Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  Some of Picasso’s words in this interview, particularly those on research, are flatly contradicted by other remarks of his; but upon the whole this seems to be a most considered statement of his views, and it is one that he made to a friend of many years standing who neither irritated him nor tempted him to be paradoxical.

  While he was still in Paris it is probable that he etched “La Source,” and possible that he made the lithographs called “La Coiffure” and “La Couronne de fleurs,” in all of which the slender forms, the graceful and indeed pretty lines of a more conventional neo-classicism make a strong contrast with the sculptural women of his painting. His drawing, his painting, and his social activities had left him little time for engraving or lithography, but he had abandoned neither, and in these last few years he had produced a score of plates, some of them portraits of Olga, Radiguet, and Paul Valéry; others, like the four lithographs published by Marius de Zayas in 1921, of fairly slender classical figures by the sea, with some beautiful horses. Although he began exact dating at least as early as the studies of his hands at Fontainebleau, he was not yet consistent, and much of this work cannot certainly be assigned to any one season nor even to any one year. Yet the general picture remains: that of a less ponderous neo-classicism making its appearance in drawing, lithography, and etching well before it does so in paint.

  Cap d’Antibes, the peninsula that runs out into the Mediterranean between Juan-les-Pins arid Antibes, was then almost deserted: a few hotels and villas had sprung up, and the vogue for the Riviera in summer was just beginning, but Antibes itself was still essentially a fishing-village, and what industry it had was based on scent from the cultivated fields of flowers and from the aromatic herbs and bushes that grew all over the rocky headland and the wild country farther from the sea. It is difficult to imagine now, when one is faced with the flood of concrete, the aspiring urban towers, and the hordes of campers bathing cheek by jowl in a polluted soup to the sound of a million transistors while coaches deliver fresh swarms of pale Teutonic flesh to join the tight-packed sweating mass; but it must once have been a paradise. Picasso was happy there, much of the time: the sun poured its energy into him, and at intervals of bathing, eating, and talking with friends, he drew and painted a large number of serene and comely women, many harlequins and saltimbanques, and both Pan and people playing pan-pipes. The women are well-covered (he hated them skinny) but they are no longer massive and their faces are often pretty: most are still more or less classical, at least in their drapery, though the nudes might belong to any age. The saltimbanques never really belonged to our time, and although some of them now take on an eighteenth-century air, particularly the deliberately sentimental “Saltim-banque assis avec canne,” often known as “The Sigh,” others retain their timelessness and come close to merging with the equally timeless pipe-players in what can be called a classical world: though there is a good case for calling it a world that has always existed and that is still to be seen by the seeing eye around the Mediterranean.

  One of these pan-pipe pictures, too outstanding to be really typical, is a big oil of two plump boys on a rampart, seen in conventional perspective, high over the sea: something of the archaic bulk remains in their thick, powerfully modeled bodies, something of the immobility, particularly in the listening figure on the left, but it is no longer stony, and it is tempered with a certain unsentimental grace. They are wearing bathing-trunks and one sits on a block of stone, playing, while the other stands motionless, gazing at nothing with the protuberant eyes that Picasso so often painted in those years. He was very pleased with the picture, which he added to his collection; and it is generally held to be the climax of his classical period.

  It was in connection with these boys that Reverdy wrote, “His characters are splendidly immobile; they are solely plastic; and these are the higher qualities of the entirety of his art. Not a single pose, not a single gesture, is anything but the plastic outcome of the means brought into play. Never a head, body, or hand whose position and shape is anything other than an element whose unique purpose is to add to the expressive whole, having no function whatsoever outside the plastic building-up of the picture.” I do not quote this to mock Reverdy, whose words seem to me to be profoundly true in the case of Picasso, but partly to give an example of the flood of hurrah-words, unspecific and meaningless except to those who both know the pictures and agree, and applicable to virtually any painting one admires, that constitute a great deal of the literature on Picasso, especially that part of it written by his poetical friends. Yet the real significance of the quotation is that Picasso liked that kind of writing: and it is, after all, a sign of friendship, that quality he valued so highly.

  At the same time Cubist still-lives accumulated in his studio; and here too in this immensely productive year there was a most important change. The old rigor of the straight edge and the angular plane gives way to soft curves and flat free-form shapes and to flowing lines that sometimes define a given form but that more often envelop it like an irregular cartouche. This change, as it is so often the case, had been heralded by a few minor works as early as 1922, quite apart from the rococo phase; and now it appeared in full force. Some people, either fascinated by the ascetic analytic period, which to many still seems the true high Cubism, or perhaps so conditioned by association that the image of the eponymous cube with its hard angles seems inseparable from the underlying state of mind that produced the pictures, refused to consider these as part of the tradition at all. However, they were comforted from time to time by the reappearance of the rectilinear compositions, often brilliantly colored, that they were used to.

  On another plane, one perhaps less important in the history of art but equally significant in the history of the man, are the many pictures of his family. Señora de Ruiz came to stay with them at Cap d’Antibes, and he painted a portrait of which any mother would be proud and of which no painter would be ashamed, although it was obviously meant to give pleasure to one formed in another age. It is the picture of a dignified middle-aged woman with a fine carriage of her head; her face is set in kindness, but her large black eyes state that she is not to be trifled with. Her son’s eyes, by the way, though they are usually described as black, and although they certainly gave that impression, were in fact dark brown: their strange compelling quality and their apparent blackness may have come from their curiously dilated pupils, which even in strong sunlight were as wide as a cat’s by night.

  And he often drew and painted little Paulo: the boy was now two, walking about and talking better French than either of his parents—his grandmother spoke not a word. Earlier in the year Picasso had made a pastel of him, wearing woolen drawers and clasping a wooden horse: now, copying from a photograph, he painted him sitting nervously on a donkey, still thickly dressed, with a white bonnet: the hairy donkey and the child with the pure lines of his infant face belong to different worlds, both agreeable. Picasso also painted his son in vermilion slippers, drawing at a low table; and the child’s apparently non-figurative drawings bear a strong resemblance to those his father was to make next year. There are some pictures of Olga as well: one, a pastel, shows her looking particularly sullen; and in this case the likeness can scarcely have been meant to please.

  Perhaps it is no more than coincidence, but 1923 also produced another departure, a picture of three women by the sea, three nudes; and looking at them no one could think of Tanagra nor of Attic grace. One lies on her back, her vast body filling the foreground and her tiny head resting on her hand; another stands with one leg high on a rock and the other, immensely long and ending in a great flat foot, planted on the sand; the third is rushing into the sea. She is so wildly foreshortened that her massive legs are still on the shore while her pinlike head is already a great way off.

  For some this picture is four-dimensional, the running figure’s elongation being an elongation in time as well as in space; for others it is a skit on the bathers of Cézanne, Renoir, and Matisse. But may it not be the
forerunner of the monstrous distortions of the female body that were to appear (or to reappear, when one thinks of the “Demoiselles” and some other pictures) in his work a few years later—a savage twisting of forms for which at other times he could show such tender love? As well as the ordinary intermittences du coeur, there are periods when most men hate women, seeing them as eaters of their life, as the enemy. Certainly most creative men, who require, and sometimes receive, an exceptional degree of freedom, kindness, and abnegation. The toothed vulva is an image to be found in all ages and all countries; and what adolescent boy has not heard tales of lovers being broken, mutilated, or swallowed up entirely? No simple cause can explain the strength of this emotion, the dark side of the sexual drive; but some part of it may have to do with the resentful acknowledgment of the enemy’s indispensability, a resentment all the more furious the greater the male’s vitality: and who was more masculine and vital than Picasso? Latent homosexuality is often put forward as a deep-lying factor, as well as a host of others, including the fact that in a man’s citilization many women are bores out of bed and often in it; and it is surely unnecessary to mention domestic disagreement as an immediate cause, the obvious and apparently rational catalyst that sets the whole complex series of reactions in motion.

  Even without this deep revulsion the war between the sexes can be bitter enough, and from daily conflict of interest alone many a loving relationship has ended in hatred: but when the two are combined the results can be spectacular indeed, especially if they are expressed by a man with a perfect command of his medium. Friendship is a somewhat different matter, though it would be a bold writer who presumed to trace the dividing-line; and as it is usually far less intense, so in case of shipwreck it ends in indifference rather than in flaming disaster.

  The particular new friendship of this summer did in fact come to an unhappy end some twenty years later, when Breton found that he could not approve of Picasso’s attitude during the war; but on the whole Picasso kept his friends. Although he had a very difficult character this was a relationship for which he was peculiarly gifted, so much so that he had many true and deeply affectionate friendships with women, which is more than most men can say.

  In 1923 Breton was twenty-seven, a striking, leonine young man with a considerable reputation as a poet. He and Picasso liked one another at once, and very soon Breton’s portrait joined that remarkable gallery which, if it were collected together, would show so many of the really interesting men of the first part of the century: the fifteen years between them made no difference, for until physical age forced itself upon his notice Picasso paid little attention to the passing of the calendar years; and even then it did not prevent him from making immediate, direct, and wholly human contact with people of other generations: he was a perpetual contemporary.

  It is odd that they should not have known one another earlier, since they had many friends in common, some of whom Breton had met as far back as 1917, when Reverdy founded the review Nord-Sud, which Apollinaire. Max Jacob, Aragon, and Breton helped to run; somewhat later he was to be seen in Max Ernst’s picture “Au rendezvous des amis,” together with Chirico, Eluard, Desnos, Arp, and others; and naturally he knew Tristan Tzara.

  I say naturally because Tzara was not only another of Picasso’s friends but also a leading figure among the Dadaists—in fact he was the author of their 1918 Manifesto, no less; and at that time Breton was a Dadaist too. As the sequence of years has been disturbed in these last pages, a backward glance at Dada may restore the order: it might be called an avant-garde artistic movement if garde did not imply some notion of preservation or defense; for the Dadaists did not wish to preserve anything, least of all art as it was generally understood. They were disgusted with the established order; they wished to subvert it; and as far as art was concerned they meant to do away with all existing ideas, replacing the rational by the irrational and divorcing thought from expression. The true parent of Dada was probably Marcel Duchamp with his ready-mades in New York, but it was a group of poets and painters in Zurich, all somewhat anarchistical and most of them refugees from the war, who gave the movement its name (they opened a Petit Larousse and settled for the first word they chanced upon), worked out its manifesto, published a review, and opened a gallery. The review reproduced works by Picasso and Modigliani; the gallery showed Kandinsky, Klee, Chirico, and Max Ernst.

  As soon as the war was over many Dadaists came to Paris, and they at once began to organize exhibitions and performances, extremely noisy performances that were often broken up by the police. Picasso, perpetually curious, was interested in the movement—he was at one of the meetings at the Théàtre Saint-Michel, where the Dadaists were putting on a kind of anti-play, when the dissident Breton and his followers invaded the stage, and the police arrived to quell the riot—but he was far more interested in the men, several of whom he esteemed.

  In time, however, the Dadaists preceived that the weapon with which they were trying to destroy all forms of morality, political government, memory, logic, literature, the plastic arts, including their most recent forms, and the products of the mind in general was in fact the mind itself: this put them out of countenance—they quarreled, excommunicated one another as heretics, and launched passionate anathemas at their former colleagues. The movement died of its inherent contradictions in 1922, and from its ashes arose the more significant, more positive Surrealism, whose manifesto Breton was to write in 1924.

  Surrealism interested Picasso infinitely more than Dada; more than any of the movements that had preceded it. The Surrealists proclaimed Picasso as their prophet; they reproduced the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” in La Révolution surréaliste; and they pointed to “La Femme en chemise” as an evident precursor of their philosophy. And when the avowed Surrealist painters Chirico, Klee, Ernst, Arp, Miró, and Masson held their first exhibition in Paris they borrowed some Picassos to hang beside their own. Although as a painter Picasso was not a committed Surrealist in the strict sense of the term, nor perhaps in any other, there is no doubt that the Surrealists’ work came very close to his own at times; that he watched the movement with the utmost attention; and that it had an important effect upon his work.

  For the time being, however, he could not turn his full attention to Surrealism. Not only had he a great number of summer ideas to commit to paint on his return to Paris and a show of his works at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery to prepare, but he also had to design the costumes and scenery for another ballet, or rather for a performance that in many ways resembled a ballet.

  This was Mercure, poses plastiques, and it was to be staged by Etienne de Beaumont, with music by Satie and choreography by Massine. The Surrealists, as puritanical as most revolutionaries, disapproved of the ballet as decadent and bourgeois; but even if Picasso could have been prevented from doing what he chose by what other people said, their words would have amounted to nothing compared with the fact that Derain, Braque, and Gris had all entered the same field and that they had done remarkably well. And far more important, Matisse agreed to do the curtain, sets, and costumes for Stravinsky’s Chant du Rossignol. When Picasso heard the news he cried out angrily, “Matisse! What is a Matisse? A balcony with a big red flowerpot falling all over it,”

  Conscious, perhaps, of the Surrealists’ severe and respectable gaze, and certainly aware of his friends’ achievements, he turned to Mercure -with more zeal than to any ballet since Parade; and when in June, 1924, the audience gathered in the theater they beheld neither Naturalism on the curtain nor angular Cubism on the stage, but a new Picasso devoted to the flowing line.

  On the subdued, twilight curtain they saw two familiar figures, a tall white harlequin playing a guitar and a red pierrot playing a fiddle; but they were enveloped rather than defined by undulating continuous curves, and this dynamic line set the key for everything that appeared when the curtain rose to show a totally unfamiliar world. Much of the scenery also flowed, not only figuratively, not only in its line, but in fact: it was m
ade of great free-form shapes that vaguely hinted at the form of the more precise signs inscribed within them or overflowing the borders and drawn with curved, black-painted wire or supple rods. Since the argument of the ballet had to do with the capers of Mercury some of the figures were those of horses, a chariot and so on; they moved not only as entities but also within themselves. The Managers in Parade had walked about and even danced, but this was entirely different—this was more the presence of mobiles, forming not only the setting for the ballet but an integral part of its motion. Night, for example, a woman on a starry bed, swung to and fro.

  It is a pity that so much creative power should have been spent on a libretto that was by all acounts devoid of inspiration if not downright offensive, but Mercure was Picasso’s farewell and it was fitting that he should end his association with the ballet in a blaze of glory before going back to his real and solitary vocation.

  Of relative glory: the public, even the restricted public of the Soirées de Paris (that was the name of Beaumont’s entertainments, and they were charity performances, under the patronage of the President of the Republic, for the benefit of war-widows and the Russian refugees), did not like the ballet as a whole, nor was it a success in later performances; but the setting was admired, and what is more, Picasso’s contribution to Mercure converted the Surrealists. They had begun by disliking the whole idea: during the earlier scenes Breton, Aragon, Soupault, and their friends booed, hissed, and hooted; but they stayed to applaud and the next day they wrote to Paris-Journal to apologize, saying, “We wish to express our profound and total admiration for Picasso, who, despising all sacrosanct convention, has never paused in his perpetual creation of the disquiet, the searching anxiety of our modern days nor in giving it the highest form of expression … Picasso, far beyond his colleagues, is now to be seen as the everlasting incarnation of youth and the unquestionable master of the situation.”