Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  Why Royan does not appear. Picasso had no friends there and the place had nothing much to recommend it apart from its bathing-beaches. It was a small, fairly modern town on the right bank of the Gironde, where the broad river meets the sea, and possessing a harbor it had a certain naval and military significance—not the best place for a foreigner; and Picasso was very conscious of being one. Perhaps they were just too tired to go any farther in the crowded car. In any event they found rooms in an hotel, and Picasso at once began to draw the horses they had seen on the road and that continually passed through the town: strings of horses requisitioned by the army.

  But soon Picasso found that foreigners who had arrived in Royan after August 25 were not allowed to stay. This worried him extremely, for although nobody could have been more contemptuous of authority in the realm of the spirit, he hated the slightest prospect of trouble with the law, hated it so much that now he drove straight back to Paris, which he reached in time to hear the first air-raid sirens and the thump of anti-aircraft guns firing at a false alarm, spent a few hours getting the necessary permits, ate his lunch at Lipp’s, took his coffee at the Flore, and then drove straight back again. But he had not had time to buy canvases, and they were not to be had at Royan, so some days later he ventured north again, this time with Sabartés. Brassal, who had been commissioned by Life to take a series of photographs for an article on the forthcoming Picasso exhibition in New York, found him in the rue des Grands-Augustus. Brassaï had not been there before; in fact he had seen little of Picasso these last few years, because Dora Maar was Picasso’s photographer as well as his companion, and she was liable to explode at anything she considered an intrusion into her territory. Picasso was welcoming and he cheerfully submitted to being posed at Lipp’s, talking to Pierre Matisse, at the Flore, signing some prints, and in his studio. He was cheerful, even gay; but in these photographs one sees signs of age, almost for the first time. He wears spectacles to sign his prints, and although he wore them for etching at least as early as 1912 they now look habitual; his famous forelock is much diminished and the remaining hair behind it is carefully spread over the bare dome in sparse strands. Fifty-eight years and three wars had taken their toll, and there was every likelihood that far worse was at hand. This uneasy lull could not last; and Picasso, having collected and packed at least some of his pictures, hurried back to Royan.

  They had prepared themselves for a cataclysm, for an overwhelming German attack, and for the virtual destruction of Paris. Nothing happened. Far away the Germans and the Russians devoured Poland, but scarcely a murmur reached the West. France and England settled down into the phony war, and in Royan Picasso began to build himself a daily routine.

  A morning walk, exploring the market and rummaging among the objects in the junk-shops and the auction-rooms; then after lunch work until nightfall in a room he had hired as a studio. In his headlong flight he had either forgotten to pack an easel or there had not been room for one in the car, so in the Royan auction-room he bought a villainous little thing—Sabartés says it was meant to stand on a piano, holding a photograph—which he was obliged to lash to the back of a chair; but even then he had to work squatting on the floor, as he had done in his youth. And in spite of all protests and of two visits to Paris, where he had easels in profusion, he went on painting like this until the end of the year.

  It was on this spindly affair, in a small room that he had crammed with purchases from the junk-shops, such as a valuable steelyard, and with a chair-seat for his palette, that he painted a number of portraits of Dora Maar, including one called “Le Chandail jaune” in which he returned to his matting texture of the year before, some still-lives of course, and a head of Sabartés. Although there is a great deal of systematic distortion in most, they are not violent pictures; the general atmosphere is one of deep but contained torment, even in the portrait of Sabartés, which was a carefully-contrived surprise, meant to give pleasure. Here again Sabartés is a seventeenth-century hidalgo in a ruff and a plumed bonnet, but now his face is pulled out in length and twisted about its vertical axis, and his spectacles, upside-down, cross beneath his bald, domed forehead in a melancholy droop. It makes a sad contrast with the blue portrait of thirty-eight years before, sad for both the friends; but Sabartés received it with his usual composure.

  This gravity continued into 1940: if anything it became even more apparent, since in January Picasso found a better studio, and with more space and light, and with the real easel that he had at last brought back from Paris, he could paint larger pictures, such as the monumental and indeed monstrous “Femme nue se coiffant,” whose hard-edged, massive, powerfully-modeled volumes have some relation to the bone figures of ten years before, although her vast belly and buttocks and even larger, curiously naturalistic feet, all crammed into a small bare low-ceilinged cell combine with the somber color (dark green walls and a moonlit purple floor reflecting into the pallid flesh) to remove her to another plane—to a plane in some ways resembling that of the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” for there is the same shocking brutality. But whereas the “Demoiselles” are almost flat, the “Femme nue” is vividly three-dimensional: the rough beast starts from her background with the ponderous majesty of a great block of stone.

  Yet the period was not without its moments of relief. Already, in the autumn of 1939, there had been the gratifying reception of “Picasso: Forty Years of his Art” in New York, the most important exhibition of his life so far, with no less than three hundred and forty-four paintings, drawings, prints, collages, constructions, and sculptures carefully chosen to show every stage of his career. The lavishly-illustrated, percipient, appreciative catalog was a masterpiece of its kind, and it gave Picasso great pleasure; so in general did the reaction of the public and the critics, for although there were some piercing cries of dissent, the exhibition (which traveled on to Chicago and other cities) finally established his reputation in the United States. And then, a little while after the big nude, Picasso and Dora Maar went up to Paris again for a few weeks—there was a show of his gouaches, watercolors, and drawings in April—and there he painted a gay picture of eels on a table with a garfish and a sole. Soles, more obviously than most creatures, have anticipated Picasso in the redistribution of features, and a day or so later, perhaps feeling that he had been outdone, he returned to the subject with a particularly enchanting version of them, all superimposed roundnesses upon a pattern of colored planes, with their eyes and mouths set in a new arrangement and their forms echoed by the round pans and the chains of a pair of scales. He spoke of them when he wrote to Sabartés, adding that he missed the market at Royan: and this note, which was written on the back of an invitation to attend a requiem Mass for all Catalans who had died for their country, ended in that language embolcate amb la flassada del abragada que t’envia el teu amic de sempre—wrap yourself in the rug of the hug sent by your past present and future friend.

  But the Paris of April was filled with anxiety. The Germans had dealt with the Poles long since; they had had plenty of time to regroup their forces, build up their armor, and increase their air strength, and once the winter was over they had made use of it to invade Denmark and Norway: the phony war was almost over. The Maginot Line, prolonged by the Belgian defenses, was thought to be impregnable, but even so Paris was extremely nervous; Picasso caught the mood and returned to his earlier task of making his possessions as safe as possible. In the first place there were his own works, and then an important collection of pictures by painters he admired; these he entrusted to his bank, which pleasantly enough was called the Banque du Commerce et de 1’Industrie, where he had two strong-rooms next to the one used by Matisse, who had also left Paris on the declaration of war. (In Picasso’s vault there were Matisses, and in Matisse’s Picassos.) And although Sabartés does not mention them, just as he does not mention Dora Maar’s presence at Royan, so that she has no more than a ghostly being in his narrative and her many portraits are unexplained, there can be no doubt that
Picasso also attended to the well-being if not to the equal safety of Marie-Thérèse, Maya, Olga, Paulo, and his nephews, for however intermittent it may have been where his art was not concerned, his sense of responsibility was active and whole-hearted when it was aroused.

  Matisse had also spent much of the spring in Paris, and both painters were still there in May when the long-dreaded blow was struck, when the unbelievably violent and successful German blitzkrieg shattered the defenses of neutral Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, drove the British into the sea, outflanked the Maginot Line, and hurled the French armies southward in total confusion.

  On May 16 Picasso met Matisse in the street and gave him the news that the front was irreparably broken, adding that the French generals were the equivalent of the professors of the Beaux-Arts. When he wrote to his son Pierre some months later, Matisse spoke of “the shame of a disaster for which one is not responsible. As Picasso said to me, ‘It’s the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.’ If everyone did his job as Picasso and I do ours, this would not have happened.” For the moment he set out for Bordeaux, while Picasso took the first train back to Royan, leaving Paris a little ahead of the main flood of refugees.

  In June the Germans were in Paris, an open city from which the government had fled: in another week Petain had signed an armistice, handing over the northern half of France and the entire Atlantic coast. In a few days time, following fast upon the disorganized host of soldiers and civilians, the occupying forces appeared at Royan: they marched through the streets and set up their Kommandantur a few yards from Picasso’s studio.

  Picasso feared the potentialities of an unknown future, the inimical forces that surrounded him on every hand, but when what had been an undefined menace crystallized into present reality it found him unmoved. The present was now a country under German occupation, a country where Jews were hunted openly, where the Gestapo took people away in the night, where he himself was not only suspected of being partly Jewish but was known to be the most notorious leader of the Kunstbolschewismus so abhorred by Hitler; his work, like that of the other degenerate artists, was proscribed in all territory ruled by the Nazis; he had taken an unmistakable and very public stand against Fascism, and Hitler’s friend Franco hated him; he knew and liked a great many Communists, and he was thought to be one of them. The present was field-gray, and it contained a whole new nation of those authorities he disliked and dreaded—a superstitious dread. It was open to him to leave for the United States or for Mexico; or he could, like Matisse, have had a visa for Brazil; and of course there was the unoccupied zone in the south.

  But after a period in which he made sheet after sheet of macabre drawings, filled with pain—his earlier Royan still-lives had sometimes contained skulls, but while those were the skulls of sheep, these were human, or nearly so—a curious gaiety came over Picasso. On August 15, the day of Our Lady’s assumption and a great feast in Spain, he painted an entrancing, brilliantly-colored “Café á Royan,” with bright awnings in the sun, the lighthouse and the sea beyond, filling the picture with cheerful blue. Then he began to pack, and on August 24 he deliberately drove back to Paris.

  Miles away Matisse had had much the same reaction: he was at the frontier with his passport in his pocket and the boat was waiting at Genoa to take him to Rio de Janeiro; but, as he wrote to his son, “When I saw the endless line of people leaving I had not the least desire to go … I should have felt like a deserter. If everything of any worth runs away, what will remain of France?”

  France meant different things to Matisse and Picasso: but although Picasso remained a Spaniard through and through, France and above all Paris nevertheless for him meant light, freedom, and the living arts, and that intemporal country, beyond all national or geographic boundaries, was where his patriotism lay.

  Chapter XVII

  THE Paris to which he returned was a strange, dark city, its lights reduced to a sinister pale-blue glow: the curfew, rationing, endless queues for food and for permits of every kind. And although at first it was sparsely inhabited by Parisians, since the Germans had taken huge numbers of prisoners and multitudes had fled, the streets were filled with hateful uniforms, gray, green, and black; and the swastika flew over countless buildings, while the Louvre stood dark and empty.

  As winter approached it was also a cold and hungry city; for although the Germans had received orders to be “correct” and although many of them were outwardly civil for a while, their politeness at no time concealed their greed, and from the very beginning a steady stream of fuel, food, and valuables flowed northwards to the Reich. In the earliest days of the occupation they systematically opened all strong-rooms, confiscating all Jewish and a great deal of Gentile property and making lists of the rest: Picasso spent some time at his bank with two of these inspectors, more familiar perhaps with gold teeth from the corpses at Auschwitz than with modern painting; and as Matisse’s vault was also open he hurried them from one set of pictures to another, worrying them with exact sizes and dates, darting to and fro, asserting that they had already seen these, and then all those, and assuring them, when they came to the end of their meager, garbled inventory, that all the paintings in all the vaults, Picassos and Matisses together, were worth sixteen thousand francs, rather less than £1,000 or $4,000 at the time. It was a perilous game, but it succeeded.

  Then as winter came on, German correctness wore thin and Paris became more dangerous by far. Official Teutonic charm, the call for collaboration, had worked on comparatively few Frenchmen and those few were scarcely of the kind that even Nazis could respect: furthermore, although the nation as a whole was still behind Pétain, a nascent Resistance began to make its presence known, and this made the German attitude more savage still.

  In time the Resistance took innumerable forms: highly-specialized intelligence-work and armed attack, often combined with the Resistance of the spirit—writing, publishing, painting in defiance of the authorities—was one; and another was sabotaging the German and Vichy machines of government, supply, and oppression. This included helping, comforting, and hiding Jews, resistants, and suspects; and the black market could also be considered a useful kind of subversion.

  Picasso did not attempt armed resistance, nor, as far as I know, was he in immediate touch with any intelligence network; but he practiced all the other sometimes equally dangerous forms, and it is significant that he was regarded as absolutely reliable by the most active leaders of the movement, men whose lives depended on their perspicacity.

  Ever since the first introduction of taxes and regulations, the French have devoted much time and energy to evading them: it is so much a part of the French way of life that even now there is an official consolation of 10 percent for those who have no possibility of concealing their exact incomes. They would naturally have plunged straight into the black market in any case, but now that it might be represented as a protest against the Germans and Vichy, almost as a patriotic duty, they took to it with such universal zeal that the official systems of rationing were turned upside-down. Picasso followed their example with all his might; he found a black-market restaurant right away, and an illegal source of bronze for his sculpture; but in Paris no amount of effort could obtain black-market electricity or gas. A very little fuel was all that could be hoped for.

  Nearly all Parisians were cold, but since few lived in vast seventeenth-century barn-like rooms, few were quite as cold as Picasso. At one time he had meant to live in the rue La Boëtie and work in the rue des Grands-Augustins; but it would not do. The smaller flat may have been easier to heat, although it was at the top of a tall building, exposed to the icy winds and with no warmth coming up from the lower floors any longer; but it was two miles from the studio, and with few buses, few underground trains, no taxis, and no petrol for his own car that meant a great deal of time spent walking—walking made unpleasant by the weather and odious by the presence of the Germans. Work had to come first, so after a while Picasso shut up the flat, leaving some remarkable treasures—C
orots, Matisses, a box of gold—and settled in the comfortless rue des Grands-Augustins for good.

  His newly-installed central heating did not work; nor did the gas and electric fires he bought; and the monstrous iron stove he had acquired because he loved its barbaric lines burned all his fuel in a trice, emitting a sullen roar but little heat. Presently friends lent him a kitchen range, which did give some heat when he had any coal to put into it but which also filled the place with smoke.

  With all its frigid inconveniencies the studio was an excellent place for work, particularly since Picasso, as a Spaniard, could withstand almost any degree of discomfort and cold; and although the remaining months of 1940 did not produce any painting or sculpture of the first or even the second importance, this was due less to the want of fuel than to the general upheaval, to the time-consuming domestic arrangements, and to the fact that until the illegal lines of supply reached their steady flow it took a great deal of energy to keep oneself in food and tobacco. And it had other advantages: his black-market restaurant, where he could eat without giving up his ration-tickets, was in the rue des Grands-Augustins itself (the place was called Le Catalan, and it was run by a Catalan, and Catalan could be heard there every day) and, far more important, Saint-Germain-des-Près was now the center of what intellectual life Paris still possessed, whereas the rue La Boëtie, so hard to reach, had grown peripheral. Even more than a stove that worked, Picasso needed the blaze of friendship or at least of congenial company from time to time, as a relief from the profound and necessary solitude of his work and as a means of tying himself into ordinary life again after his lonely exploration of unknown regions. This, together with plain bodily warmth, he found to some extent at the Flore, and he was to be seen there, generally with Dora Maar and Kazbek, every evening.