Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  Some small part of his coldness might be attributed to a telegram that came from Edmonde Charles-Roux, announcing Derain’s death. It did not affect him to anything remotely like the same extent as Matisse’s some weeks later, but it did remind him of his age. Another reminder appeared shortly after in the person of Françoise Gilot, who brought Claude and Paloma for the rest of the holiday: she went off the next day, but the dinner-party on the evening of her arrival, with Jacqueline sitting on Picasso’s right, separated from Françoise onlv by young Dr. Delcos of Col-lioure, was quite exceptionally tense.

  After another week or so of bathing at Collioure, the band now swollen by the smaller children and their nurse, the holiday came to an end. There were times when Picasso was extraordinarily open and unreserved; others when he was so closed in upon himself that even those nearest to him had no notion of what was going on in his mind; and now, to the general astonishment, Picasso went back to Vallauris with Jacqueline; and from that point on, for the better or for the worse, his fate was sealed.

  It is easier to state these facts than to explain them, but one may hazard the guess that quite apart from the discouragement and weariness of his disappointment with Rosita, the steady dissuasion of his interested friends had done its work; that the contrast between Françoise Gilot’s strongly-emphasized independence, coldness, and detachment and Jacqueline Hutin’s even more evident total devotion had a powerful effect; and that lassitude, consciousness of age, and a longing for peace in which to work induced Picasso to give in. There may well be other factors of which one knows nothing, but that was the only explanation those who knew him well at the time could give. To them it seemed that he just gave up the struggle—that he abandoned his castles in Collioure and the renewal of his Catalan life for the sake of quietness.

  Yet there is a good deal of comfort in defeat, and back in Vallauris the portraits of Jacqueline began again. They are quite unlike those fierce, striking women of the June pictures: the sphinx has gone; so have the memories of Sylvette; and there is nothing whatsoever of Geneviève Laporte: the tall neck, the high fine cheekbones have vanished, and the “Jacqueline dans un fauteuil ô bascule” of October is a plump and above all a comfortable little figure.

  In the autumn, at the time of the exhibition of the Sylvette pictures, Picasso and Jacqueline were in Paris: it was too late for the much larger retrospective at the Maison de la Pensée française, which the Russians had made even more interesting by sending thirty-seven of the pictures bought so long ago by Shchukine. That admirable collector had survived the revolution, and for many years he lived in Paris, still attending the sales and the galleries, though no longer as a purchaser; he was dead now, and his daughter felt she had a right to her inheritance—she began legal proceedings, and the Russians hurried the pictures back to Leningrad and Moscow only a few days after the exhibition opened. Picasso did not see them: but he would not have gone to the show even if they had been there for months. His sense of embarrassment was as particular as his sense of privacy, and as strong; for while he did not at all mind displaying his works to friends and even casual acquaintances, the idea of attending an exhibition of them among an anonymous crowd filled him with distress.

  He did see Geneviève Laporte, however, and although it was now too late for their misunderstanding to be done away with they met most affectionately: he was delighted at the success of her collection of poems, Les Cavaliers d’ombre, which had come out in June with seven of his drawings by way of illustration; and there was a generosity in his friendship for her that would be inconceivable in the Picasso depicted by Françoise Gilot, whom he also saw that autumn.

  They quarreled at once, and when she went to see him a few months later to tell him that she meant to marry a man called Simon they quarreled again. She gives a description of Picasso “feigning illness” and behaving discreditably, but she does not mention one of the causes of their disagreement, which was La Galloise. The villa, like one of the flats in the rue Gay-Lussac, had been bought in her name; by law it was hers, and she meant to hold on to it. I do not say that the place was not morally as well as legally hers: I have no knowledge of the facts. All that is certain is that Picasso had to find new quarters, giving up a house that suited him in spite of all its drawbacks, with the rambling studios near at hand, his pottery and the kilns close by—a house, above all, to which he was thoroughly accustomed.

  Between these two quarrels (and after the second Picasso and Françoise Gilot never met again) there was a period in which he did little work. Friends were one reason for this: they flocked to see him after his long absence; so did strangers; so did journalists, eager to hear about his private life. And these last exhibitions, as well as all those I have not even mentioned, had so increased his fame that Paris was now almost as bad as the Côte d’Azur, and he could not even walk about Saint-Germain-des-Près in peace. If he joined a crowd to stare at a gushing broken drain (great quantities of rain fell that winter) they turned from the spectacle and he himself became the flood, an inhuman phenomenon. There were other factors too: early in November, 1954, Matisse died after his long illness and the news affected Picasso deeply; when he was asked for a statement he said, “Since Matisse is gone, there is nothing whatsoever to be said,” and his tone was more eloquent than many of the eulogies that appeared. Then in the same month the war in Algeria broke out.

  In December, 1954, Picasso began his versions of Delacroix’ ”Les Femmes d’Alger”: but although the Communist Party was opposed to the North African war there is little likelihood that the horrible conflict had anything to do with his decision. His admiration for Delacroix went back to his earliest visits to the Louvre in 1900, and in this particular picture, Picasso’s and Cézanne’s favorite Delacroix, one woman is absurdly like Jacqueline.

  It is clear that some important change had come about in their relationship, a change far greater than can be accounted for by gratitude for her good looks and her youth, but that may be connected with his realization that this was not an adventure on ner side but the devotion of a lifetime, and in the next two months he painted no less than fifteen variations in which she figures, many of them highly colored, some as representational as Delacroix, and all of them far more openly erotic; and in the last, the most brilliant of them all, he accomplished the feat of combining a relatively naturalistic Jacqueline-odalisque, full of curves, with three others cut into often rectilinear planes and disposed upon firmly-ruled striped backgrounds, set at angles to one another; the transition is carried out by means of a mirror that belongs to the perfectly legible figure but that nevertheless reflects a woman whose geometry comes from another world; and the whole is triumphantly bound together by a color-scheme strongly and without any doubt purposely reminiscent of the later Matisse.

  There was nothing in the least slavish about Picasso’s admiration for Delacroix, whom he treated with even less ceremony than El Greco, Poussin, or Courbet, moving his figures from place to place just as he saw fit, switching the erotic charge from negative to positive and preferring his own strong light to Delacroix’ mysterious shadow; though in nearly all he did retain the horseshoe arch of the original. As he worked, says Hélène Parmelin, he wondered what Delacroix would say if he walked in: she also affirms that Picasso would not look at Delacroix’ ”Les Femmes d’Alger” nor even at a reproduction during this period; and no doubt a man with Picasso’s astonishing visual memory could easily carry both the Louvre and the Montpellier versions (for he used both) in his head, perhaps already so transmuted that direct contact would have been harmful.

  The series came to an end in February, 1955, and at about the same time Olga Picasso died in a hospital at Cannes, where for a long time she had been suffering from cancer and partial paralysis. Picasso and she had never been entirely out of contact—her photograph was to be seen in the rue des Grands-Augustins, and he wore her ring all his life—and now, returning to the south, he saw to her burial.

  He did not settle in Vallauris
again. It had been made plain that La Galloise was no longer his home, and although he so disliked change he now made a great effort, soon finding a far larger and even uglier house like a vast wedding-cake that had belonged to the Moëts on the outskirts of Cannes, in the wealthy, villa-studded district called La Californie; the house was also called La Californie, and its ugliness was that of wealth as expressed in the uninhibited days of 1900; still, it had a great deal of space, it was bathed in light, and it was surrounded by a fair-sized garden. It is true that the garden looked like a municipal park, but at least it was heavily protected against intruders.

  At the same time he virtually abandoned both his remaining flat in the rue Gay-Lussac (Valentin says he gave it to Inés) and the rue des Grands-Augustins. If this was an attempt at a clean break with his past, it was not at all successful; for although Picasso was wonderfully indifferent to houses and to their comfort, nothing could overcome his passion for objects, for portable possessions, and within a very short time almost everything he had ever owned, including the knife he had used when camping with Pallarès in 1898 and the English chairs from his childhood home in Málaga that his father had sent him in 1909, began to converge upon La Californie, filling the vast, high-ceilinged rooms and making them look like something between an ill-run pawnshop and a remover’s warehouse. Pieces of sculpture also arrived, gathering round their maker in troops, the bronzes, headed by “L’Homme au mouton” and “La Chévre,” living outside, where Picasso’s dogs and eventually his pigeons gave them a patina they would never have acquired in a museum: but well before they were all unpacked the big house was permeated with a smell that was never to leave it until Picasso himself went away—oil-paint and turpentine, the smell of creativity rather than that of wealth: though as it happened creativity also meant wealth in Picasso’s case. Money rolled in upon him from all sides, and presently it was to reach full flood, making him the richest painter who had ever lived.

  He at once took over the greater part of the ground floor, including the best drawing-rooms, and turned them into studios, quickly gathering his familiar slum around him; and here he painted a large number of portraits of Jacqueline and what he called interior landscapes—the studios themselves with her in them and the trees and sky showing through the open Art Nouveau windows—fine free pictures full of happiness.

  But pleased though he was with La Californie, his heart did not forget the Roussillon, and at Whitsun he was back at the rue de l’Ange with Jacqueline, Maya, Cocteau, the Leirises, and many others. They went to the bull-fight at Céret, and Picasso thoroughly enjoyed himself: during this visit he had much more time to look about him and he found that the little town had scarcely changed since he was there with Eva; water still gushed up from hidden springs and flowed along the gutters, the huge planes still shaded his favorite café, the scops owl uttered its unvaried note, and many of his old friends were still to be seen, including Frank Havilland, now the curator of Brune’s museum, to which Matisse had given some lovely drawings just before his death. Quite apart from his kindness for the town, Picasso did not choose to be outdone, and he behaved even more handsomely than usual, giving the museum a large number of presents. And his generosity did not stop there; in 1957 he designed the poster for the museum’s Manolo exhibition, and for many years after that crates would arrive, bringing his more remarkable ceramics. But Picasso never brought them himself, nor did he ever see Perpignan again: this was his last visit to a Catalan country, and when it was over he settled down to painting at La Californie.

  Yet a culture pays little attention to political boundaries, and Picasso did not become French for having lived seventy years in France. The influences that had formed him (as far as any outside force could form so exceptional a being) were largely Catalan, and a demi-Catalan or more he remained to the end of his life. One of the last friends to sit by his death-bed came from Barcelona, and between 1955 and then he saw scores and scores of people from his youth—the thread was never broken. This uninterrupted contact owed much to Sabartés, who was not only a far better correspondent, but who could travel to and fro without any opposition from either the Spanish government or from Picasso, who never required his friends to share his views (he was much attached to some leading Carlists). In 1955, for example, Sabartés was in Barcelona, and returning to France he brought Joan Vidal Ventosa, once of the Quatre Gats, and Antoní Clavé, together with the Gaspars; and one of the results of this meeting was a Picasso show at the Sala Gaspar in Barcelona in October, 1956, an exhibition that excited immense interest and that was followed by many more.

  Picasso worked well in the tall, light-filled rooms of La Californie, but 1955 was not his most productive year, although with his great “official” retrospective of paintings, including “Guernica,” at the Pavilion de Marsan (the Musée des Arts décoratifs, part of the Louvre itself) and of graphic work at the Bibliothéque nationale, it was the richest year hitherto for the public, and the reason for this was that he spent much time and even more energy making a film with Georges Clouzot, Le Mystére Picasso. It was not the first film about him—there had been three or four documentaries in earlier years—but it developed into the most ambitious by far, a full-length film in color. Clouzot saw fit to make it at Nice and in the summer months, when the heat of the powerful electric lights, added to that of the sun, was enough to make a salamander quail; but Picasso loved a new technique, he loved people who really knew their trade, and he was seized with an enthusiasm at least as great as Clouzot’s. Although the film was based on the notion that laying on the colors constitutes the act of creation, as though no more of a love-story were to be filmed than its consummation, a fallacy that cannot have deceived Picasso for a moment, he lent himself wholeheartedly to the scheme and laid on the colors with a zeal that is a delight to watch.

  Sometimes he did so in the oven-like film-studio, using a newly-invented and disagreeably “chemical” pigment that would soak straight through an absorbent surface, thus allowing the camera to follow his work from behind, sometimes ordinary paint in the open, on a beach just by Antibes, sitting at his easel and getting up every few seconds to let the last brush-stroke be filmed; and perhaps the most astonishing thing about the whole undertaking was the way he carried on his solitary pursuit amid the host of directors, cameramen, technicians, and idle spectators, perpetually interrupted yet never for a moment losing his concentration, sitting there with his brown person shining with sweat, clothed in a pair of canvas drawers, his luminous eye fixed upon his picture and his hand sweeping out the perfect curves. Even a trivial film calls for an immense amount of time and of coordinated work by a large number of people, and this film was by no means trivial: Clouzot and the technicians worked on and on, and Picasso worked with them, sometimes twelve and even fourteen hours a day, producing bull-fights, still-lives, nudes, collages and drawings, some of them memories of the Verve suite. Hélène Parmelin reproduces about thirty in the third volume of her Secrets d’alcove d’un atelier, but it is said that there were many more, some given to the people in the film-studio, some “mislaid.” No masterpiece was born before the eye of the camera; but what is far more surprising is that in these appalling circumstances Picasso did not fall far below himself and that when he was on the beach of La Garoupe he even painted pictures that would have pleased him at any time.

  It is many years since I saw the film and I cannot speak of it with any accuracy; but, mixed with the pleasure of seeing him at work, I do remember an uneasy impression that he was being put through his paces, that the fruit of immense thought and experience was presented as something like a most accomplished trick, almost a music-hall turn, carried out in minutes, as though celerity were of real significance; and this impression was strengthened by the music, the drum-roll for the vital stroke that gave apparently random lines their meaning, and indeed by the nature of some of the things that Picasso drew when he was amusing himself. The incredible virtuosity was there, but so it was when Picasso was amusing h
imself in a restaurant after dinner, when he drew on the napkins or made creatures out of crumbs; and Picasso is so very much more than that.

  Yet for all its probably inevitable shortcomings the film was a most fascinating spectacle, since apart from showing many pictures in the act of birth, though not of conception, and Picasso’s technical approach, it also conveyed his immense vitality with more success than one would have believed possible. And if Clouzot left the mystery of Picasso’s creative process even more impenetrable than it was before, that was perhaps because he used a camera rather than a double gas metaphysical microscope of extra power working outside the limits of time and space imposed by his medium.

  Nearly forty years earlier Picasso had flung himself into the mad, gregarious world of the ballet; this summer he flung himself into the even madder, more gregarious world of the cinema. But whereas in the ballet the dancers at least have to keep trim and neat by abstinence, film-people tend to carry on after working-hours, drifting from bar to bar with hordes of companions. Picasso could no more resist their strenuous conviviality than their strenuous work: at the age of seventy-four he painted by day, surrounded by a crowd, and he played by night, surrounded by an even greater number of new acquaintances and people more or less connected with the cinema, among whom such truly valued friends as Pallarès, Geneviève Laporte, and the Lazermes seemed rather lost, although he welcomed them with all his heart. In addition to the film-people and the holidaymakers there were also the men and women who got into La Californie on the grounds that they were fellow-Communists, Spaniards, or painters, or simply because they wanted to see Picasso. Some asked him for friendship, some for money, all for time; and once they were in, Picasso’s code forbade him to put them out. He must often have longed for the drawbridges of Collioure: but still, squandering his strength and spirit like a twenty-year-old, he went on and on, late nights, comic hats and all, until the triumphant end of the film, the scattering of the crowds at the time of the mass return to Paris, and the comparative calm of autumn.