In October they went back to Paris, partly for an exhibition of 1946 Antibes drawings at the Leiris gallery, partly for a larger if not more important show of Picasso’s pots at the Maison de la Pensée française, the Party’s window on to its intellectual activities, and partly because his first enthusiasm for ceramics had waned. It was in Paris that he painted his charming picture of Claude in his Polish clothes—one of many portraits of the child—as well as two versions of “La Cuisine,” large canvases based on the kitchen in the rue des Grands-Augustins with its birdcages for the turtle-doves and the owl, but so far removed in its extreme, almost monochrome simplification and its use of rectilinear signs that it is as nearly abstract as anything he ever did. The same tendency, in some degree allied to his dot compositions of 1926, is to be seen in other pictures of this time, and one possible explanation is that it represents a reaction from his pots, with their physical continuity and flowing line, a return to a more rigorous organization of an ideal rather than an actual space.
The exhibition of Picasso’s ceramics, a hundred and forty-nine of his best pieces, excited no great outcry, which rather disappointed him; but on the other hand it sent all the other painters, sculptors, and handymen hurrying to the nearest pottery, so that for the next twenty years France was flooded with misshapen jugs and ashtrays, while at the same time tourists flocked to Vallauris, bringing a material prosperity hitherto unknown and destroying what was left of the ancient craft: old kilns revived, producing near-Picassos by the gross, and new chimneys poured more smoke into the already polluted air.
The year 1948 moved into 1949: Françoise’s pregnancy grew more evident, and Picasso painted some pictures of her in which the schematic face, sometimes black and white, is strangely divorced from the fine color of the rest. Then in April her daughter was born. The birth coincided with a great Communist peace congress in Paris for which Picasso had been asked to provide a poster. It is certain that he agreed: it is equally certain that he had nothing ready by the appointed time, although he spent many of his days in Mourlot’s workshop. With only a short while to go Aragon looked through the portfolios at the rue des Grands-Augustins and found an exquisite print of a pigeon, a white pigeon of the breed that has a frilly neck and long feathers covering its feet: Matisse, who had even more birds in his house than Picasso, had given him the pigeon some time before, a present that filled Picasso with uneasiness: was Matisse making fun of him? Would it not be better to eat the bird rather than to draw it? Finally he made this lithograph, white upon black, one of his most successful prints, and of course without the remotest hint of propaganda. Aragon, immeasurably brighter than his Party colleagues as far as indirection was concerned, at once saw its possibilities as a poster and carried it off. The bird, the symbol of the peace congress, now became a dove, with all the connotations that implies; it appeared overnight on every wall and hoarding in Paris, applauded even by violent anti-Communists; and Picasso, very pleased (he loved applause) christened the baby Paloma.
Paloma was a fine child, and in his own way Picasso was delighted with her. He esteemed intellectual power of the kind possessed by Matisse, Giacometti, Braque, Eluard, and some of his scientific friends such as Lacan and Langevin, but the ordinary range did not interest him much; he looked rather for an intelligence of another order, that of the heart in some cases and of the body in others, a quality often to be found in the young, an almost impersonal and perhaps undeserved attribute that so very often fades entirely, like the ability to produce pictures with no effort of any kind.
For a while he found it in these children, and he painted them often, sometimes singly, sometimes together, and sometimes with their mother: they are admirable pictures, but they are worlds apart from the intensely personal earlier studies of Paulo as a little boy—finer paintings, maybe, yet far more detached, the work of a man who was primarily an artist rather than a doting father.
This was a rich year, with his lithographic versions of the Cranach Venus, with paintings by the score and a renewed outpouring of ceramics; rich for the public too, with his big exhibition of recent work at the Maison de la Pensée française from July until December, 1949; but the next was richer still, for it produced not only many of his finest pots and some remarkably interesting pictures, including his restatement of Courbet’s “Demoiselles des bords de la Seine” and of El Greco’s portrait of a painter, but also “La Chévre,” one of the high points of his sculpture, and several other pieces.
Picasso had been thinking of a return to sculpture as early as 1949. By that time, with still another child in the house and with an even greater accumulation of pots and canvases, he was short of room at Vallauris, and in the summer he bought a disused scent-factory down the hill from La Galloise, a ramshackle building that provided him with two painting-studios and the barn-like space he needed for his modeling, carving, and fitting together of improbable junk—a kind of three-dimensional collage taken far beyond the limits of the Surrealists’ objets trouvés aidés. What is more, quite near the new studio were rubbish-heaps, full of possibilities, and in 1950 he began to make the most of them.
Sculpture had been in his mind, but some particular circumstance was required to bring it into action on a large scale, and it may be that the presence of a bronze cast of “L’Homme au mouton,” fresh from the foundry, worked as a catalyst. Early in the year Vallauris, grateful for the prosperity he had brought, for the “publicité énorme,” made him an honorary citizen of the ugly and now very smoky little place, and in return—for it was impossible to outdo Picasso in generosity on such occasions—he presented the statue to the town.
For a while he was still busy with his ceramics, his painting, and his lithographs. Although there are signs of strain many of them are agreeably domestic, showing the children and Françoise: but it is significant that at least one of the heads related to her is broken up in the savage way reminiscent of his days with Olga, and that these children are not seen with Maya, although the little girl and Marie-Thérèse were spending their holidays close at hand. But presently the new inhabitants of the sculpture-studio began to appear: a pregnant woman, her distended belly being part of a round pot and her breasts two more, all from the rubbish-heap: a little girl skipping, her body and arms a flat basket with two handles, her face incised plaster cast in a box, her wooden legs wearing two huge old shoes, the whole held up in the air by an iron tube that rises from the ground to make the skipping-rope: and above all the goat.
When one has been told about the materials Picasso used, materials that were by definition rubbish, they can be seen there in the unifying bronze, with all their potentialities realized: a worn-out basket, two imperfect jugs, a palm-frond thrown up by the sea, a tin, some bits of wood and metal strip, cardboard, plaster. From these he formed the essence of all goats, a disgraceful, aggressively female creature, as pregnant as can be and rather larger than life-size. The differing textures of the materials, reproduced by the bronze, explain some small part of its value; its stance, form, volumes, and inspired distortions explain much more; but the whole goat far exceeds the sum of its parts, and in its way it is the most satisfying sculpture Picasso ever made—surely something very near the Platonic idea of that powerful, somewhat diabolic, salacious, unshapely, ill-smelling yet companionable beast.
The “Tête de mort” is no doubt a more important statement, but on its own level “La Chévre” stands alone. As well as all its other virtues, the creature conveys that pagan sense of fun proper to goats and to Picasso: indeed, a friend who was at Vallauris while it was being made, a painter, told me that originally there was a rubber squeaker in its belly, directed towards the protruding tube that forms the anus and that Picasso could make make it sound at will. This vanished in the process of casting, but the simple merriment remains.
Picasso was happy when he was in his studio working on the goat and the other sculptures. Yet the circumstances did not seem favorable for happiness, for although the children gave him the livel
iest pleasure, their mother was not an easy companion at all. She often felt aggrieved, and one task that she resented even more than the others was lighting the stoves in the factory-studios early in the morning so that they should be warm by the time Picasso got out of bed, much later in the day. By her account he worked her very hard, although at this time she was going back to her own painting; but a woman who is inclined to play the martyr is likely to become one in earnest whether she chooses to or not, and there is a curious contrast between the beautiful slattern Fernande, lying in bed at the Bateau-Lavoir, sleepily watching Picasso sweep the lane that led from the divan “along a narrow valley among the empty sardine-tins and the respectable depth of oyster-shells” to his easel, and the indignant Françoise shoveling her ashes some forty years later. Martyrdom in a marriage or its equivalent is rarely left unshared, however, and perhaps this was but one more example of two people wrapped together with barbed wire and tearing one another to pieces: certainly Picasso, who could be more agreeable than most men to a woman who pleased him, could also be exceptionally unpleasant to one who did not—he justified the comparative absence of servants by saying that since Françoise Gilot had wanted the children it was but right that she should look after them herself—yet upon the whole he seems to have come off worst in these dreary, long-drawn-out and destructive battles.
The one thing that he felt more than all the rest was gloom in the house. The summer mornings were very well, with quantities of friends on the beach at Golfe-Juan, and the working part of the day was even better; but glumness, wry looks, and resentment were but too often his lot for the rest of the time. One should never underestimate the power of a woman, they say, nor her capacity for eating a man alive; and after some time of this, Picasso, as he told Eluard, was near to killing himself.
The fact that he did not do so in spite of the steadily increasing gloom he put down to the presence of Geneviève Laporte, who “made him laugh again” and thus saved his life: and although the exact dates are uncertain it is likely that the happiness of his sculpture was also due to her.
Since 1945 she had grown up into a very elegant slim young woman, much given to country life, the writing of verse, and the company of dogs and horses: at intervals of traveling she had flitted through the life of Picasso and Sabartés and the Eluards, retaining all their affection and her own cat-like charm. By 1950 she had settled in France again, and she was seeing a good deal of Picasso, in and about Paris: and by 1951 they were lovers. Those are almost the only firm dates that can be advanced: but Geneviève Laporte was a poet rather than an annalist and when in 1972 she came to write Si tard le soir… her purpose was less to set down a chronology of their loves than a portrait of the man. This she did with a success comparable to that of Sabartés and Brassaï, and the Picasso she described was essentially the same man they knew, though of course seen in an entirely different light—a very, very much kinder and a far bigger man than the character of the same name in Lake and Gilot, a great artist rather than an art-master. There is almost no bitterness in the book, although in time they parted: only a certain disillusion and a few strokes, mostly directed at people other than Picasso, that one could wish away: yet it must be admitted that some of his less attractive sides, such as his jealousy of Braque and Cocteau, are to be seen both in Laporte and Gilot. (Geneviève Laporte took her title from a dedication that Picasso wrote on one of his presents to her: Si tard le soir le soleil brille . . .the lateness of the day being no doubt his age and the blazing sun his love.)
It must also be admitted that Sabartés’ dictum “Picasso is never to be taken literally” is exemplified in Si tard le soir…. Sometimes he is obviously just having fun—the monkey of his Céret days, for example, swells to a chimpanzee the size of a twelve-year-old child—but there are places where his words are more disturbing, as when he is reported to have said that the Rousseau banquet was really a joke—nobody believed in his talent—and to have reproached the Cubist Braque with copying him.
Yet although he uttered some curious statements and although one sometimes has the impression that Picasso liked making game of a young, very pretty, and rather credulous friend—that he did not think himself on oath when they were talking and laughing together—he almost always did so in the pleasantest way, and apart from those ungenerous flings at Cocteau and Braque (whose work was fetching remarkably high prices at this time, higher even than Picasso’s) and an unfortunate incident towards the end of the book, the general picture is one of a tender, generous, kind, and most affectionate Picasso.
While it lasted theirs was an idyllic relationship. In many ways they were admirably suited: she loved the man for himself and she had the deepest admiration for his work, while he respected her poetry, her lovely person, and her rare attitude, uninvading, unpossessive, gay, and above all entirely friendly, wholly with him and on his side. When she says, “I believe I was Picasso’s only deep love and in all likelihood his last” she may well be right. The years between them did not signify: Picasso’s spirit was as young as hers, and in his seventieth year he climbed the Provençal hills with the same elastic step, talking to her as to a contemporary, telling her about Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, who were so living in his mind. He had now outgrown that fear of age which had haunted him some years before—“You know, if I never looked in a glass 1 should not know 1 had grown old,” he said—and now he rarely thought of it except when some unlucky word forced it into his mind: once Geneviève Laporte observed that in fifty years’ time she would be able to tell her grandchildren about him, and his eyes filled with tears. And of course the word death was never to be spoken.
It was a singular as well as a beautiful relationship, and one of its singularities lay in its uncalculated discretion. Geneviève Laporte was quite at home in the rue des Grands-Augustins once more, and the whole household welcomed her heartily when she came to stay: Picasso and she traveled about the countryside, and since he could not drive they were necessarily in the company of Marcel: the Eluards hired them a little house at Saint-Tropez: Cocteau and Jean Marais knew them well: yet none of these people talked. From the summer of 1950 onwards the Korean crisis and then the war filled the headlines, but Picasso was still front-page news in a certain kind of paper, yet no word leaked out. None of the serious books on him speak of Geneviève Laporte as anything but the author of a collection of poems that he illustrated in 1954, and even Crespelle’s curious Picasso and his Women of 1967 does not mention her name. Perhaps she engendered a protective affection in many of those who knew her: she certainly did at the rue des Grands-Augustins, where she had nothing but allies.
But the world was too much with Picasso for him to be allowed to swim indefinitely at Saint-Tropez with Geneviève Laporte, to climb the scented hills, or even to continue with his series of happy landscapes. Among other things there was the unlucky flat in the rue La Boëtie: he had not lived there for years, but he valued it as a storehouse, as something belonging to him, and he furiously resisted attempts at requisition, particularly as he believed that on the pretext of dealing with the shortage of houses the authorities were in fact persecuting him as a Communist. He stirred up all his influential friends—he had an enormous acquaintance—but the comradeship of the Liberation was long past now, the tide was running strongly against the. Communists, and presently the seals were back on his doors again. Picasso and all his belongings were put out: seventy crates full, says Gilot. But this did not happen until the end of the protracted, hard-fought legal proceedings, that is to say in August, 1951, and before that, in November, 1950, he went to England to attend another peace congress.
The British government was strongly opposed to this Sheffield meeting, held in the middle of the Korean war; so was a wide section of public opinion, not all of it merely anti-Communist. The delegates, including the Nobel prize winner Frédéric Joliot-Curie, were turned back at Dover: all of them except Picasso, who, having been allowed through the barriers, suddenly found himself alone. He wa
s furious: he could not understand why he should be considered harmless. Perhaps, as Penrose suggests, it was because the British Arts Council was holding an exhibition of his recent work in London at that very moment.
So many appalling things have happened since 1950 that it is difficult to remember that Korea seemed to be the certain death of peace, the signal for an atomic war between the great powers, perhaps for total destruction. Whatever Picasso may have thought of Russian policy there is no doubt that he was passionately concerned about peace. Without any hesitation at all he risked popularity, influence, wealth, and personal comfort to support it, and shortly after his return from England he set to work on a picture that he entitled “Massacre en Corée” and that he deliberately based on Goya’s “Third of May.”
On the right a group of anonymous, modern, visored, armored figures under the command of an officer with a sword are about to shoot a captive group of naked women over on the left, some of them pregnant, some of them with small children. The picture is almost as monochromatic as “Guernica”: the comparison is inevitable, and it is more than the “Massacre en Corée” can bear. Even on the physical side it is not a tenth the size, and in other respects the disproportion is possibly even greater. Perhaps, as some have said, it was no more than a sketch that he finished in time for the Salon de Mai and that he did not pursue. In any case it pleased nobody. The simpler-minded Communists complained that the killers were not identified—the picture was not politically correct; those who understood it to be a protest against all killing rather than an indictment of the Americans complained that it did not have the emotional impact of its great predecessors—that it was painted with the head rather than with the heart; and of course the anti-Communists decried it as a piece of propaganda, while those who were committed by friendship or other motives to unconditional admiration of all Picasso’s work spoke in embarrassed tones of his humanity and other valuable qualities.
Picasso: A Biography Page 55