Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  Saint-Germain was a center, a rallying-point; but it was far from crowded. Although demobilization brought Eluard and others back, and although some prisoners of war such as Jean-Paul Sartre returned in time, the war had scattered many of Picasso’s friends: Breton, Ernst, Kisling, Lipchitz, Chagall, Leger, Mondrian, and many more were in America, Matisse was at Vence, Marquet in Algiers, Miró had gone back to Spain. It is true that both Derain and Vlaminck remained, but it would have been far, far better for their reputation if they had fled from the temptations of German flattery, preferential treatment, and journeys to the Reich. Kahnweiler, as a Jew, was hidden somewhere in the South Zone, and Picasso’s other Jewish friends, condemned to wear the yellow Star of David, rarely left their houses: and later, as the war grew darker, colder, and more deeply sad, he too tended to stay at home, shut up alone with his work: the cafés saw little of Picasso after 1942. It was, as he said later, one of the loneliest periods of his life, and all the more so as some people he knew took to avoiding him as a dangerous contact. Others went further, and it is painful to record that Vlaminck, for one, saw fit to attack him in a review published under German authorization. In general there seems to be little or no connection between moral and artistic worth—Goya would have been called a collaborator—yet it is a striking fact that none of the three great names of painting left France during the war, and that none of them, however apolitical, would have the least truck with the Germans, nor with Vichy.

  His loneliness was of course much diminished by the presence of Dora Maar and Sabartés as well as by that of Marie-Thérèse and Maya in their little fiat on the He Saint-Louis, which he regularly visited at least every Thursday, Maya’s holiday from school, and generally on Sundays. But none of these was an ideal companion for Picasso: indeed, his requirements were so great and grew so much greater with the years, that the ideal companion, had she existed at all, would have been as rare a being as Picasso himself. She would have had to possess a strength equal to his own, a devotion just short of worship, for worship would not do at all, and those who prostrated themselves were trampled upon and destroyed, and a commensurable talent: given his great respect for verse, a beautiful poetess might have answered, and some years later one very nearly did in the person of Geneviève Laporte. But neither then nor at any other time did Picasso have the good fortune to secure this nonpareil; and on occasion he would speak wistfully of a harem.

  In the winter of 1940 to 1941, however, his mind was turned less to women than to literature. He had written a good deal of verse before the war and at Royan, and the book he and Vollard had planned would have had a considerable bulk: now he set himself to a play, Le Desir attrape par la queue, and on the first page he drew himself seen from above, spectacled and rather bald and wispy, in the act of writing about the desires that his characters catch, or attempt to catch, by the tail. Where Picasso’s writing is concerned the distinction between poetry and prose has not much meaning, and although few but his unconditional admirers would say that he was a poet in the same sense that he was a draughtsman, painter, and sculptor, he was incapable of writing a piece without brilliant poetic flashes in it. His dramatis personae have an undeniable splendor: Big-Foot, a writer, in love with the Tart (the edible kind); Onion, friend to Big-Foot; the Round Tip; Silence; the Tart (in love with Big-Foot); the Tart’s cousin; Fat Anxiety (friend to the Tart and in love with Big-Foot); Thin Anxiety (friend to the Tart, also in love with Big-Foot); two dogs; the Curtains. And any poet would be proud of Sordids’ Hotel, where one of the scenes is set. The desires these people pursue are to do with food, warmth (they suffer much from the cold, and when they leave their feet in the corridor of the hotel, the feet cry out, “Oh my chilblains, my chilblains”), money, and coarse love-making: it would be difficult to summarize the argument of the play, for there is none, but the violence, the pace, and the brutal Ubuesque hilarity carry the action along very well, and at a private reading at the Leiris’ flat some years later it gave the utmost delight.

  But that was a private reading, packed with Picasso’s friends—Braque was there—and the parts were taken by such people as Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Michel and Louise Leiris, Reverdy, Raymond Queneau and Dora Maar, she being Thin Anxiety: they were all thoroughly accustomed to Surrealist tropes, and for them the wild play of associations was far less private than it would be for outsiders, who may see little more than a dazzling but mysterious and perhaps rather labored play of fireworks from which there emerges an occasional splendid piece or some wonderfully funny dialogue. And even among those who so thoroughly enjoyed the reading there were some who regretted that Picasso should spend creative energy on his pen when he could have spent it on his brush. For his own part he had no exaggerated opinion of his writing; he was diffident about his abilities and taking his cue from his friend, even Sabartés emphasizes that Picasso wrote the play “solely for his own amusement.” This was an open, acknowledged diffidence, as about something that was by no means vital to him: it was quite unlike that deep anxiety as to the validity of his own art that pervaded his mind on occasion, particularly when he was away from his easel or when work would not come—a paradoxical anxiety, since at the same time he knew there was no other painter living except Matisse and possibly Braque who had as much to say and as great a power of saying it, and one that only his most intimate friends were aware of.

  Underlying humility is perhaps an essential component of greatness; but the paralysing doubt that may accompany it never or very rarely affected Picasso when he was confronted with a virgin canvas or a sheet of drawing-paper. The Zervos catalog shows a surprising number of paintings for 1941, several of them having a bearing on food: the particularly affectionate treatment of the black pudding in the still-life called “Le Buffet du Savoyard” for example, makes it clear that Picasso loved the simple dish for itself as well as for its aesthetic properties. Others are to do with Dora Maar. They can still be called portraits, for although in some the twisting of the head about its vertical axis is carried even farther than in the Royan “Sabartés,” while in others the hatchet-faced woman in a chair has little human about her at all, the sitter can be no one else: yet it has been said that they are more pictures of a state of mind, or rather of their tense relationship, than of Dora Maar. On the other hand, at this point Picasso was preoccupied with a simultaneity of vision achieved by means somewhat different from those of Cubism: in May, for instance, he made one of his beautifully fluent drawings of a woman lying both on her back and on her front. At first glance she seems to be split like a kipper, with her two classical profiles sharing the same pillow and the same head of hair, but following down one sees the belly and up-flexed knee on the right and on the left the buttocks and the downward knee: it knocks common logical perception sideways, and the result is both convincing and deeply satisfactory.

  The pictures that are either directly of Dora Maar or that are based upon her are open to question and to various interpretations: the sculpture is not. Since his peopling of the stables at Boisgeloup in 1932 and 1933 Picasso had done little apart from some grim dolls for Maya and a few constructions, but if one may judge by the increasingly sculptural nature of some of his recent painting, such as the “Nu se coiffant” of 1940, his mind had been tending in that direction, and now, with fewer distractions than he had known for years, he modeled a more than life-size head of his companion, a great smooth serene head, finer in plaster than in its indifferent bronze. (It is the one that was set up as a monument to Apollinaire.)

  His return to sculpture was certainly the result of inward necessity, but his decision may have been precipitated by the arctic winter of 1941-1942. Once even in the coldest months some warmth emanated from the houses of Paris and rose in wafts from the gratings of the Metro—the city was not unbearable even for those who slept out, wrapped in newspaper—but this was no longer the case, and in the vast painting-studio Picasso’s hands, stoical though they were, grew too numb to hold a brush, although he wore all the clo
thes he had. The bathroom was the only place that he could heat; the water for damping clay and mixing plaster was conveniently near at hand; the mess did not signify; and in this narrow but at least tepid space he worked with his usual fierce intensity.

  The sequence of his sudden spate of sculpture is uncertain: for one thing Kahnweiler, the authority on the subject, was far away; and for another there is a tendency to date a piece by the year of its casting, in spite of the fact that Picasso loved to keep his figures by him in their first fragile purity. And at this period the connection is more than usually tenuous, because his supplies of illicit metal were not be be relied on: the Germans were commandeering every scrap of bronze they could lay their hands on, including all the public statues, for the benefit of one Breker, Hitler’s favorite maker of colossal images—a person visited by more French artists than I like to name. Yet it is probable that apart from this head of Dora Maar, 1941 also saw the two disreputable alley cats to which he was so much attached, the one pissing with its tail held stiff, the other pregnant, as well as one of the most moving sculptures he ever made, the “Tête de mort.”

  It is no more than a foot high, though one remembers it as far larger: a dark bronze that is neither quite a skull nor yet a living head. The eye-sockets are empty and the flesh of the nose is gone, but the bare jawbones and the grinning teeth of the traditional memento mori are not to be seen, being covered with as it were a tight shrunken leathery skin—a skin that does not obscure the gleaming dome above the eyes, however.

  Everyone who has ever written about Picasso refers again and again to his loathing of death: yet the skulls of animals and men were a usual part of his vocabulary, and this piece of mortality made tangible is an object modeled with love, a work that one gazes upon with grave satisfaction, longing to touch it. If the apparent contradiction needs resolving, there is an answer at hand, as simple as the bronze itself and perhaps as true. If I am not mistaken, the “Tete de mort” is Picasso’s most consummate piece of exorcism: he gave the spirit a shape and so, at least for the time, he broke free from it.

  In 1941 death was near at hand, even nearer than before: in June Hitler attacked Russia and the French Communists instantly faced about, throwing all their weight on the side of the growing Resistance. They had been outlawed in the earliest days of the war and then savagely persecuted by Vichy; by now they therefore had the advantage of a well-tried clandestińe organization and a disciplined, wholly committed membership, already purged of the faint-hearted. It is none of my business to enquire into the motives or the patriotism of the leaders, a question so passionately argued in France ever since 1941, but I do know that many of the rank and file were men and women who would die under torture for their convictions, that some joined the Party when membership, if discovered, meant a concentration-camp or summary execution, and that Picasso had a number of friends among them. The Communists’ change of front had a deep effect upon him, but it did not become immediately apparent in his work; nor indeed can it be said to be unquestionably evident at any time. Attempts have been made to link various pictures with particular outside happenings, but with a few exceptions they are unconvincing: Picasso’s painting may have been his diary, but it was a private diary, one in which a man is not likely to record public events such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American declaration of war which brought hope to Europe at the end of 1941, or the advent of the infamous Pierre Laval early in the year, the hunting of the Jews, the massive deportations.

  Although in fact, with the American intervention, the tide had turned, 1942 began badly for the civilized world, with the Germans deep in the heart of Russia and the Japanese carrying everything before them in southeast Asia: yet the daily life of even the greatest men is conditioned by circumstances that it seems ludicrous to record on the same page as such pregnant events, and Picasso’s own comer of this world was brightened by the return of Inès. At the beginning of the war he had left her in safety at Mougins, and there she had married a young man called Sassier, who now brought her back to Paris. Picasso, who had been making do as well as he could with the help of Marcel Boudin, the nominal chauffeur, took a small flat for the couple in the warren-like house that contained his studios, and Inès looked after him. There was not much for her to cook in Paris, apart from Jerusalem artichokes, swedes, and rhubarb, but there had been even less on the Mediterranean coast, where the people lived on tomatoes, sunlight, and a little fish: and even the fish disappeared later in 1942, when the Germans occupied the south zone and forbade the boats to put to sea. However, Inès did a great deal with a very little; she was thoroughly used to Picasso; she fed him as well as she could, and she kept the house neat where he wanted it to be neat. Theirs was a pleasant southern relationship, tyrannical at times, with loud expostulations on either side, but entirely human, and the place was far less austere with Inès in it. She was also a very pretty young woman—Eluard admired her much—as one may see from the charming portrait that Picasso made of her in April, one of a series of presents that carried on year after year until she had a collection that any millionaire might envy.

  Throughout 1942—indeed throughout the war—most of Picasso’s pictures show a somber, muted range of colors; and there is often the same insistence upon food—a hat made of a large fish, with crossed knife and fork, still-lives with eggs, with fruit, with a pigeon (many people tried to eat the Paris pigeons during the war, luring them with crumbs; but they were found to have a vile blackish flesh, as inedible as crow). An apparent exception is the powerful still-life with a guitar and a torero’s sword, which he painted in April: here the color, especially the startling red of the sword-grip, is more brilliant, but even so the strong blue, the green, and violet drain the gaiety away. It is an unhappy picture in spite of its fine yellow and scarlet, and for Pierre Daix it is a reflection of the death of Picasso’s very old friend Juli González: the news of it reached him a few days before he painted the picture.

  In the same month he painted a couple of still-lives of horned ox-skulls, the one seen by day, the other by night; these too are somber, brooding pictures; and in their spare, angular stylization they mark a midpoint between two of the manners he was using at this time, on the one hand a faceted series of often straight-edged planes (one recumbent nude might almost come from the early days of Cubism), and on the other strongly rounded and sometimes modeled volumes that emphasize his distortions, particularly of Dora Maar’s face, to an almost unbearable degree. The many portraits of Nusch Eluard, by the way, show no such tension.

  Most of these were fairly small pictures, three to four feet high at the most, but in May he set to work on a far larger canvas, six and a half feet tall and nearly nine feet broad. “A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand,” he once told Zervos, and what he had in mind when he started “L’Aubade” there is no telling: the result is one of the most enigmatic of his pictures—enigmatic, that is to say, if one is not content with its direct statement, with the hallucinating play of triangles and quadrilaterals of quiet color, the monstrous multiply-simultaneous nude made of some firm grainless substance that can be carved with a perfect definition, thus allowing the distortions and the planes of simultaneous vision to be carried out with no solution of continuity: she lies stiffly on or just above a divan whose stripes give it the appearance of a fakir’s bed or perhaps a rack; and at her feet, in a rigid Spanish chair, sits another woman holding a mandolin, wearing some clothes and a pair of felt slippers. Her head is made of three more triangles, and their common apex strikes against the angle of three of the facets of the complex prism in which they live. Why does she sit there so quietly? Why does she not play her mandolin? What is the reason for the empty mirror-frame? I do not know: nor do I know what place the “Aubade” has in Picasso’s long sequence of pictures in which two women appear, sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, sometimes in an ambiguous relationship. But at least the “Aubade” and the sequence to which it belongs do emphasize, if emphasis were necessar
y, both the vast importance of women to Picasso and the price he had to pay for having them in his life. Each singly brought him great joy, and no one could have been happier than Picasso painting in the first flush of his emotion; but when they began to eat him—and he really seems to have believed that the process was not reciprocal—he resented it, and some part of his savage distortion of the female form and face may be put down to this resentment as well as to purely aesthetic considerations. And when they amounted to two or more at a time, seriously interfering with his work, his resentment grew greater still: for they did interfere with it, and not only by worrying him, bringing his mind down to mundane jangling, but sometimes by their physical intrusion. When he was actually painting “Guernica,” for instance, his creative powers at their utmost stretch, Marie-Thérèse came in and found Dora Mcar there: after screeching at one another for some time they had a brutish, squalid battle, pushing one another about in the very studio itself; and although Picasso affected a cynical amusement when he told the story some years later, the man then engaged on one of the most important works of his life cannot have found it so very droll.