Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  It was in the summer that followed the “Aubade” that the Germans and the French police carried out their vast sweeps in Paris, rounding up thousands of Jews in July and August, 1942. And it was now that the great deportations began, trainloads of résistants, Communists, Jews, and suspects from all over the country, many of them victims of denunciation, traveled up through France to Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau, Mauthausen. The shooting of hostages had started long before, but now the Nazis killed two hundred just outside Paris in August and September alone. These were the days of the delator, when an anonymous telephone-call or an unsigned note could bring the Gestapo thundering on the door in the dead hour of the night; and these were the days when Germans kept coming to the rue des Grands-Augustins to ask whether Lipchitz were there (of course he was not: he was in America, as they knew very well), and whether Picasso were not also a Jew; and then they would search the place. Whether there was anything for them to find, apart from the illicit bronze, I do not know, but if there was they never succeeded; the hopeless confusion of Picasso’s mounds may well have discouraged the most eager. They were “correct” with Picasso, who for his part took great care to have his papers in order so that they should have no hold on him; and in his case, either from ignorance or from some uneasiness about his fame, the Gestapo did not attempt the private blackmail that they practiced with so much profit elsewhere. Not all the Germans came to search, however: there were some who appeared as semi-official intermediaries, hinting at privileges, coal, extra rations; and others who professed to love the arts. Their charm had no effect upon Picasso’s unbending severity: they got nothing out of him at all, nothing but postcards of “Guernica,” which he pressed into their hands, saying, “Souvenir, souvenir. “There is the story that Abetz, the German ambassador, came one day with the intention of making himself agreeable: looking at a reproduction of the great picture he said, with a civil leer, “So you did that. Monsieur Picasso?” “No,” said Picasso, “you did.” The tale is not literally true, but it was told everywhere, and it is highly significant of the esteem in which Picasso was held. No one, not even the most poisonous tongues of a milieu notorious for slander, ever accused him of the slightest concession to the Germans or to Vichy.

  And it was in this dismal summer—he did not go away, of course—that Picasso began the drawings that were to culminate in his statue “L’Homme au mouton.” The work can be seen as a counterpart to his “Téte de mort,” since it is an equally powerful statement about life. At first he was not sure what form it should take, but he inclined to the idea of an engraving, a lithograph, or a picture; then as he sank deeper into the subject, and as the drawings accumulated—there were more than a hundred of them—he saw that the figure had to stand free in space: it had to be a sculpture. This was one of the projects upon which he spent a very great deal of time and thought, letting it ripen thoroughly in his mind, a rare process with him and one that his friends could have wished more usual, if the outcome had always been as successful as “L’Homme au mouton,” or “á l’agneau” as those call it who either have an elastic notion of a lamb or who wish to emphasize the religious connotations. It was not until the end of this year or the beginning of the next that he ordered the armature or set about looking for the large quantity of clay that would be needed: for sculptor’s clay, like everything else, was hard to find in the war; and even when it was found it was often of poor quality.

  In the meantime he carried on with smaller pieces of sculpture, often ephemeral constructions or collages, and with painting, some of it of capital importance. From a distance the portrait of Dora Maar painted in October, 1942, looks simple, a straightforward picture of a young woman in a red and green striped dress, looking straight in front of her and sitting rather stiffly, much as Henri Rousseau’s models sat: in fact it has something of the air of a Rousseau. Then as one walks closer the Rousseau innocence vanishes, and with it the apparent simplicity. The stiffness is not the ordinary embarrassment of a young woman having her likeness taken but the extreme tension of one who can only just maintain her tight-lipped self-control: her nostrils quiver with the effort; her great eyes are filled with tears. Antonina Valentin, who speaks with authority, states that while the picture was being painted Dora Maar’s mother died; Dora Maar nevertheless went on sitting; and that Picasso, although he did not alter the now incongruous dress that he had invented for his color-scheme (he often painted Dora Maar in clothes that did not exist or that he had seen on other women), changed the background, painting out the bars that marked her as his prisoner, and the symbolic crust of bread and water-jug.

  There was hope in the world in 1943, but for Paris it seemed very remote and theoretical indeed: certainly the Allies had landed in North Africa at the end of 1942, but two days later the Germans had invaded the South Zone, occupying the whole of France; and as the Resistance grew, so did the repression. Food was even shorter; the electricity was cut off for long periods at a time, so that Picasso worked by candle-light as he had in his youth; gas-fires burned with a weak, uncertain flame or went out altogether. For a month and more Picasso gazed at the armature, the metal skeleton to support the weight of clay for his statue. He had already fixed the more than life-size scale and all but the last details of the figure; he had already laid in his clay; but still he let the iron rods stand there while his idea grew to its full maturity.

  Then one day in that cold, dark February, and at a time when there seemed to be no end to the war in human sight, he set to work. He knew exactly what he meant to do; he had no need of models; everything, even to the arch of the sheep’s nose, was in his head; and with incredible speed a great statue unlike anything in Picasso’s past or future work took shape: a tall, powerful, lean, bald, bearded middle-aged man with long straight legs, his big feet firmly planted on the ground, advances carrying a large shorn sheep; he is perfectly direct, perfectly simple, as he poises himself against the weight: so is the sheep, which strains its head away from him, as sheep will when they are in a man’s arms. His right hand is under its rump, supporting it; his left grasps its feet in that antique gesture familiar to Hesiod, Virgil, the peasants of Horta, and to Picasso himself; his face is grave, set, matter-of-fact, unaware of his own nobility.

  At one point the feeble war-time armature and the indifferent clay began to yield, but Paul Eluard was there, sharing Picasso’s warmth and writing in the studio, and between them they stayed it with ropes: then the sheep fell to the ground and had to be wired back. But by the end of Picasso’s working day the whole statue was finished, though by now the clay was in such a state that he dared not model the legs as he had wished, and to this day they are rather stick-like.

  Almost at once he encased the wavering figure and cast it in plaster. Even with all Picasso’s ingenuity and his innumerable contacts there was not the least possibility of bronze for so large a work while the Germans were still in France, so “L’Homme au mouton” stood, fragile but splendidly white, in his studio until after the Liberation. A very great many people saw it there, and although there were differences of opinion about its direct meaning and its underlying symbolism, there was a general agreement that the statue represented an assertion of hope, of faith in fundamental decency, and that at a time when both were rare it gave those who saw it courage. Some critics have connected the directness of communication, the immediate “comprehensibility” of the figure with Picasso’s move towards the Communists, a theory that would be more persuasive if Picasso had ever modeled or painted anything of a comparable nature, in tune with the workers’ allegedly simple tastes and power of understanding, after he became a member of the Party in October, 1944.

  Of the move itself, however, there is no kind of doubt. The influence of Eluard and Aragon was already great and that of events perhaps even greater, but it appears that the decisive factor was his prolonged contact with Laurent Casanova. Casanova was one of the leading men in the Party and in the Communist Resistance, a most impressive figure as an intell
ectual and above all as a man of action: his wife had been killed by the Germans and he had been captured and recaptured three times; on his fourth escape he eventually reached Eluard, who passed him on as an anonymous Communist to the safer hiding of the Leirises’ big flat. This was at the end of Picasso’s little street, on the quai des Grands-Augustins: it was here that Picasso met him, and during the weeks of his concealment they saw a great deal of one another.

  “L’Homme au mouton” was not the end of Picasso’s burst of sculpture. In the same year he produced his most surprising piece, the “Téte de taureau”: poking about in a rubbish-heap he came upon an old bicycle saddle, and next to it a pair of rusty handlebars. In a flash, without any mental effort on his part, their potentialities were revealed to him. All he had to do was to fix them together in a given position and there was a fine bull’s head of the same spare race as his recent still-lives. He did so and had the result cast in bronze, which, as he observed, has the power of giving a wonderful unity to disparate elements. For Picasso there was no such thing as an ignoble substance or a contemptible object; the color and the texture of a packet of tobacco was as valuable as that of a sapphire. By casting this head in bronze he passed his more lively, totally unprejudiced perception on to those who could not surmount the barrier without help; though at the same time he was aware that they might not make the transformation in reverse, and that if they did not see the saddle and handlebars in the bull, then much of the point was lost.

  He was very pleased with the head; so were many other people, but by no means all. Some looked respectfully at the bronze, then detected the saddle and the handlebars and no longer loved the sculpture; they felt obscurely that they had been made game of. Then there was the fact that the head had taken Picasso five minutes whereas “L’Homme au mouton” had called for the best part of a year: could both be valid? And even some of those who admit that once beauty is present the time, skill, and material required to bring it into being are irrelevant still remain anxious and dissatisfied.

  Picasso went out rarely these days, and much of his painting has an inward quality: there is one view from his studio window, with the useless radiator under the sill, that is particularly moving, not so much because of the lack of heat (in fact the window is open) as because it looks out from a sad room over an even sadder town. Those who went through the war will remember how at intervals between boredom and alarm one became aware of the shift in one’s perception of time; it seemed that the slaughter and destruction had been going on forever and that they must necessarily continue; one was a prisoner in this endless nightmare, and only more darkness, more battles, crueller repression, and heavier air-raids could be ahead: that is the feeling of this picture. Yet there are others: early in 1943 he painted Ines’ child learning to walk. With an idiot determination the little boy raises one huge foot, his bald, unformed, pliable face staring straight ahead, while on either side his clumsy hands hold those of his mother, bent over him from behind in a maternal curve and filling the canvas to its utmost limits. It may not be a picture that gave Inés much pleasure, although its composition, the juxtaposition of the heads, the planes of the child’s coat, and the archaic use of the painter’s space are unusually interesting; but it is not a desperately sad one. Nor are the many still-lives of this period, unless one takes the skull and jug literally, which would probably be a mistake since it was painted on Assumption Day, when Picasso’s mind was apt to fly back to Spain: and what more Spanish than a skull and jug? On the whole they are grave, reflective pictures with much the same range of subjects as those of his full Cubist days; they have a remarkable strength, made more emphatic by the firm black lines that define each jug or candlestick or chair. Some of them, however, like the “Nature morte aux cerises” with its pretty coffee-pot and its dish of cherries, are positively gay; but that was painted in November, 1943, and even by the middle of the year the whole world had changed. The Germans had been thrust out of North Africa; in Russia they were in full retreat; the Allies were deep in Italy and Mussolini’s army was on the verge of collapse. In France the Resistance had grown enormously, harassing the Germans, sending out military and political intelligence, preparing for the invasion, and keeping the country’s spirit alive by every possible means, including of course clandestine publication. And in Paris overt intellectual life was recovering: at the end of 1942 Fabiani had been able to bring out the edition of Buffon that Vollard had commissioned, while in 1943 Picasso illustrated Le Chévrefeuille for Georges Hugnet and Contrée for Robert Desnos, his friend from the early days of Surrealism. Desnos lived near at hand, in the rue Mazarine; and Picasso, who saw him often, had noticed that his round, plump face had grown haggard these last few months, taking on the expression often to be seen in those committed to the more dangerous forms of resistance. There were more shows in the picture-galleries, with some new talents emerging; and the Salon d’Automne began its series of retrospectives, starting with Braque, who for some reason was officially less degenerate than Picasso—he too had returned to Paris in the autumn of 1940 and he stayed there throughout the war, painting interiors and still-lives.

  And then there was a chance encounter that added some brightness to Picasso’s private world. He was having dinner with Dora Maar, Marie-Laure de Noailles, and some other friends at the Catalan one evening in May when he noticed two good-looking young women at another table with an actor he knew. Picking up a bowl of cherries, he went over and obliged the actor to introduce him: the girls having said they were painters he invited them to his studio. Presently they came, first the two together and then one of them alone: this was Françoise Gilot, then aged twenty-one. She was studying law and literature in a desultory fashion at the Sorbonne and at the same time she was learning to paint. Her father was a wealthy businessman who made scent and eau-de-Cologne among other things: she had received a thorough-going middle-class education and she was a typical product of the richer bourgeoisie. “That, of course, was a great incentive,” said an old lady who had known Picasso for more than sixty years, when we were talking about Françoise Gilot. “It would naturally have given him the utmost pleasure to undress a girl belonging to that world.” She was a very intelligent Frenchwoman, and she was probably right; for although Picasso knew Bohemia in all its forms as well as certain aspects of the grander world, the closed French bourgeoisie, with its smooth surface, its materialism, and its incredible hardness, was quite foreign to him, and this no doubt gave Françoise Gilot a certain exotic charm; but with her dark-red hair, her fine complexion, the pure oval of her face, and above all her youth, she also had qualities of her own.

  However, in June, before their acquaintance had reached any very advanced state of intimacy, she went away for the summer and she did not come back to the studio for several months. At this point she was an agreeable interlude, but one of no great importance.

  Early in that fine September of 1943 Brassaï came to the rue des Grands-Augustins again, this time to photograph the sculpture; although since he refused to ask the Germans for a permit he had no more right to publish his work than Picasso had to exhibit his. He found Picasso wearing shorts and a striped singlet: he was in great form, but as soon as he had seized Brassaï and had kissed him on both cheeks he cried, “Tell me the truth—we haven’t seen one another for some time—I’ve changed a great deal, haven’t I? Look at what has happened to my hair! When I come across one of my old portraits, it quite frightens me.” Picasso was going bald: the top of his head was bare, its sides were gray, and his forelock was no more than a spectral wisp. It seemed absurd: his face and that brilliant eye, the window to his mind, were as full of ebullient life as ever they had been; yet in fact his body had now served him for sixty-one years and for at least forty of them it had been driven very hard indeed. The signs of wear were clearly visible, and when he thought of it, it either depressed him extremely or he flew out in passionate revolt. Fortunately there were a thousand other things that he felt with equal vehemence and pa
ssion, and on this occasion he branched straight off to his sculpture. The studio was now crowded with earlier figures from Boisgeloup and with new works, so crowded that they overflowed into another place that he had taken just down the street: like Brassaï, he had preferred most of them in plaster; but that wretched Sabartés had so worried and badgered him about the permanence of bronze that in the end he had been forced to yield to his importunities.

  Picasso was in excellent spirits: his cheerful bad faith, his delight in his sculpture, particularly the “Téte de taureau,” and his affectionate kindness to Brassaï were all in tune with the glorious weather and with the feeling of hope that filled the town—Italy had surrendered, the Russians were on the Dnieper, the Allies might be in France at any moment: they were dropping greater quantities of arms to the Resistance, and now they were bombing factories, railways, marshaling-yards, military installations by day as well as by night.

  Yet it nearly always took a considerable lapse of time before any general feeling showed itself in his work, and often it did not do so at all. While Brassaï was photographing his sculpture that September Picasso was painting such pictures as “Le Corsage raye” and “Le Buste de femme.” The first is the head and shoulders of a woman wearing a kind of geometrical hat and a blouse striped vertically from neck to bosom and then horizontally; her face is made of three curved planes in which signs for her features are incised, and these sharply-defined surfaces, lit by a light of their own, swirl about a central point that may be the tip of her nose. The second is a woman with a triple head—two interpenetrating profiles that also make a full face—sitting in a wicker armchair and wearing garments of that “matting” texture which he had used in 1938. They are fascinating pictures, but they have not the slightest connection with the state of the war in 1942. Nor do his illustrations for Desnos’ book, etchings that look straight back to the “Sueno y mentira de Franco,” with the same hatched polyp-like forms and the same concentration on the squid’s siphon. And the list could be carried on to a tedious length.