Highly individual behavior was common enough at the Deux Magots; but in combination with beauty and obvious intelligence it was very rare, in Saint-Germain-des-Près or anywhere else. Picasso was fascinated and he said something to that effect in Spanish to Sabartés. The young woman looked up: she had lived in the Argentine and she understood the language. In spite of her answering look, and in spite of his enterprising temperament, Picasso did not presume to risk the perhaps inevitable rebuff; but Dora Maar was a friend of the Eluards, of Man Ray, and of many of the Surrealist group close to Picasso—it was odd that they had not met before—and presently the proper introductions were made.
Dora Maar was far and away the most intelligent woman Picasso had ever met: the only intellectual with whom he ever shared part of his life. She was the daughter of a Yugoslav architect married to a Frenchwoman and now settled in Paris after some years in South America: in 1936 she was a professional photographer—Brassaï speaks highly of her talent—but earlier she had been deeply concerned with painting, only to find that her work did not come up to her own exacting standards. By any count, and even more so by Picasso’s, she was a strikingly good-looking woman: black hair, pale blue-green eyes, a pure oval face with rather high cheekbones, a splendid, distinctive carriage, beautiful hands. What relation there may be between merit and the possession or loss of beauty has yet to be determined, but there is no doubt that once beauty is present it is enormously enhanced, brought to full life, by intelligence; and there is no doubt either that Dora Maar possessed intelligence as well—so much so that we find virtually none of those kind, instantly legible portraits that were usual in the early stages of Picasso’s friendships.
Dora Maar was still living with her parents and she and Picasso had not seen very much of one another before high summer came, July, the time for Paris to empty southwards; and with it the appalling news from Spain, the outbreak of the civil war.
The Spaniards in Paris reacted violently: overnight even those who had lived in France so long that they thought in French became passionately Spanish once again; and there were few who could see any middle way. Picasso’s friends among them belonged to all shades of opinion from Catholic royalist to atheist anarchist, passing by every kind of anticlerical liberal, Marxist-Leninist, and Trotskyist; for most the answer was clear-cut black and white. Hardly any were indifferent: but for a moment it looked as though Picasso might be one of these. Although some of his closest friends were Communists he had not shown much concern over the battle between the Right and the Left in France, the Stavisky riots of 1934, or the triumph of the Front populaire, with the enormous changes it brought in the pattern of working-class life; he had taken little notice of the extreme tensions, the shifting balance of power in Spain and Catalonia, nor indeed of the mortal danger to the Republic and to Catalan autonomy. It was as though he were above or below or in any case outside politics. Yet this was only an appearance: where matters of primordial importance and his own country were concerned his decision was loud, determined, and unequivocal. He declared for the Republic.
His support was of great value, and the Spanish government appointed him director of the Prado. But by this time half Spain was in Franco’s hands; his troops were on the Guadarrama, some twenty miles from Madrid; in August his planes bombed the city, and the treasures of the Prado were hurried away to Valencia. Whether Picasso ever performed any of the duties of his charge is doubtful: a statement that he made when he was painting “Guernica” contains the words, “In Valencia I investigated the state of the pictures saved from the Prado,” but the translation may be at fault, since neither Sabartés nor any of his friends speak of this journey, while Antonina Valentin says, “Bergamín told him that when he was in Valencia supervising the arrival of the pictures from Madrid he unrolled a canvas and found that he had ‘Las Meninas’ in his hands. Picasso sighed and said, ‘How I should have loved that!’”
However, he did do all he could: his weapons were paint, his fame, his credit with the world to back his repeated, unhesitating condemnation of the Fascists, and his money; and with these he fought as long as there was a cause to fight for.
In August, 1936, there was no way in which he could be immediately useful: the Prado pictures were safe for the time being, and Catalonia was still unaffected, the rising in Barcelona having been put down. He too went south to join the Eluards at Mougins, then an almost undiscovered little town perched on a hill five miles inland from Cannes. Several other friends were there, with more scattered along the coast; among them was Dora Maar, holidaying with Lise Deharme at Saint-Tropez.
He fetched her back to Mougins, where they stayed at the Vaste Horizon, a pleasant little hotel with some remarkably pretty girls to look after the guests; but their happiness was untimely damped. He wrote to Sabartés, “Between ourselves … the other day, as I was coming back in a car from Cannes with an Englishman [it was Roland Penrose], I had an accident that has left me shattered, almost unable to move, shattered, pulverized.”
He was convinced of course that bones were broken: in fact they were not, but even two or three weeks later he could still write, “up until now I have been a pitiful sight, thumped black and blue by the motor-car.”
I hope it is not unkind to Sir Roland, who was totally blameless, to suggest that this accident was one of the factors that reduced Picasso’s painting in 1936 to such a low ebb. It came at a bad moment; without it the new and powerful stimulus of Dora Maar might have started the flow again. In the event almost all he did, apart from drawings, was to start a large, somewhat monstrous nude lying under a starlit, moonlit sky—started, presumably, before he found Dora Maar at Saint-Tropez—and then lay it aside until October; while the first portrait he painted of her is no earlier than November 19.
In the autumn they drove northwards, taking with them two of the Vaste Horizon girls, Inés and her sister, to cook for Picasso and to do the housework at the rue La Boëtie. In Paris Dora Maar showed him some of the mysteries of photography, and as he had done with Brassaï he at once took some of her plates away and began to experiment with them, producing something in the nature of Man Ray’s rayograms.
About this time the legal settlement that gave Boisgeloup to Olga and shut Picasso out of it was reaching its final stage: he had nowhere to work in the silence of the country, and the studio in the rue La Boëtie was still poisoned by the memory of Olga’s seals. But it so happened that Vollard had found himself an old house in a large garden with a barn deep in the country near Versailles, at Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre. He converted the barn into a studio and in the later part of 1936 he offered it to Picasso, who was very pleased. He liked the quiet, he liked the comparative secrecy (few friends were ever invited), and he drove down three or four times a week, starting a series of quite remarkable still-lives.
When eventually Sabartés saw them he was “overwhelmed, paralysed, dazzled”; but he did not see them until November, 1938, and one of the reasons for his paralysis was that in the interval he had not been following his friend’s daily progress, so that once again “it was very different from the work I knew, and I felt that I had no base-line, no starting-point from which I could measure the admiration that so entranced me.”
He had not been following his friend’s progress because he and Picasso had parted; and so he had no notion of this new departure until he beheld close on two years’ work all assembled in a private exhibition as it were for himself alone at Le Tremblay: “a huge number of canvases … what a feast of color! As well as the pictures there were countless drawings and objects made out of pieces of wood and string.”
With his usual discretion Sabartés leaves this break in his “dream that was to last forever” largely unexplained, merely observing that at the end of 1936, “it was now about a year that I had been living with Picasso. I had tried to help him when he would let me; and now I felt that I was in his way.”
With his mute, invisible wife, Sabartés left the rue La Boëtie in January, 1937, just as
Picasso was getting down to work at Le Tremblay: they did not see one another again until April in the following year. Apart from reciting pieces of his word-portrait, Sabartés says no more; but it is clear that the parting very nearly broke his heart. What it did to his finances there is no telling: he was extremely poor.
The most probable immediate cause of their separation was the plain fact of Sabartés’ physical presence in the rue la Boëtie, and even more of his wife’s presence. Although Picasso had to some degree taken against Marie-Thérèse (a man under great emotional stress will often transfer part of the blame for his suffering from his wife to his mistress) he had not the least intention of losing her and his little daughter. Nor had he the least intention of giving up Dora Maar. But whereas in Picasso’s circumstances one avowed mistress would have caused little or no embarrassment, the production of two concurrently was quite a different matter: between men it might have passed without remark, although it would have meant sharing his secrecy, but with a respectable married woman in the house the case was altered. Where servants were concerned it was not at all the same: Picasso did not give a damn what servants thought, and he treated them with an archaic familiarity; but Señora Sabartés was not a servant, nor anything like one. The presence of the Sabartés would either have meant restraint on his part, which he could never bear at any time, or it would have meant opening himself to adverse criticism, which he could never bear either, however silent.
But a much more important underlying cause it seems to me was a change in Picasso’s character, or rather a strengthening of certain strands in that most complex skein. He was born and bred in Spain: and although it is mere determinism, silly and facile, to say that because of his blood he was bound to do this or that, the fact remains that he was brought up in a pattern of behavior unlike that of the other Western countries. Every child has heard of Spanish pride and anyone who has crossed the border into that undeferential country, meeting its police and officials, will have seen this pride in operation. It takes the form of an extreme unwillingness to be trampled upon and an even greater willingness to do the trampling; of a different social contract in which the assertion of independence if not of superiority is an essential element. On the other hand anyone who has spoken to a Spanish peasant for any length of time, as equal to equal, will have found that this contract can also include the utmost sensitivity to another’s feelings. In short the scales of rudeness and consideration are unlike those of Europe: as in other countries there is disrespect at times and gentleness at others; but these times and the occasions differ entirely from those the foreigner is used to, and he is confused.
Yet generally the desire for conquest seems to predominate, at least among the less polished Spaniards and even Catalans: this was the aggressive atmosphere in which Picasso’s earliest companions had swum from birth; yet even so they noticed—they could not fail to notice—his restless urge to subjugate.
He carried his Spanish pattern with him to France, whose milder influence scarcely had any effect at all, and there he applied it with an unfortunate degree of success; for in addition to his background he also possessed this dominant personality. His dominance could be held in check by respect and affection, as in the case of Apollinaire and Eluard; but there were few painters apart from Matisse and perhaps Braque to whom he did not feel superior, and most of his friends and acquaintances, if they competed at all, were reduced either to subordination or, if like Sabartés they were equally proud, to retreat in the face of increasing roughness. This roughness could reach a surprising pitch on occasion: after another decade or so of notoriety and silly adulation (yet still not the height of his fame) he could savage importunate fools most barbarously. When he and Geneviève Laporte were wandering about Saint-Tropez one summer morning in the fifties they were accosted by a young Austrian painter, unknown to either of them, who asked Picasso to come and look at his work. He was carrying a bunch of gladioli. “Why the flowers?” said Picasso mildly. To paint them, said the Austrian: and asked why he painted flowers he said “because they smelt pleasant.”
“Are you married?” went on Picasso.
“Yes.”
“Then bring me your wife and I will––her: after that you can smell my––and see if it is not better than your flowers.”
In English the assault sounds gross beyond belief, but the French are accustomed to a warmer language, and Geneviève Laporte, a well-brought-up young lady, laughed heartily. What is more, the Austrian did not find it intolerably offensive: he returned to the attack that same evening, sitting down uninvited at their restaurant table and asking Picasso for advice.
“You are Austrian … ” said Picasso, busy with his crayfish. “You have a father?” The Austrian nodded. “And where does he live, monsieur votre père?”
“In Vienna.”
Picasso looked up from his plate, gazed at the Austrian, and said, “Then go to Vienna, b––monsieur votre père, and after that you will paint well.” And holding out his hand, “Au revoir, monsieur.”
Dominance and aggression was one strand: it was very, very often obscured by affection and kindness (for one Austrian who failed there were scores of Catalans who succeeded), but in any close relationship it always showed sooner or later, and the sooner the less force there was to oppose it. Olga, though devoid of parts, had possessed a concentrated destructive strength that compelled his respect; but she was gone. He never found such another Tartar, and after his release the trait, unchecked, grew more pronounced.
Another was the effect of success. In Barcelona, when he was there in 1917, he had already had a hint of the price to be paid, chiefly in the distortion and even the destruction of ordinary intercourse. By 1937 his notoriety had not reached the monstrous proportions it was to attain after the war, he could still walk about without being recognized and pestered, and by the world in general he was still treated as an ordinary human being rather than a monstre sacré; but since his great retrospective of 1932 he was very well known to everybody who was in any way concerned with the arts and to a great many besides, some of them tolerably self-seeking and sycophantic already. He was quite wealthy; he was the director of the Prado; and in the nature of things he was surrounded by his inferiors. He was powerful, as a character, as a painter, and as a public figure, and the corruption inseparable from authority was beginning to make itself felt; very agreeably at this point, no doubt, like the early, euphoric stage of consumption.
Maillol was better known for the suavity of his sculpture than for that of his reflections on his fellow-artists, but with all allowance for sourness of temper and the rancor of old age (he was twenty years older than Picasso and eighty-two at the time of these remarks) this testimony from Henri Frere’s Conversations avec Maillol is valuable.
What finished Picasso was people’s adulation. They told him that God was nothing in comparison with Picasso. So he wanted there to be no other painter at all, apart from himself. There’s arrogance for you!…
Picasso was twenty when he arrived from Spain. He was slim, with an intelligent face; he looked just like a girl. He came out to Villeneuve-Saint-Georges on purpose to see me. He sang me a Catalan song [Maillol was a Catalan, a French Catalan from the Roussillon]. He was very agreeable. Now he’s grown thick, with a face like a toad. I should never have believed it. I made him very welcome. Well, the last time I saw him, in 1937 I think it was, he would hardly speak to me. For my part I was very pleasant; I reminded him of his visit to Villeneuve—indeed, I sang the song he had sung to me. He never even answered. He had come to see van Dongen in the studio where I was busy on “La Montagne’—he wanted van Dongen to work for him. Van Dongen was fine. He said he was bound to me. My statue was standing just there. I said to him, ‘Have a look at it and tell me what you think.’ Would you believe it? He turned his back on me and walked off without so much as a glance. Do you call that an artist? Do you think Michael Angelo would have turned his back if I had asked him for advice? He would have given it to me.
And kindly, too. I dare say he would have shown me with the tool.
Success, release from oppression, and a greater degree of self-assertion also had their effect upon Picasso’s sexual life. He now had two adoring women, and there were plenty of others in the near background, pretty, available, and none too shy. Almost any generalization about Picasso is apt to fall to pieces at once under the weight of exceptions; but although he was capable of completely disinterested candid friendship with women, and beautiful ones too—I say this with authority, since I have had the happiness of sharing some of these friendships—his attitude to those with whom he had a closer connection tended to be extremely primitive, and now it grew more so. He looked upon few as completely human: those who were unwilling to accept this view were compelled to do so; and some part of his life might be called the tragedy of a successful phallocrat. His often-repeated remark to Françoise Gilot about women being either doormats or goddesses was intended to annoy, yet unhappily it contained a good deal of truth—most unhappily, indeed, for what pleasure can there be in the company of either? Common sense might have told him that; but, as Einstein observed, common sense is the sum of the prejudices one has absorbed by the age of eighteen; and those that Picasso had absorbed by then were calculated for a different longitude, almost a different age.
No one will deny that it is often the duty of the creative man to be selfish: yet it may be that Picasso carried selfishness beyond the call of duty, and that he paid an exorbitant price for doing so. Heaven forbid that I should write a moral tract or cry up abnegation on anything but hedonistic grounds. But some degree of happiness is necessary for work; and work was necessary to Picasso: yet, although companionship, and female companionship, was even more valuable to such a lonely man than to most, he did his best to destroy the possibility of it. It is a matter of record that once he was no longer young he was a difficult if not an impossible creature to live with for any length of time; after years of cohabitation even the fanatically loyal Sabartés could speak of a “solitude à deux.” And to one who has never thought like a man and acted like a child it is no doubt a matter of wonder that so intelligent a person as Picasso should not have seen that his vehement desire to have his cake and eat it was self-defeating; that by entirely subjugating Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar for example he could no longer enjoy their company as full, free human beings; and that in a human relationship of any continuance there was no victory but only universal defeat.
Picasso: A Biography Page 43