Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  As I have said, Picasso went out little once he had settled firmly in the rue des Grands-Augustins. He rose late, and he usually gave up his mornings to the friends who came to see him in ever-increasing numbers; he worked in the afternoon and evening, sometimes walking a few yards up the dark street to dine at the Catalan, often in company with the Leirises, Paul and Nusch Eluard, Dora Maar of course, and Robert Desnos, who came less to eat than to collect scraps for his cats. Then he would work again late into the night by powerful electric lamps when the current was not cut off, otherwise by candle. It was disagreeable walking about Paris, although the streets were almost empty of cars; there was always the sight of Germans to give offense and of the even more offensive collaborationist organizations such as the LVF, the Milice, or the PPF, the louts who beat up Jean Cocteau in the Champs-Elysees for not saluting them; then there was always the probability of being stopped for one’s papers, and the possibility of grave unpleasantness. As for traveling farther, that was even more disagreeable, especially for a foreigner. Nevertheless, as winter came on Picasso made the journey down to Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire to see Max Jacob.

  Max had been living there in the village by his monastery ever since 1936; they had corresponded, particularly on Max Jacob’s side, and messages had passed to and fro; but Picasso was a poor correspondent, and in 1942 Max complained to his friend Michel Béalu that he was forgotten—that André Salmon wrote rarely and Picasso not at all. That was an exaggeration, as he knew very well; and only a little while later he observed with satisfaction, “What explains my forty-one years of friendship with Picasso is the fact that we made this agreement: ‘Nothing people ever tell you about me is to count, and that is to work in both directions.’”

  Picasso found his friend old and very sad: his brother and sister had been arrested for being Jews and deported to Auschwitz. He was not afraid for himself, being sustained by a faith that took unusual and sometimes disconcerting forms but that nevertheless gave him an extraordinary inner strength; and presently his spirits rose as he showed Picasso his gouaches and as they talked over the innumerable days that had passed since they shared the same bed in a world now infinitely remote.

  Max had always laid claim to occult powers that allowed him to foretell the future; he read his friends’ palms, told their fortunes with tarot cards, and gave them talismans. No doubt he made fun of them to a certain extent—Max could never resist a laugh, whatever it cost him—but now, shortly after Picasso’s visit, he deliberately wrote the year of his own death in the visitors’ book at the basilica: Max Jacob, 1944.

  Back in Paris Picasso painted more of his gravely beautiful still-lives. In November, 1943, Françoise Gilot came to see him again. She had run away from home because her father would not let her give up the university for painting and she had taken refuge with her grandmother: she appeared at the studio two or three mornings a week, but although she became attached to him their relationship did not yet reach its obvious climax. Once indeed he took her from the usual group of friends in the lower studio and led her upstairs; but it was to show her André Malraux, who had come secretly to Paris from his maquis in the Correze, a maquis that now had at least some weapons to use against the Nazis.

  Everywhere the Resistance was making ready to play its vital part in the decisive stroke; every night when the moon served arms were being dropped; messengers plied to and fro, by air, by submarine, and across the Alps and Pyrenees; and the whole country was alive with rumors of the coming Allied invasion somewhere on the Channel coast. On all fronts the Germans were in retreat; in the east their losses were appalling; and at last it appeared that the war might really come to an end. But they clung to their hold on France with unparalleled fury: for the French it was like being penned up in an ever more constricted space with a mad bear, a very dangerous brute determined to do all the harm it could before it was brought under control. The deportations and the executions multiplied; the dreadful trains crept north and east to the overflowing camps.

  On February 24, 1944, Max Jacob was arrested and taken to Drancy, the usual first stage in the long journey to Auschwitz or Dachau. As soon as the news reached Paris Cocteau set about organizing a petition, while other friends used all the influence, all the contacts they possessed to set him free.

  Some twenty years later Pierre Andréu stated that Picasso, on being applied to, refused to intervene, saying, “It is not worth doing anything at all. Max is a will-o’-the-wisp. He has no need of our help to take to the air and fly out of his prison.” In L’Irreguliere (1974) Edmonde Charles-Roux repeats these words. I do not believe that they are true: not only are they in direct contradiction with the rest of Picasso’s behavior at the time, but the emissary is stated to have been Pierre Colle, the picture-dealer and Max Jacob’s literary executor; and Pierre Colle, like Cocteau, remained on good terms with Picasso after the war.

  But even if any intervention could have moved the pitiless Germans, it was too late. In the cold, damp, filthy hole where they had imprisoned him, Max Jacob caught pneumonia, and on March 5 he died. He was sixty-seven, an entirely harmless and very gentle old man, a poet as distinguished as any of his generation.

  His body was buried provisionally in a Jewish cemetery and those of his friends who had courage and devotion enough attended his funeral: Picasso was among them. (After the war Max was taken back to Saint-Benoit.)

  Next month the Gestapo came for Robert Desnos.He had some hours’ warning, but if he had escaped they would have arrested his companion Youki, once Foujita’s wife: he waited for them, and died in a concentration-camp, like so many of the finest men and women in France. No one was safe: no fame was a safeguard—Matisse’s wife was in prison and a little later the Germans seized his daughter, the Marguerite whose portrait was one of Picasso’s most valued possessions.

  In addition to all this the air-raids increased: some Parisians cheered the planes, but that did not always save them from being killed by the bombs.

  Life was uncertain from one day to the next, and in this atmosphere tense with violent and conflicting emotions many people determined to enjoy it while they could. The seduction of Françoise Gilot, if such a word can be applied to a young woman so very willing and to a process in which there was no deceit on Picasso’s part, no promises of any kind, advanced more rapidly. They agreed that she should come to the studio in the afternoons, thus avoiding Sabartés, who had disapproved of her from the start and who foretold nothing but unhappiness; and Picasso said that he would “teach her engraving” upstairs. Young as she was, she did not take engraving literally, and she arrived, dressed with great care for the sacrifice: a sacrifice that was not accepted on this occasion, however. Later she collaborated on a book about her life with Picasso, and if I understand the veiled terms rightly, she was at this time still a virgin.

  Before the year was out she did of course become Picasso’s mistress; but it does not seem that she was of any considerable importance to him in these early days. There was no explosion of portraits or of pictures based upon her, no sudden fresh burst of creation, as there had been in almost every other case. On the contrary, he went on painting his wonderfully satisfying, quiet still-lives, some of them showing the tomato-plants that he grew in pots on his window-sill among the cactuses and calceolarias; and these were diversified by small views of Paris.

  In June, 1944, the Allies landed. The Resistance instantly attacked the German lines of communication, pinning down essential divisions, and as the Germans retreated from the south they killed without mercy: in Oradour, for example, they massacred every living soul, 634 men, women, and children burned in the village church. In August the Allies broke through, and the massive slaughter began in the concentration-camps. The fighting neared Paris, and there was every likelihood that the Germans would lay the city in ruins, decimating the population, before they were driven out.

  Picasso painted steadily. His tomatoes were ripening now, and as General Leclerc’s French armored division ra
ced up for the honor of liberating Paris he painted four pictures of the growing plants. The Germans were ready for Leclerc, but not for the people of Paris. Before the tanks reached the outskirts the whole city rose against the oppressors; barricades went up overnight and thousands upon thousands of men and women joined in the fighting, police, railwaymen, secretaries, officials, all the members of the Resistance groups, and an enormous battle broke out. Hidden stores of arms appeared, far more than the Germans had expected: in spite of their heavy weapons they could scarcely move except in tanks, and even those were often burned in the streets. But there were a great many Germans; they were reinforced by the now desperate armed collaborationists; and they had hundreds of strong-points all over Paris. The fighting grew in intensity. It was extremely dangerous to go out: merely watching from his window, Picasso was within an inch of being killed—the bullet passed right by his head. Nevertheless, with the strange, unorganized battle going on all round him, and with the likelihood of a German tank in any street or a milicien with a rifle on any rooftop, killing for the sake of killing now that all hope was gone, he made his way to Marie-Thérèse’s flat on the He Saint-Louis, the best part of a mile away, where there was very heavy fighting.

  Here he painted two careful portraits of his daughter, a sweet child now, the best kind of little girl, and the head of a young woman—of what young woman I do not know. Then, as the days went by and the battle grew still more furious, he took a reproduction of Poussin’s “Triumph of Pan” that happened to be in the flat and set himself to transposing the picture in his own terms, using what materials he had to hand, watercolor and gouache. He painted with the utmost brilliancy of tone; and as he painted, says Penrose, he sang at the top of his voice, partly drowning the thunder of heavy guns (the French armor was in the city now), the crash of falling glass, the rifle and machine-gun fire, the rumble of the tanks.

  His love for Poussin did not bind him to any servile fidelity: he took over the general scheme, the landscape almost tree for tree, the person with a trumpet on the left and the lunging figure on the right, the vase and the masks in the foreground; but whereas Poussin’s Pan triumphed with at least some sense of measure, Picasso’s splendid party is in wilder movement by far, a swirling maze of pin-headed nymphs, fauns, happy bare limbs and bodies, liberating themselves with love and music and great quantities of food, fruit, and wine.

  Chapter XVIII

  THE Libération filled the whole of France with joy, and Picasso was as happy as any of his friends; yet for him it was the beginning of imprisonment within his own myth and of banishment from ordinary society, a sentence that he was to serve for the rest of his life.

  Before the war he had been a very well-known painter, famous at least by name among all Europeans who knew anything about art, vaguely notorious among the general public. He was no more exempt from vanity than the ordinary run of men and for many years he had enjoyed this limited fame; while at the same time he was clearly aware of its disadvantages, its isolating effect, and its corrosive action on some human relationships. But it did not spread far beyond his own world; his reputation, though great, was largely a matter of hearsay for those out of reach of the galleries in the capital cities; the time of the sumptuous books of colored reproductions was not yet come; the French museums possessed little of his work, those of most other countries even less; and in spite of his enormous output few people had had the opportunity of seeing any considerable body of his pictures except at the two retrospective exhibitions, the one in Paris in 1932 and the other in the United States at the beginning of the war. Until this time his personal appearance was not widely known; few who had not met him knew who he was, and he could walk about like an ordinary mortal. Self-awareness was not forced upon him: he was not a public figure.

  Now everything was changed. Of the three great and irreproachable names upon which the love of art could focus only Picasso had the robust, outgoing temperament that could stand the glare: the invalid Matisse, now in his seventies, lived in retirement far away at Vence; the reticent Braque abhorred publicity. Furthermore, throughout the Occupation great numbers of résistants had met in Picasso’s studio, and the place itself, dominated by “L’Homme au mouton,” together with its uncompromising occupant, became a symbol of the Resistance, of light, freedom, and all they were fighting for. Then again, in the confusion of the battle Picasso’s absence from the rue des Grands-Augustins had been misinterpreted; it was widely supposed that the Germans had taken him at last, that in their retreat they had seized upon him as a hostage or as still another victim; and when he was found to be safe the whole world rang with the news.

  From that moment on his name was continually in the papers; and when on October 5 of this Libération year it was announced that he had joined the Communist Party the publicity increased to an extraordinary degree. He now possessed a world-wide notoriety; as well as this he was a combination of the highest art, of what might be called constructive Resistance, and of the left-wing outlook, and in order to set the unmistakable mark of the Libération on their show, the Salon d’Automne, backed by his Communist friend Jean Cassou, the new curator of the Musée national d’art moderne, invited him to take part, offering him an entire gallery to himself. For the first time in his life he accepted, and the visitors to the Salon de la Libération, which opened on October 6, were astonished to see no less than seventy-four paintings and five sculptures, mostly of the recent years and mostly quite unknown: they were even more astonished when groups of hooligans tried to destroy the paintings, bawling insults as they did so. What these people represented is hard to say: perhaps reaction in its final gasp: perhaps French bourgeois anti-Communism and xenophobia—their cry of “Money back” is surely significant of a certain set of values. They were easily overcome, but the repeated scenes added to the already enormous publicity, which now grew to such a pitch that Picasso’s studio was filled day and night with journalists and with American soldiers (they slept on the floor in heaps, says Françoise Gilot).

  I do not believe for a moment that Picasso organized this publicity in any way: but in the wild excitement of freedom recovered he did enjoy it. He loved new contacts, he loved fun and clowning, and he had the immense vitality that enabled him to withstand these incessant assaults. And then of course with the frightful strain removed and with his friends coming out of hiding or set free from their prisons (Marguerite Matisse-Duthuit was just saved from deportation as her train neared the frontier) he overflowed with kindness, as may be seen from his unexampled patience with Pfc. Seckler.

  Yet at some point in all the happy turmoil Picasso changed, or was changed, from a capital painter, known as such a painter should be known, into a monstre sacré, a holy cow surrounded with an enormous, self-perpetuating, inescapable, and generally irrelevant notoriety. And whereas a capital painter may be a man among other men, of finer essence no doubt but still capable of bleeding when pricked, a sacred monster may not; and when he is pricked he must ooze gold rather than blood, or at least a kind of contagious fame. To the natural inequality between him and most men is added a factitious and often somewhat tawdry rank: he is never allowed to forget his status and he must live almost as lonely as the phoenix, surrounded by courtiers rather than friends—a hard fate for one who loved company as much as Picasso.

  The change did not come about at once, and its accompaniment of vast wealth, with all the possibility of corrupting power, authority, and freedom from restraint that wealth implies, was still some few years away, together with his full realization that fame was “the castigation by God of the artist,” and of the fact that a certain kind of fame means solitude.

  In those early, ecstatic months his association with the Communists, quite apart from his union with his other friends, gave him a perhaps illusory and transient feeling of belonging to a larger body, of escaping from his role as a permanent outsider. Many people were astonished at his joining them—the gesture was entirely against his best interests as they were see
n by the dealers, since it was obvious that some American collectors at least would stop buying works by a Communist—and very soon he was asked why he had become a member. He replied in an interview conducted by Pol Gaillard for New Masses of New York that was also published in L’Humanité, the French Communist paper.

  I should much rather answer with a picture for I am not a writer; but since sending my colors by wire is far from easy, I shall try to tell you in words.

  My joining the Communist Party is the logical outcome of my whole life and of the whole body of my work. For I am proud to say that I have never looked upon painting as an art intended for mere pleasure or amusement: since line and color are my weapons, I have used them in my attempt at gaining a continually greater understanding of the world and of mankind, so that this understanding might give us all a continually greater freedom. In my own way I have tried to recount what seems to me the truest, the most exact, the best; and naturally, as the greatest artists know very well, that is invariably the most beautiful too.

  Yes, I do feel that by my painting I always fought as a true revolutionary. But now I have come to see that even that is not enough: these years of terrible oppression have showed me that I have to fight not only with my art but with my whole being.

  So I joined the Communists without the slightest hesitation, because fundamentally I had been with the Party from the very start. Aragon, Eluard, Cassou, Fougeron and all my friends know that perfectly well; and the reason why I had not joined officially before was a kind of simple-mindedness on my part, since I used to think that my work and the fact that my heart belonged were enough; but it was already my own party. Is it not the Communist Party that works hardest at understanding and molding the world, at helping the people of today and of tomorrow to become clearer-minded, freer, happier? Was it not the Communists who were the bravest in France, just as they were in the USSR or my own Spain? What could possibly have made me hesitate? Fear of finding myself committed? But I have never felt more free nor more wholly myself! And then again I was so impatient to have a country of my own once more: I had always been an exile and now I am not an exile any longer. Until the day I can at last return to Spain, the French Communist Party has opened its arms to me, and in the Party I have found all those I most respect, the greatest scientists, the greatest poets, and all the glorious, beautiful insurgent faces I saw in those August days when Paris rose: I am among my brothers once again!