Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  He paid heavily for all this, although he still had energy enough to go to Paris himself in October. Here he saw Geneviève Laporte again, and she showed him Cocteau’s illustrations for her second book of poems. Cocteau was a recent friend of hers, and his charm had so subjugated her that she really does not seem to have seen the difference in size between the two men. Picasso was fully aware of it, however, and in the summer he had already displayed some irritation when she spoke enthusiastically of her new acquaintance. Cocteau was a person with whom Picasso had a curious relationship in which irritation and resentment, not to say jealousy and even a certain amount of disdain, mingled with habit and affection: this was just at the moment when Cocteau was elected to the Académie française, and Picasso was openly displeased. “There, you see!” he cried on being shown the proofs, “What did I tell you? He’s always copied me.” He handed them back, quite out of temper. Their meeting ended pleasantly, however: she showed him some other poems, which he read attentively and praised. He commended her for working so hard (work was a cardinal virtue with him) and said that presently he would illustrate another of her books. And in time he overcame his ill-humor about Cocteau, designing a hilt for the new academician’s sword; but for the moment he was quite wretched. Some part of this must be put down to his reduced condition, for he was not in form at all. That autumn he did manage to paint a gray and white Jacqueline in Turkish clothes, looking very like the submissive inmate of a harem, and some more interiors, all vaguely Moorish, with the Califomie palm-trees outside, but the winter found him exhausted, emptied, anxious about his health; and some observers thought that this, his seventy-fifth year, might be his last. Van Gogh and Modigliani between them had not lived so long, nor Raphael half that time; but in general painting is a healthy trade, perhaps because painters work out their conflicts in a perpetual self-analysis, and when Cinto Reventós came to La Californie with his family in February, 1956, he found Picasso in better spirits. They had not met for the best part of a generation, but Picasso took up their conversation just where it had left off. “What about the Salome?” he asked. “I’ll buy it.”

  “That you will not,” said Dr. Reventós hotly: he had cherished the etching since Picasso had given it to him in 1905 and he had no intention of parting with it. This pleased Picasso, who secretly loathed seeing his presents sold: he was pleased too with the favorable opinion of the two doctors (for Cinto’s son was also a medical man), and although he was much pestered by tourists when he went out with them, the visit was a great and tonic success. It was followed by another, this time from Gustau Gili, the son and successor of the Barcelona publisher who had commissioned Picasso to illustrate a book as long ago as 1927. The book was La Tauromaquia o arte de torear, and it was written by the famous eighteenth-century bullfighter José Delgado, otherwise Pepe Illo or Hillo, whose portrait Picasso had copied when he was a boy in Madrid. The title-page stated that the work was of the greatest value to every kind of person who loved bulls: Picasso was the obvious choice as illustrator, and when he was approached—Gili senior went to Paris for the purpose—he agreed with enthusiasm. But what with procrastination and two wars he did nothing, and now Gustau Gili II had come to bring the affair to life again. Again Picasso agreed, and with equal enthusiasm: he liked the Gilis (it was they, I believe, who brought him the fan-tailed pigeons that soon came to occupy so much of the upper floor of La Californie), he liked the idea; and the pleasure of these visits, these renewed contacts with Barcelona helped to set him up, while the coming! Provençal spring confirmed their good effect.

  He did nothing about Pepe Illo; but under the influence of the spring he turned to a large canvas of a shepherd sleeping under a tree while a goat grazes on its leaves, all pleasant planes, as cheerful a picture as those at Antibes. Earlier in that year he had worked on some nudes, one pair reminiscent of his heavy great women of Royan, with the massive columns of their bellies and buttocks seen simultaneously, and another of his bathers of twenty years before, as though he were flexing his muscles before returning to a more important series of “interior landscapes,” most of them including Jacqueline, to his sculpture and his pots.

  His sculpture had taken a new form at about the time of Sylvette or a little earlier: it was now a sculpture of painted planes, cut out of boards or plywood or sheets of metal. A typical example was a head of Sylvette herself, made of tinplate painted light gray with black strokes for her features and her pony-tail, the whole bent along four straight lines to form a free-standing figure about two feet high. Others were taller, raised on broomsticks or thin columns, and from a distance their flat surfaces looked rather like finger-posts, while the more constructed, brilliantly-colored sort were akin to totem-poles.

  In 1956 these figures grew larger and often flatter: the well-known group of bronzes called “Les Baigneurs”—six pieces ranging from four foot six to eight foot eight—give the impression of having no more than two surfaces each. About the time he made them Picasso said to Hélène Parmelin, “A dreadful thing about these days is that no one says anything unpleasant about anybody else.... There is something good in every show. And in any case everything is sound and worthwhile or pretty nearly so.” His remark encourages me to observe that I do not like “Les Baigneurs” at all: they say nothing to me. But this opinion, or this confession of insensibility, is less widely shared than that of Georges Salles, then the head of all the French museums, including the Louvre, who spoke of “Les Baigneurs” as “a most delightful success in which Picasso lets the prime mover of his genius work without the least restraint: and for his genius artistic creation is above all a magic act. Each Bather culminates in a minute bird-like head, so light that it cannot but be gay. All this would be merely clever, fantastic, startling, and droll if it were not for the fact that a mystery inhabits the strangeness of these beings, the darkest, most impenetrable mystery, that of life itself.”

  Nineteen fifty-six was a year in which the Algerian war grew even more savage and the French left-wing opposition to it more articulate: it was also the year of the Twentieth Congress in Moscow and Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. His revelation of the tyranny that had filled Gulag and so many other graves and concentration-camps struck many French Communists with horror and dismay. Neither of these events has any obvious echo in Picasso’s work.

  Although Hélène Parmelin’s Picasso sur place is resolutely and even compulsively euphoric, from what little she says it is clear that Picasso was deeply concerned about what had happened in Russia, and that he was downcast and worried; but unlike some of his friends he did not find it impossible to go on with the Party. He retained his card at this point, and although with Pignon and some others he signed a letter protesting against the French Communist Party’s official attitude to the Soviet intervention in Hungary later that year, he retained it to the end of his life in spite of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the reversal of Khrushchev’s policy, and the persecution of the Jews. Loyalty to the underlying cause? Political unconsciousness? The lapsed Catholic’s need for a dogmatic basis? Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were extremely unwilling to leave their fatherland in spite of all they suffered; and to a certain extent the Party was Picasso’s fatherland.

  In any event he painted few pictures of much consequence apart from some cheerful garden-pieces in which Claude and Paloma are to be seen, they being at La Californie for the holidays, and political distress may have had something to do with this: though a more obvious immediate cause is the summer invasion of the south by friends and tourists.

  Among the visitors was Geneviève Laporte, bringing the book that Cocteau had illustrated, as she had promised. He asked her eagerly whether she was alone, and he was pleased when she said yes; but after that their conversation dwindled. Their direct communication, even their real knowledge of one another, vanished in the silences.

  The relationship, perhaps the sweetest in Picasso’s life, was almost dead. It just survived an autumn meeting in Paris, when Picasso went back on hi
s promise to illustrate another collection of poems—it was also to have two gouaches by Cocteau—on the grounds that the publisher had put out a book illustrated by Jean-Gabriel Domergue, a fashionable painter of pretty pictures, and that he would not allow his name to appear in the same catalog; but it perished entirely the next summer. She had come to see him at La Californie: they talked in one of the vast bare rooms and again the silences stretched out between them. Picasso’s boxer, the foolish Yan, brought her a piece of wood from the garden and she tossed it for him. “This is not a suitable place for playing with dogs in,” said Picasso, and for Geneviève Laporte he was no longer there—her Picasso had died.

  A man can change surprisingly even in his seventies; but a young woman of under thirty is likely to change even more, and in their movement away from one another it may have been Geneviève Laporte who had traveled the farther. Certainly the Picasso who turned at last to Pepe Illo was recognizable as the same man who had drawn and painted bull-rights twenty and forty and even sixty years before, whereas there is little in common between the schoolgirl who wrote her piece on Picasso in 1944 and the author of Les Cavaliers d’ombre.

  He did so, says Douglas Duncan, immediately after a disappointing bull-fight at Arles. He came home, shut himself up, and did not emerge until he had finished the twenty-six aquatints that were used for the book as well as several more that were not. Into these few hours of intense activity he poured seventy years of experience as an aficionado, and the suite is a delight even to those who do not take much pleasure in seeing bulls tormented. Apart from the virtues of its separate plates, the whole has an unrivaled unity, arising no doubt from the speed of execution and the technical mastery which allowed that speed.

  Bulls had long been present in his ceramics, but now they increased in number, and he made some very fine oval dishes which are the arena itself, with the ritual going on in the middle and the crowd spotted all round the edge, much as he had painted them when he was a child in Málaga. There were owls too, for another had entered his household, joining the pigeons, the goat Esmeralda that wandered upstairs and downstairs, almost wherever it chose (there had been a goat at La Galloise, but Gilot got rid of it: Jacqueline Roque put up with Esmeralda) and the dogs—a dachshund called Lump was now Yan’s companion. The pigeons had multiplied to an extraordinary extent, and Picasso fed the squabs himself; but one of the original hen-fantails must have been a flighty bird, for now there were signs of common blood in the dovecote, vulgar mottled gray and brown creatures whose looks could not have recommended them to anyone except Picasso, who gave them the run of the top story.

  The sculptures, now even more two-dimensional, had multiplied too, and they stood all about the garden: there were also some modeled bronzes, particularly a noble bull’s head with designs covering its smooth surface in something of the Easter Island manner. And of course there were more paintings, including another “Plage de la Garoupe,” the result of a large number of experiments with cut-out forms.

  But for all this the summer of 1957 was a trying season: many other bull-fights as well as that of Arles were disappointing; the invasion was as bad or even worse; Jacqueline had an operation, Picasso’s old sciatic leg was giving trouble, and even without that he was often ill-tempered—so ill-tempered that from. Hélène Parmelin’s account (and she was well placed to know, since she was more or less a fixture at La Californie) few people apart from those who liked being trampled by a famous man or who earned their foothold by toad-eating could have put up with it: as she says herself, “one could never move on his plane with a sense of equality,” and those who did not care for a state of permanent subordination kept away except for brief visits. Picasso loved pride and independence in others: but he could not always refrain from destroying both, just as he would so often exercise his Midas-touch, although he deplored its effects. Jacqueline addressed him as Monseigneur, a title usually reserved for royal dukes and bishops, Kahnweiler trembled at his frown, and the mood of the whole household was strictly regulated upon that of the master. At this point the mood was far from agreeable; yet among his intimates there were surely a few who saw in this nervous tension and increasing irritability the signs of an approaching work of great importance. And it would be strange if Jacqueline were not among those few, for although a great many unpleasant things have been said about her, mostly by excluded friends, nobody has ever questioned her devotion.

  In August there was a great turmoil at La Californie. Picasso deserted the lower part of the house, where he was too often interrupted, and moved up to the top story among the pigeons. Some time before this he had been asked to paint a big mural for the UNESCO building in Paris, but up there, in a solitude shared only by the birds and Velásquez and occasionally Jacqueline, the commission was the least of his concerns. He worked steadily day after day and often far into the night; he showed nothing to any of his friends other than Jacqueline, nor did he leave off except for bull-fights until October, when he took Pignon upstairs and showed him his great series of variations on Velásquez’ ”Las Meninas.”

  He had not yet finished all he meant to do, but even so there were “twenty or thirty” canvases up there, and all of them, apart from a few balconies with pigeons and views of the light-filled sea and land embraced by his window, were Meninas. The first was a large statement of his theme, a picture comparable in size with Velásquez’ but proportionately broader, which assembled all the characters of the original in much the same relative positions, the whole painted in a pinkish gray. The little infanta is there with her two maids of honor (or perhaps children-in-waiting would be a better translation of meninas), her dwarf and her fool, a dog, two tutors in the background, and a cloaked figure in an open door still farther off, all watching Velásquez painting the king and queen, who, since they inhabit the emptiness in front of the picture, the emptiness shared by the spectator, are only to be seen in the looking-glass behind the artist.

  In this first version the painter is a gigantic figure with a double profile, his head reaching the ceiling; and in this ceiling there are two great hooks, filled with a significance of their own: in a later picture, almost at the end of the series, a dark, highly schematic picture, he appears again, a pied triangle with a huge cross of Santiago (the order of knighthood to which Velásquez belonged) painted on it, standing well back from his easel, farther from the curiously insistent hooks. But between these two Picasso was less concerned with Velásquez and the other men than with the infanta and her little court: she and they are taken out of the main picture and they are to be seen in a score of transpositions, some of them wonderfully gay and full of color, others filled with sadness, and still others with the indefinable anxiety of dreams.

  When the pictures were shown publicly they excited a great deal of comment, most of it favorable, and once again they were interpreted in countless different ways. Some people saw political comment in “Las Meninas,” a symbolic refutation of the social order; some really thought that Picasso had spent weeks and months of his time making a parody of Velásquez. The various interpretations were no doubt valid for each of the interpreters, as Picasso said himself on another occasion; but when one has read several of them the question arises: are such essentially subjective views worth communicating? There was also a good deal of more informed discussion of Picasso’s treatment of space and its relation to analytic Cubism: in “Las Meninas,” of course, he took no account of Velásquez’ traditional perspective, and this adds even more to the quality that can be called dream-like, since in dreams the traditional sequences of space and time so often vanish, together with the common operation of cause and effect, yet without affecting one’s profound sense of reality—of another, almost always stronger reality. To be sure, some dreams make sense according to one’s waking mode of thought, and they can be put into words without losing too much of their essence: but those that cannot do not therefore lose their night-time significance nor their reality; they retain both in some non-verbal region o
f one’s mind, and, I believe, in painting. And if some part of “Las Meninas” can be described as a dream-like though very active meditation on Velásquez then that would go far towards explaining why so many of the reasonable interpretations are unconvincing. Clearly this also applies to much of Picasso’s other work as well as to that of most worth-while painters, particularly Uccello, but it seems to me most strongly exemplified in “Las Meninas.”

  They were finished at the end of the year, and early in 1958 Picasso turned straight to the UNESCO commission, a mural about thirty-three feet broad and twenty-six high for the conference-hall. The technical difficulties were considerable; he dealt with them by using a large number of separate panels that could be fitted together, but this meant that he could never see the full-scale picture as a whole.

  It was first seen in a school at Vallauris, when Georges Salles came down to unveil what was to some degree the offspring of his zeal, since it was he who had urged the unenthusiastic Picasso to undertake the task. The curtains were drawn aside and the local people saw an enormous picture quite filling the far end of the playground: to the right a man standing on a beach, another lying in front of him with his head raised, and a third sunbathing figure whose Matisse-like curves contrast strongly with the harsh line of the other two; to the left a woman with a minute head, a vast undivided bosom, and feet like an inverted heart stands looking away from the men; and into the sea between them falls a white and apparently calcined form, all little round head and attenuated limbs enveloped in a sharply defined shade. The fall, coupled with the indifference of the bystanders, has led most people to call him Icarus, though others, including UNESCO, speak of “Le Combat du Bien et du Mai.” The inhabitants of Vallauris applauded respectfully, and at the parties given for the occasion Picasso’s friends were lavish with their praise; but when the picture was seen in Paris—or partially seen, since it is impossible to stand back and view it as a whole—it was received with almost universal condemnation.