Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  Since French Communism, as it is ordinarily practiced, is a great way from Moscow’s version (in the last elections there was a poster in Provence that read “Vote Communist, the party of the small proprietors”), and since many French members are not doctrinaire Communists, no great readers of Marx or Lenin, but join out of a generosity of heart and a hatred for the injustices and inequalities of the capitalist system, in a sense Picasso was among his brothers, particularly in those exalting days of the Libération and then the victory, before party politics and party dogmatism resumed their sour old grind, destroying the unity and joy. But even then there were very few among them with whom he could possibly talk about painting and even fewer of the leaders who had any notion of what his work was all about. The Communist views on art, on Socialist-Realism, and on the necessity for educating the masses by direct propaganda were of course the antithesis of Picasso’s, and in their disagreement neither side ever yielded an inch at any time.

  Picasso’s declaration was pronounced at a moment of the utmost enthusiasm (at no other time could he possibly have bracketed himself with the Socialist-Realist Fougeron), and his strong sense of occasion may have led him to say more than he meant. Some weeks later, when he was talking to Geneviève Laporte, he gave a simpler, more private, and perhaps more convincing explanation. “You see, I am not French but Spanish,” he said. “I am against Franco. The only way I could make it known was by joining the Communist Party, thus proving that I belonged to the other side.”

  Geneviève Laporte was then at the Lycée Fénelon, not far from the rue des Grands-Augustins, an entrancing girl of seventeen, all long graceful lines in his drawings of her; and her Resistance group at school had a majority of Communists. In an attempt at becoming a Marxist she had read Politzer and Stalin, but it would not do; she could not honestly join the Party. “Have you read Marx?” she asked.

  “No,” said Picasso. Nor, it appeared, had he read anything else on the subject.

  She was not a Communist, but she was a résistante; and it was as a résistante and as a reporter for her school newspaper that she called at Picasso’s studio, almost blind with shyness, shortly after the ugly scenes at the Salon de la Libération. Sabartés opened the door on his way out; she took him for Picasso and poured forth her prepared speech, glowing crimson as she did so. With a distant expression on his face, Sabartés listened until she had quite finished, observed, “I am not Monsieur Picasso,” closed the door, and began to walk downstairs. But after a moment he added, smiling for the first time, “Come again tomorrow at noon: then vou will see him.”

  Although he disapproved of women in Picasso’s life and would willingly have kept them out of the studio at least, he was as good as his word. She was admitted, taken into the lower studio full of visitors, and introduced; Picasso received her very kindly, led her into another room, sat her on a park bench, and talked to her about her lycée. She showed him her school paper; he showed her some of his drawings, recent pictures, and reproductions of earlier work. Presently she gathered courage enough to come to the point: the purpose of the interview was to elicit a general explanation of Picasso’s art, which her schoolfellows did not quite understand, an explanation that would provide them with ammunition against the vile Fascist reactionaries who decried him and who said that he mocked the public; and she began with the familiar words “I don’t understand…”

  “Understand!” cried Picasso. “What the Devil has it to do with understanding? Since when has a picture been a mathematical proof? It’s not there to explain—explain what, for God’s sake?—but to awaken feeling in the heart of the person looking at it. A work of art must not be something that leaves a man unmoved, something he passes by with a casual glance. It has to make him react, feel strongly, start creating too, if only in his imagination. He must be jerked out of his torpor, seized by the throat and shaken up; he has to be made aware of the world he’s living in, and for that he must first be jolted out of it.” Growing calmer, he told her a great deal about aesthetics that she had not known, about beauty, its relative nature, the beauty of ugliness, the prime value of imagination; then he guided her, blushing again, to the door, asked Sabartés (in the midst of a dead silence among the visitors) to give her his telephone number, and invited her to come again when her article was written.

  This was the beginning of such a pleasant relationship. She came every Wednesday, in the afternoon, when he should have been working; they sat on the park bench and she prattled away while he fed her chocolate, a treasure scarcely to be found in France, brought him by the American soldiers.

  In spite of these stolen afternoons and of the time he spent with Françoise Gilot, with his innumerable visitors and with his work for the Spanish refugees, he painted steadily, often far into the night: still-lives, his tomato-plants, views of Paris. And in spite of the happy upheaval of his public and his private worlds, there was little change in his painting. The still-lives, often with candles, sometimes with skulls, are perhaps even more powerful than before, and one neo-Cubist view of Paris which brings the Sacré-Coeur into the same landscape as Notre-Dame is more brilliant and considerably larger than the rest of the series; but in general his pictures of 1944 and 1945 are those of a man neither more nor less Communist, neither more nor less committed than ever he was, nor overwhelmed either by the Libération or by his more intimate emotions.

  Indeed so little did any particular engagement appear that some people doubted or affected to doubt the sincerity of his Party membership, especially as he was reported to have denied any connection between art and politics. Françoise Téry of Les Lettres françaises, the intelligent Communist weekly, told him of what was being said; he reacted violently, darted out of the room, and came back some minutes later with a hastily penciled statement that ran: “What do you think an artist is? A half-wit with nothing but eyes if he is a painter, ears if he is a musician, lyres installed on every floor of his head if he is a poet, or just muscles and nothing else if he happens to be a boxer? Far, far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, keenly and perpetually aware of the heartbreaking or passionate or delightful things that happen in the world, and he molds himself entirely in their likeness. How could you conceivably cut yourself off from other men and from the life they bring you in such abundance? In the name of what uncaring, ivory-tower kind of attitude? No: painting is not there merely to decorate the walls of flats. It is a means of waging offensive and defensive war against the enemy.”

  As a political credo it is about as specific as Voltaire’s écrasez I’infdme, and it can scarcely have given much satisfaction to the Party theorists; but as a picture of what Picasso meant by politics it could not be improved.

  As his friendship with Geneviève Laporte increased so his relations with Françoise Gilot became more difficult. There was no necessary connection. For him Geneviève Laporte was still a delightful child: all through the autumn and the harsh winter of 1944 to 1945 her visits continued. She was promoted to a seat on the hairy bull-skin that covered his bed, and there she sat, while Picasso made her tea and fetched her his week’s drawings and engravings. Once, indeed, he did suggest that she should stay with the skin she so much admired, but she understood it as a joke; and it is a fact that even then he said vous rather than the familiar tu that was to come in later years. Françoise Gilot, on the other hand, was now his mistress; familiarity had done its usual work; and she, unlike Geneviève Laporte, was now acquainted with the choleric, irascible side of his character, expressed in such warm terms as, “I don’t know why I told you to come. It would be more fun to go to a brothel.”

  This aspect of Picasso was well known to his friends, his household, and himself; they dreaded his pale silent fury even more than the black rages during which, as Brassaï puts it, “flame burst from the nostrils of the Minotaur.” 1 have not spoken of them hitherto for fear of giving the impression that Picasso spent a considerable proportion of his life in a state of fulminating discontent, which is
untrue. Long before he was an old man, habitual kindness had set its mark upon his face, and although on occasion he could erupt like a volcano, kindness always comes into any description by those who knew him well, and often it is the first trait they mention. Brassaï, who frequently uses the word, was one of those men to whom accidents occur: he was alone in the studio one day in November, 1943, photographing the plaster “Homme au mouton,” and as he turned it so that the light should strike at a fresh angle one of the sheep’s legs fell off, shattering to pieces as it hit the plinth. After a long and very unhappy pause—like most people he had heard of the Minotaur’s rages; and this was perhaps Picasso’s most highly-valued figure—he went to tell his news. On hearing it, Picasso said nothing; he walked into the studio, examined the damage with a knowing eye, and quietly observed that it was not very serious—the slot had not been deep enough—he would repair it one of these days. And when Brassai left him some time later Picasso said, “I was not cross, was I?”

  But the potentiality for rage was there, and sometimes the rage itself; and few people could withstand either of them or the full force of Picasso’s personality. Certainly Dora Maar could not, and Françoise Gilot found it difficult. In 194S she took to seeing less of him, staying away for a week or a fortnight or sometimes as long as two months. Dora Maar’s reaction was quite different. She scarcely came to the studio at all but waited in her flat just round the corner for him to telephone her, and then they would go out together: she was permanently at his disposition. But she was reaching the limit of her endurance, although she still did her best to join in Picasso’s very active and often very gay social life, Brassaï gives an account of her appearance at a luncheon-party at the Catalan, where Picasso and his many guests were in the greatest form, laughing, talking, telling stories (Picasso was a splendid mime and a perfect host). She came late, alone, unsmiling, mute, and sat down; two minutes later she stood up and left. Picasso hurried after her. An hour later he came back, looking utterly horrified, and called Eluard out of the room. Neither returned.

  At this juncture, Françoise Gilot, coming back to the rue des Grands-Augustins after one of her absences, found her lover in a frame of mind that she could not understand at first. He told her that Dora Maar had had a nervous breakdown, with hallucinations, and that his friend Dr. Lacan had taken her away to his nursing-home. This had happened not in one bout, but over several days, in the course of which (I quote Gilot) Dora Maar had said, “As an artist you may be extraordinary, but morally speaking you’re worthless,” while Eluard had blamed him for her condition, thumping a chair on the floor so passionately that it broke to pieces.

  Picasso expected others to be as strong as he was himself—it seemed normal—and Dora Maar’s collapse not only distressed but puzzled and disconcerted him. He had a great respect for Eluard, and Eluard’s denunciation, coming on top of Dora Maar’s, shook him badly. Even at the time, of course, he had found an argument that satisfied some level of his mind: Dora Maar frequented the Surrealists; the Surrealists advocated irrationality (Eluard himself had said that delirium was the purest expression of reason); it was therefore their fault. But the question of his moral worth remained with him, never entirely resolved.

  By the time summer came the war in Europe was over. The concentration-camps, having shown the world the unimaginable baseness of the totalitarian mind, gave up their survivors: many who came back to France were walking skeletons, often tubercular. Some of them had been with Robert Desnos when he died from starvation and ill-treatment after the journey from Buchenwald to Terezine; and what he heard from them, and the photographs, moved Picasso very deeply.

  Although the road to the south was now open at last he did not go away until long after the victory. During these months he was preoccupied with a picture on a scale comparable to that of “Guernica.” Like “Guernica,” “Le Charnier”—the charnel-house—has no color: everything is gray, shading to black on the one hand and to white on the other. Although it is not a quarter of the size of “Guernica,” which was designed for a given wall, it is still a big canvas, about six feet by eight and a half, and it seems larger because of its grayness. High on the left stands a white table with a crumpled cloth, a jug, a saucepan, perhaps a piece of bread; they are seen only in line, but otherwise they are in the same spirit as his recent still-lives. The table exists on one plane: on another, physically below it and extending in a diagonal from the lower left-hand corner towards the upper right, lies a tumbled heap of bodies, a man, a woman, and a baby, thrown together pell-mell. Almost in the middle of the picture the starved man’s stick-like legs, rigid in death, with their huge feet tied at the ankles, rise as once the soldier’s arm with its clenched fist had risen in “Guernica.” The painting makes no concession to popular taste; it is entirely Picasso in its use of the Cubist idiom, its distortion, and its sculptural planes. Yet it is a direct, not a symbolic statement: a silent, massive condemnation of the stated facts.

  “Guernica,” with all its scores of drawings and composition-studies, was painted at great speed, perhaps in little more than a month, one stage following the other with bewildering rapidity. “Le Charnier” would not come. All the essentials were there by July, yet the picture was not finished for the Salon d’Automne of 1945. Nor was it finished by February, 1947, when it was shown in the exhibition of Art and the Resistance, nor even some years later when he sold it to an American collector.

  It is a picture that possesses great force and clarity; it is a proof, if proof were needed, that he did not live in any ivory tower; but it has nothing like the emotional impact of “Guernica.” The everlasting wrong of the concentration-camps, the cold, deliberate slaughter of millions upon millions of people, was evil of an order of magnitude new to the world, horrible beyond the powers of Picasso or of any other man.

  And while he was working on “Le Charnier” Picasso’s mind could not be as wholly fixed upon his subject as it had been in the days of “Guernica.” There was his renewed grief for Desnos and Jacob and many other friends; there were the contrary, insistent claims of his living friends, who in spite of Sabartés devoured his time, bringing about wild fluctuations of mood; there was Dora Maar’s illness; and there was his consciousness of growing old. More than most men he felt the mutilation of advancing age: most feel it cruelly enough, the hopeless struggle against castration and declining powers, the battle that can only end in defeat; but few are so wholly committed to life as Picasso was; few have ever had his powers to lose. His grand climacteric had come and gone, a time when age often presses on one’s mind more than it does later; and his awareness of it, and perhaps his resentment of their youth, may account for some of his occasionally savage treatment of his mistresses.

  A ludicrous but significant instance is his deep concern over his forelock. Time out of mind, well before Samson, hair has been a symbol of virility; it has always had a great magic power and the loss of it has been a disaster. Picasso’s hair was primarily the lock drooping over his eyes, and now in his sixty-fourth year the lock was leaving him; that spring, at the risk of turning himself from a fiery bull to a dull-eyed steer, he cut off the sparse remains, recording the event on the title-page of a book by Poe: “No more forelock! Paris, May 12, 1945.”

  Then there was the showing of his pictures in London. It was an unusually important exhibition, and Picasso was sensitive to newspaper criticism—that is to say, although he never took the slightest notice of any man’s strictures, never changed his approach for praise or blame, he read the papers with the utmost attention, just as he watched his visitors’ faces as he showed them what he had done. Once again he was exhibiting with Matisse, as he had first done forty-three years ago, but this time it was at the Victoria and Albert Museum rather than in Berthe Weill’s little gallery, and it was organized by the British Council, no less. But while the Matisses were more in the nature of a general view or retrospective, all but one of Picasso’s paintings belonged to the war years: the contrast between the
serene detachment of the one and the violence and often savage introspection of the other was startling, but even without that the British public would have been amazed. It was long since they had seen anything of Picasso, and this concentration of his recent experience, much of it expressed in manners they were not used to, shocked them extremely, the more so for being in that staid, official building, with its smell of established death. But at least they did not pass the pictures by with a casual glance: many of them reacted by writing to the papers, and day after day the middle page of The Times was filled with attacks and counter-attacks of a rare virulence.

  Finally, late in the summer, leaving the unfinished picture behind him, he took Dora Maar to the south. They drove down, for at last there was petrol for civilian cars and now the elderly Hispano-Suiza could take to the road again. There they stayed part of the time at Golfe-Juan and part of the time at Cap d’Antibes, with Madame Cuttoli, a collector whose wealth allowed her to indulge her real passion for the arts—she was a leading figure in the revival of French tapestry—and one in whose villa he was free from the cries of Give, give that had worn his spirit ever since he became well-known and that now increased even faster than his notoriety, from the sprats artfully designed to catch a whale, and from the impression that he was an inexhaustible source of free (and marketable) pictures, drawings, and engravings for the first fool with flattery to spare or a handsome wife to prostitute.