso’s progress, it is often convenient to concentrate on his summer holidays, for it was more often in the south than in Paris that he could find the solitude he needed, to say nothing of the sun; and often it was in the south that he took his new departures, working them out in more detail when he went back to Paris.

  When one knows Picasso’s views on the want of evolution in his painting, the word progress seems out of place; but here it is used in the sense of sequence in time rather than any advance towards a goal—of a king’s rather than a pilgrim’s progress. And at first glance solitude seems equally inappropriate when it is used in connection with Picasso, to whom company was often the breath of life—almost any company at times—and who was so often to be seen in a crowd. Yet solitude was necessary to him, not only because he was an essentially lonely man, requiring the two extremes and often disliking both, but because of his work. Some men can work in a noise with people all around them: many French authors do their writing in cafés; Satie composed the music for Parade in the café-tabac of the place Denfert-Rochereau; and it was in a series of Italian cafés that Scott-Moncrieff translated Proust. But Picasso was not one of them. “Nothing can be done without solitude,” he said to A. Tériade; and to Salles, “I have to live my work, and that is impossible without solitude.” Admittedly he said these things later—the conversation with Tériade probably took place in 1931—and perhaps the need grew more apparent as his enormous energy diminished a little, but it was always there; and in 1923 he set out to find his solitude at Antibes.

  Before he left he had many things to do, and one of them was to give an interview to Marius de Zayas for the New York review The Arts. America had not yet seen much of Picasso’s work, but what had been shown had excited a great deal of interest, and everybody concerned with modern art knew that he was one of the most important figures in Europe. The interview was long; it covered Picasso’s opinions on research in art (invalid); on art as a lie that reveals truth; on nature and art (mutually exclusive); Cubism; and evolution; and it was carried out in Spanish. Zayas condensed the dialogue into a series of direct statements, showed them to Picasso for his approval, and then translated them into painstaking, rather formal English. The whole, amounting to some two thousand words, is to be found in Alfred Barr’s Picasso: Fifty Years of his Art, a most scholarly analysis of his work up until 1945. In an earlier chapter I quoted some passages to show what Cubism meant to Picasso: here I draw upon the same source for his views on progress, or rather on evolution.

  I also often hear the word evolution. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than ever it was. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression. When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me th
at they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they are all images in different planes.

  Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.

  The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting. All I have ever made was made for the present and with the hope that it will always remain in the present. I have never taken into consideration the spirit of research. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or of the future. I do not believe I have used radically different elements in the different manners I have used in painting. If the subjects I have wanted to express have suggested different ways of expression I have never hesitated to adopt them. I have never made trials nor experiments. Whenever I had something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said. Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress, but an adaptation of the idea one wants to express and the means to express that idea.