Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  It was not there at the time of the Italian retrospective. But even if it had been, and even if the whole triptych had been seen in ideal conditions, there would still have been some hostile criticism, for even now opinions are divided. At present few people deny that “Guernica” is a very great painting, but there is nothing like the same near-unanimity about “La Guerre et la Paix,” even though it has now been discussed for more than twenty years.

  The first time I saw the picture it’ did not seem to me to have anything at all of the very great urgency and emotional charge of “Guernica”; Picasso’s deliberate survey of the two extreme states of the human condition appeared to me to have some of the weaknesses usually to be seen in Last Judgments; but whereas in most Last Judgments the blessed seem condemned to an eternity of boredom while the damned and their attendant fiends are filled with passionate life, here it was Peace that was convincing, while War, apart from those hands and the trampled book, struck me as literary and remote. Even the round-faced figure of War himself looked quite good company. I was tempted to say that Picasso, in spite of his longing for vast surfaces, could not deal with them when they were provided—that with the exception of “Guernica” his genius flowered best when it was confined. But that was a first sight, after a long day’s drive in beating rain; and it is notorious that a traveler, harassed by his voyage, by hunger, by other sightseers, tends to be captious and unreceptive—in an Italian journey Picasso himself saw Giotto unmoved—and presently, rested and fed, with the chapel to myself, I found the whole painting grow enormously in power, above all the arched picture at the end. Although some passages in War still seemed rhetorical, the grimness of others increased beyond measure; and the pagan joys of Peace, with their more personal, less obvious symbolism, filled me with satisfaction. The picture still does not move me as “Guernica” did in New York, but the comparison has little meaning, since the two statements are of a different order: even so, upon reflection “La Guerre et la Paix,” in spite of those parts to which I am insensitive, now seems to me a picture of such a size that if I had to cross the Atlantic again to see it I should do so.

  Almost immediately after he had finished the two panels, Picasso set off for Paris. Geneviève Laporte had been there most of the year, seeing much of the Eluards: the friends met with great pleasure, but within a few days Paul Eluard fell sick. He was only fifty-seven, and although his health had always been frail nobody thought he was in any danger. A week later, calling in at the rue Gay-Lussac on her way to lunch with the Eluards, Geneviève Laporte heard from Ines that he was dead: Picasso was already with his widow.

  They buried him at the Pere-Lachaise with an immense crowd of friends and admirers—few men have been more loved than Eluard. Picasso was very deeply moved: death always shattered him, and this death perhaps more than any. Some days after the funeral he too fell ill, while at the same time still another death so affected Geneviève Laporte that she left Paris for the remote Auvergne, where she lived in complete solitude for several months.

  Before Picasso left Vallauris Françoise Gilot had proposed that she should go with him: she had, it seems, been plied by Madame Ramie with reports of another woman; she said that from now onwards she and Picasso “should be together all the time,” and her words were accompanied by a threat that she would “do something about it” if he did not comply.

  He did not comply, of course, and on his return, ill and very sad, she told him that she saw no reason for staying. This was a solution, but it was not the solution that Picasso wanted: it would mean the loss of his children. He asked whether there were anyone else in her life; she said there was not; but on going to Paris by herself in the spring of 19S3 she formed a connection with a Greek.

  In her book she denies ever having said that she was leaving him because she was tired of living with a historical monument (a crack that was widely repeated at the time, the decay of their relationship being common knowledge): the words to which she does own were less lapidary and perhaps even more unkind, since they were entirely humorless—”So I began to tell Pablo that if I was leaving him, it was in order to live with my own generation and the problems of my time.” And now on her return she told him about her Greek.

  In spite of all this he begged her to stay, swallowing his pride in a manner inconceivable to his friends: it was, they have told me, a very painful sight indeed. His words, or her uncertainty, had some effect, and 19S3 dragged on in a state of unstable equilibrium, broken by frequent scenes and the repeated intrusion of journalists, for these were the years when the price of Picassos was beginning to soar and the combination of money, notoriety, and sex brought reporters to La Galloise by the score.

  It was a wretched period: through some failure of communication he was cut off from Geneviève Laporte, buried in her far retreat, and since by temperament and by his natural size he had long since dominated most of the people he knew, he had nobody, now that Eluard was dead, with whom he could talk on an equal footing. Matisse, one of the very few who might in happier circumstances have advised or at least comforted him, was now very ill; the intimacy with Braque had suffered irreparable damage from rivalry and time. Picasso had friends by the hundred, some of them distinterested, but none of the right stature, and he lived in a crowded solitude.

  There were a few intervals of peace, however, as when he made the acquaintance of Sylvette David, the wife or fiancee of a young English chairmaker in Vallauris, who became his model—her pony-tail is to be seen in many a charming picture—or when he conversed (sometimes in Spanish) with Jacqueline Hutin, a young woman Madame Ramie had brought to Vallauris some months before to help in the pottery-shop. Madame Hutin—her maiden name was Roque—had been married to a man sometimes described as an engineer, sometimes as a minor civil servant; at this point the divorce proceedings may or may not have begun, but in any event she was living alone with her daughter Kathy. Jacqueline Hutin, or Roque as she was known after the divorce, was very small, shorter than Picasso, neat and trim; and if her modest origins and her lack of any very advanced education worried him at all, which is unlikely, it was outweighed by her total and evident admiration—in spite of all his experience, Picasso still liked worship from young women: at this time Jacqueline Hutin was twenty-seven. But apart from these intervals his reactions to the present situation, though often contradictory, were violent: the most obvious was a sudden and extreme sociability. Far from avoiding people other than his closer friends or those who might interest his perennial curiosity, he now flung himself into almost any company and scoured the country with a changing band of hangers-on, going right over to Nîmes for bull-fights and haunting the night-clubs all along the Cote d’Azur, particularly at Saint-Tropez. He did so in the hope of finding Geneviève Laporte, who in her even younger days had enjoyed such places: the journalists were unaware of his quest however, and his sad capers, presented literally, filled many a page in the cheaper illustrated weeklies. And this was the time when his comic disguises (once the occasional expression of merriment) began to increase; when visitors, embarrassed or amused according to their nature, might be received by a Picasso with a red cardboard nose, a false mustache, and a paper hat. He racketed about continually, expending an immense amount of time and energy, but in spite of the weariness and boredom he still worked.

  Among his pictures were two of a woman savaging a dog: in both she has got it down on its back; she grasps a fore and a hind leg in each of her powerful hands and she stares down into its helpless face. The woman is Françoise Gilot, the dog Kazbek’s successor, a boxer called Yan, stupid, demonstrative, and wanting in judgment, but affectionate. Another is of a lean she-cat stalking towards a cock on a kitchen table: the bird’s wings flap, but its legs are tied and it cannot move. And at about the time of the second “Femme au chien” he produced a drawing that caused more fuss than a dozen pictures: in March, 1953, Stalin went to his long account and Aragon, as editor of Les Lettres françaises, asked Picasso for a portrait. Picasso was
unwilling—he had never seen Stalin—but since it was for Aragon he turned out a workmanlike and recognizable, if uninspired, head of a youngish Stalin and sent it off to Paris. Aragon liked it; so did Pierre Daix, who did most of the work at Les Lettres françaises; and they were amazed at the storm that burst over their heads. They had underestimated both the passionate idolatry of the father-figure among the rank and file of the Party and the spirit of intrigue among their rivals in the Communist press. L’Humanité and the Party leaders censured the drawing and publicly humiliated Aragon: Picasso was roughly handled too, but before things went to extreme lengths, before these authoritarian methods disgusted the Party’s most spectacular if most unorthodox member, Casanova came to see him and smoothed the matter over.

  Picasso’s violent sociability at this time was tiring and wasteful, but it did lead to one of his pleasantest friendships and very nearly a complete change in his way of life. His old friend Totote Hugué, Manolo’s widow, and Rosita, their adopted daughter, a great favorite of Picasso’s and now an elegant young woman, came to see him, bringing the Comte and Comtesse de Lazerme, both French Catalans from the Roussillon. Monsieur de Lazerme had known Totote ever since his boyhood, when his father, also a lover of the arts, had taken him over to Céret to see the Manolos, and they had been friends from that time on; and he had met Picasso in 1951, when he drove Pierre Brune, the painter, all along the Côte d’Azur to visit other artists on behalf of the museum he had founded at Céret.

  Picasso received them with his usual splendid hospitality, and in return the Lazermes invited him and Françoise Gilot to Perpignan, where they had a house of the kind that would be called a palace in Spain and which in fact dated from the time when Perpignan belonged to the Spanish crown. On this occasion Françoise did not choose to accept—she had other plans in view—but Picasso did, and on August 12, 1953, he arrived with Paulo and Maya.

  Picasso had never lost touch with his Catalan friends nor even with their children—among others, Pierrette, Gargallo’s daughter, and Jacint, the son of Doctor Cinto Reventós, had come to see him not long before, and Pallarès was a regular summer visitor—but this was the first time he had been in the Rousillon for forty years. As I have said, the social contract is not the same in Catalonia as it is in France; superficially it is rougher in some ways, but beneath the surface it is often far more friendly, direct, and indeed more sensitive. It was the contract that had formed Picasso’s social mind, and here in the narrow streets of Perpignan, with Catalan spoken all around him, he was very much at home.

  A little while later his hosts took him to Collioure to see the bull-fights and the extraordinary firework display given every year in honor of Our Lady’s assumption. Picasso left directly afterwards, but at the beginning of September he was back for the Perpignan bull-fight, bringing his elder children, his nephew Javier, Totote, and Rosita, all in the old Hispano-Suiza. They left for Vallauris the next day; then about a week later Picasso was in Perpignan again for a longer stay, this time accompanied by the Pignons. There would be no point in giving a detailed list of his movements during this short period were it not for the fact that two hundred and eighty-two miles lie between Vallauris and Perpignan. No east-west motor-ways existed then; much of the narrow road was bad, and in August and September all of it was crowded, so that each journey took at least nine hours. The heat, the noise, the smell, and the weariness can be imagined, and the fact that he freely accepted them when he was well over seventy gives some idea of how desperately he needed to escape through company and perpetual motion.

  Many friends, including the Aurics and the Leirises, joined him in Perpignan: he liked most of them individually, but in the mass they tended to be overwhelming. Once some critical number had been passed, group-psychology started to operate, and the members of the court, as he called it himself, began to display the stock symptoms of jealousy, competing for status and attention, showing-off and emphasizing their intimacy with the great man. It was flattering no doubt, and Picasso liked flattery, but the tension was wearing, and presently he went off to spend a few days in the more relaxing air of Collioure.

  It was absurd that he had not known the village earlier, for it was only twenty miles from Céret; and just as Céret was closely connected with Cubism, so Collioure was the first haunt of the Fauves. Matisse had worked there for years, bringing Derain as early as 190S and Marquet not long after, while countless other painters, including Juan Gris, had followed them.

  However, Picasso knew it now, and his liking for the place grew with his acquaintance. Here at last he had a little peace: he stayed at René Pous’ Café des Sports, eating Pauline Pous’ wonderful soupe de poissons, her Catalan bouillabaisse, or fresh crayfish fished up by various Pous cousins, and he lay in the sun or bathed most of the day.

  This real rest, this swimming in the sea, the language and atmosphere of his youth, restored his spirits and his strength: he needed both, for immediately after his return to Vallauris on September 29 Françoise Gilot walked out, taking the children with her. At some time, it appears, she had told him that she was leaving on September 30, but after so many unfulfilled threats of this kind he can scarcely have believed that she would really go.

  In her book she justifies herself by saying that he would not let her have an operation for some female complaint; but when she reached Paris she seems to have been more concerned with seeing her Greek than with going into any hospital.

  In a way it was a relief. Within a few days Picasso was in Paris too: some time before this Geneviève Laporte had emerged from her desolate silence, though by letter alone, to discuss her poems and to tell him that she had found a farmhouse at Arbonne, on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and now he sent her a telegram begging her to ring him up. Picasso was no letter-writer, nor was he much of a hand with the telephone, which he loathed, and Geneviève Laporte reached the rue des Grands-Augustins with no more than a general sense of emergency.

  Ines opened the door to her with a welcoming smile and whispered, “Françoise has gone at last. Monsieur was too shy to telephone—I was the one who told him …” At this point Sabartés came to welcome her, and then Picasso. There were several people in the studio, including Tototé Hugue and Rosita; presently they all had lunch, and in time everybody went away. Geneviève Laporte told him about her farmhouse, and he asked if he might see it. He might indeed, she said, and she would drive him there: her car was outside the door. He told Paulo to join them with the Hugués later, and they set off. Picasso and Geneviève Laporte had not seen one another for nearly a year; both had been through a great deal and now there was something tentative in their relationship. The journey began in comparative silence: Picasso wanted to ask her to share his life but he could not find a way of bringing it out; the shyness that was usually an inconspicuous though important part of his character now became evident, partly because of their long separation, partly because he was far better at granting favors than asking them, and partly because what he wished to ask was of the very first importance to him. Furthermore, Françoise Gilot’s steady insistence upon his age had left him with no illusions: people of her generation saw him as an old, old man, somebody who had been heard of forever, like Julius Caesar or Joan of Arc. Shyness is the most catching of all the emotions, and Geneviève Laporte had not only that to contend with but also her private knowledge of the situation: in addition to this she was an inexperienced driver taking a new car out of Paris through heavy traffic. She had little or nothing to say, and they were well south of the city before Picasso spoke of Françoise Gilot’s disappearance.

  By the time the car reached Arbonne they were almost on their old footing of complete confidence: but not entirely—Picasso, though happy, was not wholly at ease; he misunderstood an innocent remark, detecting an unfavorable inner meaning, a kind of fling at his past, that it did not possess; and above all he had not made his clear request by the time Paulo appeared in the other car. They dined at a restaurant, just the two of the
m together, but still he did not speak out directly: not that night, nor yet the next morning, when he told her he was going back to Vallauris.

  Geneviève was surprised and deeply wounded: apart from anything else she had expected him to stay a while. The groping for communication, the shyness, and the tension must have been very great, for when Paulo and the Hugués were there, the car about to leave, and Picasso, gathering his courage at last, turned to her and said, “You’re coming?” she was so upset, so confused and overcome that all she could reply was, “Change the sheets first.”

  What she meant by this she could hardly tell, except that it referred to her dislike for La Galloise and that period of Picasso’s life; and the words were scarcely out before she blushed for them. But they had been said; there was no calling them back; and the car drove away.

  Chapter XX

  PICASSO, believing himself to be rejected, and acquiescing in the rejection, returned to Vallauris, to a house now silent, empty of its children.

  At the level of immediate companionship he was not alone, nor anything like it: Totote and Rosita looked after him at La Galloise for a while, the Pignons were still in the studio down the hill, the Ramiés and Jacqueline Hutin in Vallauris, and the children came for a few days at Christmas, while of course there were the inevitable interviewers and journalists. But Geneviève Laporte was five hundred miles away and apparently farther still in the distance that signified; and the only work he did was a certain amount of pottery, including some rather mechanical black plates, each with a white house traced upon it.

  Winter can be very cruel in the south of France, with the mistral shaking the orange-trees and the cold forcing its way into houses built to keep out the sun; but it is an invigorating cold, and this winter suddenly brought Picasso such a furious burst of creativity that in December and January he produced almost all the hundred and eighty drawings of the Verve suite, so called because they first appeared in that magazine, with a preface by Michel Leiris.