Chapter XIII
MODERNISMO had had a powerful effect on the adolescent Picasso; but Modernismo was an indefinable atmosphere made up of countless different and often contradictory elements rather than a coherent movement. Fauvism too had had its influence, yet here the effect was to bring about a violent reaction; and a lover of paradox could maintain that the true father of Cubism was therefore Matisse. All the other movements of his twenties and thirties had left Picasso untouched; but now Surrealism attracted him as no other had ever done.
Yet before deciding how much Surrealism influenced Picasso and to what extent he was himself a Surrealist, it might be as well to ask whether the question is rightly posed, whether in its plastic aspect Surrealism did not originate with him—whether the Surrealists were not in fact Picas-soites rather than the other way about.
They certainly thought that their aesthetic was exemplified in some of his works. André Breton said, “If Surrealism is to adopt a line of conduct, it has only to pass where Picasso has already passed and where he will pass again.” But what Breton and his friends saw in the “Femme en chemise” for example and what Picasso felt when he was painting it may have been as widely different as their views on what constituted Surrealism.
For Picasso the meaning of the word was much nearer Apollinaire’s: speaking to André Warnod in 1945 he said, “I attempt to observe nature, always. I am intent on resemblance, and resemblance more real than the real, attaining the surreal. It was in this way that I thought of Surrealism,” and Andre Warnod was a very old friend—he had been one of the guests at the banquet to Rousseau. Brassaï was another friend to whom Picasso was likely to open his true mind, and to Brassaï he said, “For my part I always aim at likeness.… For me surreality is nothing else, never has been anything else, than that deep likeness far beyond the shapes and colors of immediate appearance.”
For the Surrealists themselves their movement was at once simpler and far more complex. The simplicity lay in the notion that transcendence could be achieved by deliberately and “scientifically” bringing the subconscious into play and making this the dominant factor rather than the host of infinitely delicate interacting forces set in motion by aesthetic sense, cerebration, keen intelligence, and innumerable other motors including no doubt the subconscious as well, to say nothing of genius; the complexity in the immense apparatus of symbols, things-in-themselves, references, associations, programs, and eroticism that they used according to their abilities in trying to achieve their stated aim of facing the material world with closed eyes, of letting “a certain psychic automatism” take over the controls in order “to set free what lies, unknown to him, in the depths of a man’s mind,” and of consciously trying with all their might to be unconscious.
Obviously the Surrealists were very much in debt to Freud, whose teachings were widely and sometimes accurately diffused by the early twenties; but although these doctrines were of great value to what was primarily an intellectual and literary movement they were of less relevance to the Surrealist painters, for whom in any case the oneiric vision cannot have been so startlingly fresh, since they had before them the example of Bosch, not to mention Signorelli, Arcimboldo, Fuseli, and so many others. And for painters even the explicit theory had nothing particularly new about it, seeing that long before this Redon had said, “Everything is done by a quiet submission to the coming of the unconscious mind,” and Matisse, “You begin painting well when your hand escapes from your head.” Besides, although it is possible to speak, write, and even draw “automatically” with one’s eyes shut, and the more earnest Surrealists really did so, it is much harder to paint, and the painters were at a disadvantage. These handicaps, less evident in the days of Chirico, became obvious in the decline of the movement, when the puerilities of the second generation of Surrealists were little more than illustrations of fabricated, unconvincing dreams, of essentially literary anecdotes as old-fashioned as Art Nouveau.
Not surprisingly in a man who so valued his privacy, Picasso loathed Freud and all his works, maintaining that Freudian psychology was unscientific; nor, although no man was less of a prude, did he care for Freud’s great emphasis on the sexual drive, which also filled the Surrealist pictures with so many symbols.
On the face of it there was a great deal to set Picasso and the Surrealists apart, the most important being a radical difference of vision, and, if the hypothesis of exorcism is correct, a radically different purpose; for whereas in some of his most important pictures Picasso’s aim was surely to cast out a spirit, the Surrealists’ was to call it up; and this they did consciously, to the utmost extent of their powers. “Surrealism’s dearest aim now and in the future must be the artificial reproduction of the ideal moment in which a man is prey to a particular emotion,” said Breton.
Yet Surrealism was also a state of mind, an anarchistic, turbulent, youthful, sanguine, iconoclastic state of mind that matched Picasso’s. He was far too much of an individualist to like the Surrealists’ rigid sectarianism or to put up with the papal role assumed by Breton; but no bull presumed to gore Picasso; the Surrealists treated him with great respect, and he was much attached to the poets, the flower of the movement, Leiris, Eluard, Aragon, Desnos, Soupault. There were times when he was so close to the Surrealists that they could claim him as one of themselves without provoking a denial on his part or incredulity on that of the public.
Even so, their ideas did not yet impinge upon him in their full force, partly because they had not at this time been fully formulated, much less carried into practice, and partly because he was still at the height of his dinner-jacket period.
The dandy had revived, and he wore his dinner-jacket with a difference; for while in those times ordinary men put on a black waistcoat, Picasso girt his evening loins with the old Catalan faixa of his Barcelona days. It is a long strip of cloth, black or red and fringed at the ends, that goes three or four times round one’s waist, giving grateful warmth and support but making it impossible to take one’s trousers off quickly. It is considered a very healthy garment all round the Mediterranean, and on settling in Paris Picasso long retained his, wearing it under his overalls as a protection against the falling damps of Montmartre; but now it shone, a pure ornament, in the dry, well-warmed drawing-rooms of his grander friends. There is a photograph of him wearing his faixa in conjunction with a boiled shirt and black tie under a bullfighter’s embroidered jacket at a great ball given by the Beaumonts in 1924. He stands, straight and proud, between Madame Errazuriz and Olga, who glare rigidly at one another like a pair of angry cats: he seems quite detached.
If he was detached from these two ladies, he was even more so from his former life. Montmartre saw him no more; nor did Saint-Germain-des-Prés, then the great resort of all those who counted in the arts and of far greater numbers who did not but who nevertheless had known Picasso well.
The summer of 1924 found the Picassos at Juan-les-Pins again, but apart from some tall, slim, pretty Graces and some draped standing or sitting figures, poor relations of his water-carriers, the ancient world, Pan, fauns, satyrs, did not make their way into his studio. Indeed, this year was the end, the rather disappointing end, of his neo-classic period as it is ordinarily understood and perhaps of his specifically Italian memories and associations; yet his minotaurs, nymphs, and demi-gods were not far away, and they were to reappear in his work, particularly in his drawings and engravings, every time he came back to the south.
His great achievements during 1924 and the years that followed were big still-lives, full of color: they could be called Cubist, and they retain many of the traditional objects such as guitars, bottles, sheets of music, often set on a table, although synthesis and simultaneity have receded almost as far as the straight line. These most decorative pictures are all curves, a far cry from those he painted twelve years before in a different world: and they are informed by a different spirit, as though Picasso were drawing on a private source of joy, less esoteric and more generally availabl
e, though not necessarily of a lower order.
This source may have been the presence of his son. Paulo seems to have been an entrancing little boy, and Picasso was not the only father to see his first-born as a continuation of himself, a promise of physical immortality, a non omnis moriar with pretty ways: something of great consequence to a man who hates the idea of death.
He painted and drew him; most significantly a large oil of this year shows Paulo dressed as a harlequin; and what is more, from this point on the harlequin, as an important symbol, vanishes from Picasso’s work. The child sits as good as can be, sideways on an upholstered chair, his feet dangling, and he gazes out at his father a little anxiously, his head held up and his hands clasped on his knee. He has evidently wriggled at some time, because two ghostly feet can still be seen to the left of his present position. Another, painted some months later, when Paulo was just four, shows him as a torero in the traditional traje de luz, with the arcades of a huge bull-ring in the distance. In these pictures the little boy’s pure lines, eyes, and complexion have the same infinite tenderness that are to be seen in Renoir’s portraits of his own son; the similarity is increased by both children’s having auburn hair and the delicate skin that goes with it; and perhaps at that time the feelings of the two painters were much the same.
There were some landscapes too, views of the village with its lovely umbrella-pines and the sea beyond, and of course a great many drawings, watercolors and gouaches: among them is a small papier collé, a still-life in front of a window whose lace curtain must surely have been taken from some catalog. And this little picture, rather severe apart from the absurd lace, seems almost archaic in 1924; it contrasts so strongly with the curvilinear Cubism of the middle twenties that one wonders whether a term so all-embracing serves much purpose.
The statement that Mercure was Picasso’s farewell to the ballet is not quite accurate, since a few days after Mercure’s first night Diaghilev put on Cocteau’s Train bleu at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, with music by Milhaud and Picasso’s enormous women, enormously enlarged, as the curtain—the ballet was about people playing on the beach, so they were appropriate, in a way. But Picasso did nothing about the scenery, which was designed by the sculptor Laurens, nor about the costumes, which were the work of Chanel. Yet this does not mean the Picassos had lost interest in the ballet; they were both often to be seen at performances, and Olga took particular pleasure in the company of the dancers; apart from anything else, they spoke her language. And she would scarcely have been human if she had not relished the contrast between her precarious maiden days and her present security as the wife of a successful, and financially successful, man, and if she had not been happy to show her expensive clothes, her elegant flat, to her former colleagues, now in a most uneasy situation. She was living well, and whatever her origins may have been, she behaved in a way she thought suitable for nobles: the nursemaid who took Paulo walking was required to keep three paces behind her charge, a spectacle that amazed her neighbors, of whom Matisse was one.
From the financial point of view Picasso was doing well: he bought a motor-car, which at that time was a prodigious status-symbol; and since neither then nor at any later period could he ever learn to drive, he employed a chauffeur, a more impressive symbol still. Even now among painters a large car retains a certain mystic aura, and Saint-Germain-des-Près will not soon forget the universal howl of indignation, envy, and disapprobation that greeted Bernard Buffet’s appearance in a white Rolls-Royce.
Towards Christmas his year’s work culminated in the great still-life called “Nature morte á la tranche de melon.” A table, of course, a guitar, some music, a slice of melon, all on a splendid red patterned cloth or rug: and on the left a newcomer, the classical bust or portrait-head that in various forms was to inhabit so many pictures in the years to come. Here it is black, with its Roman features briefly sketched—a nose and eye in Cubist profile—a calm figure in a picture so full of life that the French term nature morte seems even more than usually inappropriate.
The year 1925 began with the same rich tranquillity: more glowing still-lives, those charming domestic portraits, a pleasant girl with a mandolin, all denials of his statement that painting had nothing to do with decoration. Then in the spring the Picassos went to Monte Carlo, where Diaghilev was rehearsing his company. Picasso came not as a collaborator but as a friend; nevertheless he spent hours and hours at the rehearsals, making beautiful flowing classical line-drawings of the dancers at work or resting.
The smooth flow of his days came to an abrupt, even a violent, end with the news of Pichot’s death. Ramon Pichot and Picasso had not seen much of one another since Fernande’s unfortunate visit to Céret in 1912, but before that they had been very close friends. Picasso reacted furiously to criticism, but, despising weakness and want of courage more than anything, he respected those few who stood up to him: and in addition to strength, Pichot possessed a mass of qualities that commanded respect and affection, a high sense of honor being one of them, and independence another. He was neither a very good nor a successful painter, but being a far more cultured man that most of his colleagues he managed to live reasonably well by finding rare books for an American bibliophile, seeking them out not only at auctions and among the antiquarian dealers but in the second-hand shops and the stalls along the banks of the Seine: this was a calling that Apollinaire and many another well-read penniless literary man had followed, sometimes with great profit, and if he had not been so scrupulous Pichot might have made a large amount of money—his employer was a millionaire, his search often fortunate. But the millionaire had proposed a monthly sum; Pichot had accepted; and his principles did not allow him to profit from his bargains in any way. The profit went to Dives.
Picasso often quarreled with his friends, sometimes with extreme violence; but he hated to let them go entirely and he rarely or never dismissed them from his mind—that was not in his concept of the relationship. His liking would survive the quarrel, often for many years, and often the friendship would revive, sometimes diminished, as in the case of Braque, sometimes stronger, as in that of Matisse. He had loved Pichot; his affection had lived on through the intervening years; and it survived Pichot’s death, for in spite of all his reasons for resenting Germaine Pichot he helped her when she was old.
The irremediable loss of a friend was enough to distress him; but in Pichot he also lost an important part of his youth, going back to the Quatre Gats and his earliest days in Paris. There were not many others he had known so long or loved so much: Manolo was far away, so was Max Jacob, and Apollinaire was dead. Then again there was Pichot’s intimate connection with Casagemas, whose death had affected Picasso so profoundly and for so long.
In addition to all this the news reached him at a time when a deep dissatisfaction seems to have been taking shape in his mind: a dissatisfaction with his way of life and more specifically with Olga; an awareness that his painting of the last few years, although it was enough to make any other man’s reputation and although it was widely recognized and applauded, lacked the explosive force it had once possessed, as though by the age of forty-four he had already made all his most important discoveries and as though a well-fed man in a well-cut suit with a handkerchief in his breastpocket and a neat bow-tie had necessarily sold his private sun.
The result was the violent, convulsive picture called “La Danse,” or “The Three Dancers.” He may have begun painting it before he heard of Pichot, but if so by the time he had finished the original intention was entirely overlaid. He worked on it for months, just as he had worked on the “Demoiselles d’Avignon”; and the pictures are comparable in their importance and their shocking impact.
They are also comparable in size: the canvas is seven feet in length and the grotesque, barbaric figures stretch to more than human height as they dance, their hands linked, against a tall french window, partly closed, that provides two great rectangles of blue framed in black and that shows a black balcony beyo
nd. The body of the central figure, naked and flesh-colored, is a long taut line from foot to head against the dark-blue gap between the windows: her arms reach high and wide. The savage figure on the left, more wildly distorted by far and in frenzied movement, wrenches her head back at right-angles to her trunk; her breasts fly high and her left hand joins the other’s right; she has a diagonally-striped kilt, and on her left side an unexplained saw-edged shape, perhaps part of her, points towards the middle of the picture. Her small round head, mad, ecstatic, or agonized, with its mouth like a toothed vulva, is more extreme than anything in the “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Over on the other side a calmer, comparatively sexless, brown and white figure also dances (they each have one foot raised) with its right hand straight and high, holding the first woman’s upstretched left, while its other reaches behind her pink waist to link with the second’s brutish paw, thus completing the chain. And behind this third figure, his head defined by the raised arms, looms the somber form of Ramon Pichot, as black as the window-frames and as massive as an Easter Island statue—a silhouette. But it is the young Pichot, the Ramonet whom Picasso knew long before Pichot grew his striking beard. We know it is he, or rather his presence, because Picasso told Penrose so, saying that “La Danse” should really be called “The Death of Pichot.”
The picture is shocking, beautiful, and terrible; and if “La Danse” is not a proof of Picasso’s faith in the power of exorcism then the whole theory falls to the ground and he was not telling Malraux the truth. It was a turning-point in Picasso’s painting almost as important for him though not for the course of Western art as the “Demoiselles,” although its effects were far less immediately obvious. The “Demoiselles” had been the most violent possible break with tradition; but a virginity cannot be lost more than once and a man cannot destroy a tradition that he has already shattered. Then Picasso never felt that he had really finished the “Demoiselles,” and for months after putting it to one side he kept making different versions of various parts—postscripts to the main picture. Nothing of the kind happened with “La Danse”; and what is more, instead of moving straight on into a new country once he had painted it, Picasso returned to his still-lives, as though the exorcism had worked entirely.
Picasso: A Biography Page 37