Picasso: A Biography

by Patrick O'Brian

  This is mere interpretation, however, and probably mistaken: most of the other pictures are apparently as cheerful as can be—more heads, more painters, a particularly charming “Homme à l’enfant” (the Notre-Dame-de-Vie gardener and his egg-faced baby wrapped and swaddled as though in an outer egg), Jacquelines, some still-lives, including a fine blue lobster on a flat basket, landscapes from his new studio, a pair of nudes, one holding a looking-glass to the other, echoing a theme dear to him in the thirties, a guitarist who looks back to a still remoter past. And nearly all these are painted in a manner that flows naturally from the pictures of La Californie but that is nevertheless quite distinct: fierce color, strong, hard, almost brutal line slashed on to the canvas so that one sometimes has the feeling that the picture is little more than a sketch (a slapdash sketch, say his detractors) more important as part of a larger work as yet unexpressed and perhaps never to be expressed than for itself. This is particularly so in the many bucolic heads, twelve of which he fitted together and sent to the Salon de Mai under the title of “Douze toiles en une, une toile en douze.”

  But that was in the early part of the year. Soon the legal proceedings about the book, the eager intervention and contradictory advice of his friends, and the unfortunate decision to carry the case to appeal dragged him so far into the ordinary world that for months on end he could scarcely get back into his own, even when he was in the shelter of his studio. Then his body let him down at last. He had cared for it with an abstemious diet all his life, pills, days in bed, and catskin comforters; and, which was perhaps more to the point, he had always followed the advice of a physician who recommended “plenty of sex and red wine”; but still it let him down.

  After he had been out of form for some time, he was found to be seriously ill with prostate trouble among other things, and in November he went to Paris, to the American Hospital at Neuilly. The grim operation was successful; the scars healed; there were no complications; and in a surprisingly short while he was back at Notre-Dame-de-Vie.

  There he was visited by his Catalan friends the Gilis, and they, as well as the few others who were allowed through the increasingly severe defenses, found him as lively and gay as though the surgeon had removed old age together with all the rest. But the appearance of instant recovery was fallacious. Picasso had been weakened by the long, slow infection and by months of worry, exasperation, and blazing anger; and tough as he was, his body had received a terrible shock.

  All through 1966 he did not paint a single picture: this had never happened to him before, even at the height of the crisis in Olga’s day. He did draw, and he did etch the splendid plates for El entierro del Conde de Orgaz, which Gili published in 1969, but he could not paint. His eyes had given him trouble even in his youth; now they were worse; and now his hearing began to fail. There was no comfort from his family, either, for although he was on speaking terms with Paulo, the other children were firmly on the other side of the electrified fence that now surrounded his retreat.

  He had all the convalescent’s irritability, and it was exacerbated by the continuing publicity about Gilot’s book, the extracts in the local papers and in many magazines: he had never been a good invalid, and now it called for an almost superhuman degree of devotion in those who looked after him. Early in 1966 the Soviet government awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize, and it is said that when the Russian representative (the ambassador himself, according to some accounts) came to hang it round his neck, Picasso was in such an evil mood that he would not even let him through the gate. Eventually he did receive the decoration, but from the hands of his old friend Ilya Ehrenburg, for many years Lzvestia’s correspondent in Paris, a haunter of Montparnasse and the owner of the finest private collection of degenerate art in Moscow; and the photograph taken on that occasion shows him looking perfectly delighted. Whether the tale of the Russian ambassador is true or not, it is quite certain that a want of tact on the part of the officials concerned very nearly upset all the French government’s plans for celebrating Picasso’s eighty-fifth birthday, and it was only at the cost of a lavish expenditure of soothing spirit that Jean Leymarie, Isabelle’s father and the curator of the Musée national d’Art moderne, whom Picasso respected as a poet and loved as a friend, managed to persuade him to withdraw his opposition. Once he had decided to cooperate, however, he did so with all his heart, opening his store of pictures, sculpture, drawings, engravings, and ceramics wide.

  When the nineteen-year-old Picasso first came to Paris at the turn of the century the Exposition universelle was in full swing: a great many buildings had been put up, and of these the most important were the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais. These only had been preserved, and now, in homage to Picasso, they were filled with his works. The Grand Palais held two hundred and eighty-four pictures, including all the greatest except for “Guernica”; and since the Russians too were happy to honor their comrade, the exhibition provided one of the finest general views of Picasso’s achievement in painting ever to be assembled. The Petit Palais showed two hundred and five drawings, ranging from the accomplished studies he made at La Coruña to some heads as recent as July, 1966, as well as five hundred and eight ceramics and three hundred and ninety-two pieces of sculpture, by far the most complete collection ever brought together and one that called for a total reassessment of Picasso as a sculptor. It was the most splendid exhibition that had ever been organized in the honor of a single artist, living or dead: and that was not all. The Bibliothéque nationale showed room after room of his illustrations, etchings, engravings, lithographs, and linocuts, and every commercial gallery that Could possibly find the means of doing so put on its own Picasso exhibition.

  The great retrospective lasted until February, 1967. The criticism ran from downright abuse to ecstatic praise, showing every shade of feeling except indifference: and the unprecedented number of eight hundred and fifty thousand people went to see the show.

  Picasso was not among them. He stayed at Notre-Dame-de-Vie: and one day he telephoned Madame de Lazerme, as he often did when he was feeling lonely for his own people; but this time it was to tell her that he would not call again; he was growing deaf, he said, and he could no longer make out her voice.

  *Different authors give widely differing dates. This I have from the Mayor of Vallauris, who was also good enough to tell me that Olga Picasso was buried at Cannes and not, as Françoise Gilot asserts, in his town.

  Chapter XXII

  THE year 1967 showed the old eager life returning: as early as February a painter-musketeer appeared, sitting at his easel in a seventeenth-century chair, his sword at his side, painting with a long delicate brush; and this time one can see what he is painting—a nude with a tiny head and a massive bosom, drawn in sure, sweeping curves. He is still only in pencil, but in March he takes on color in a fair-sized painting from which he gazes out at the spectator, more Porthos than d’Artagnan but no doubt a good companion in an equally assertive band. Picasso certainly liked him, and presently musketeers came in arrogant troops to inhabit his studio: they came in the first place from Rembrandt, as Jacqueline told Malraux, and indeed quite an early musketeer is entitled “Personnage rembranesque”; but during their journey they underwent a metamorphosis as complete as Manet’s sculptor. Picasso’s musketeers are formidable, swashbuckling creatures, armed with swords, guns, fierce tobacco-pipes, Louis XIII beards and mustaches, and with flaming color; derisive, violent men; for although Picasso loathed war his attitude to violence was at least ambivalent—his own life and his own painting were filled with it, and as for derision, he would not have been Picasso without a fund that nothing could exhaust, derision for every generally-received idea, for the establishment and art of course, but also for himself.

  Yet he also remained faithful to his very old friends the circus-people. He had drawn them again and again during his convalescent year and now they joined the musketeers, no longer the sad, lean, blue forms of long ago, occasionally lit with a tragic patch of red, but shari
ng in the brilliant, aggressive color that came flooding into Picasso’s later work to reach its height in 1969 and 1970. And at the same time he painted more of his bucolic characters as well as a monumental nude or so: but still this was not a rich year for painting. His mind was turning more in the direction of the engraved plate, which, in spite of all his immense experience, still had possibilities as yet unexplored. For some years now he had had two perfect collaborators just at hand, the brothers Crommelynck, whose press at Mougins itself allowed him to pass through the various states of an engraving at great speed; and when Cinto Reventós and Antoni Tapies came to see him this year he talked mostly about the experiments he planned to make. Tapies was one of the younger Catalan painters whom Picasso particularly valued: they had met through Dr. Reventós in the fifties, and at the time of the terrible floods in Catalonia in 1962 he and Picasso made remarkable contributions to the fund for relief—Picasso’s share was said to be in the nature of four million pesetas.

  The etchings that Picasso had in mind might have started earlier in 1968 but for the fact that Sabartés died on February 13. Picasso felt the blow very keenly indeed, and his sense of loss can to some degree be gauged by the prodigious extent of his gifts to the Barcelona museum, which he saw as Sabartés’ creation, perhaps as a continuation of his being. He sent the blue portrait of his friend that he had painted in 1901, together with the entire sequence of the “Meninas,” his most successful “Jacqueline,” nine big sunlit pictures of the view from his window at La Californie, filled with doves, and some smaller landscapes. Then later, when the museum had made room for them by acquiring the next-door palace, he added the vast store of juvenilia and early work that his family had been keeping for him ever since he settled permanently in France, a hoard that amounted to about a thousand items, ranging from his decorated school books through his vast academic prize-pieces to paintings of the Blue Period, as well as some from his later visits. And from the end of Sabartés’ life to the end of his own he sent the museum a copy of every one of his engravings, always with a dedication not to the memory of his friend but to the living Sabartés.

  Picasso went back to work in the spring, and among the first prints the museum received in this new donation was the astonishing series of three hundred and forty-seven etchings that he carried out between March 16 and October 5, working with such concentrated energy that the turmoil of May, 1968, seems to have left him unmoved: at least it never checked the continual flow.

  Much of Picasso’s drawing in 1966 and 1967 had looked back to the circus, to Pierrot and Harlequin, and even farther back, to his family; and this carried on into many of these etchings. Others belong to his contemporary world, particularly those of the musketeers, who sometimes join the characters of long ago and who often assume a most Spanish air. And a great number of both, reminiscent or modern or in every combination of the two, are erotic, so much so that about twenty are rarely reproduced, being thought unsuitable for the general public. They have been called pornographic, and since some “describe the life, manners, etc. of prostitutes and their patrons” while others “express or suggest unchaste subjects” I suppose they are; but with some strange dark exceptions that I speak of later it is a gay, witty pornography as well as a most dazzling display of his command of the medium, to say nothing of his ebullient life.

  Scarcely had he laid his etching tools aside before he seized his brush and returned to color; and if he had been sparing of it in his younger days, if from a sense of discipline he had approached his problems primarily in terms of line, he now made up for his restraint, indulging himself to the utmost possible degree. Picasso had always been an extraordinary man, but perhaps never so extraordinary as he was in these last years, when he blazed out in furious blue and green and above all in Spanish red and yellow, with black playing a most important part. And the color was a direct expression of the vitality within. In thirteen months alone, those running from January 5, 1969, to February 2, 1970, he painted a hundred and sixty-five pictures, many about six foot by four and few much smaller, as well as making scores of drawings. All these were shown in Avignon in 1970, but I did not see them properly at that time and I will postpone what I have to say for a few pages.

  As far as numbers go, 1969 and 1970 were among the most productive years of Picasso’s life as a painter; yet still he had time and energy enough to make some pots as well, to grow keenly interested in tapestry (the Gobelins factory was weaving a huge version of his collage “Femmes à leur toilette”), to see the bull-fights, and to receive a fair number of friends, including Josétte Gris, the widow of Juan. There were also several Catalans of course, and one of them, a lawyer, had the unenviable task of inducing him to sign a document that would give Barcelona the full ownership of his vast donation. Picasso had always loathed even the simplest legal formality, and this was not simple at all, since he had to look at photographs of every single work before he signed them away forever. All the united forensic eloquence of Barcelona would never have brought him to it in any other circumstances, but the prolongation of Sabartés in time and in the city’s esteem was another matter: running steadily through the sheaves of photographs he said, “These are not my works: this is my life itself,” and then set his signature to the deed.

  These were years of giving for Picasso. In 1969 he had brought himself as near to making a will as ever he could bear: this testament referred not to money or real estate but to something of much greater importance to Picasso, to “Guernica” itself. He had been importuned by General Franco’s government, working through Kahnweiler and other connections, to let the picture come to Spain, where the recently completed Madrid Museum of Modern Art had a room specially designed to receive it. All sorts of honors, such as being hung in the Prado with Velásquez, were proposed; but Picasso would have nothing to do with them. He called for his lawyer and they drew up a document in which Picasso laid it down that “Guernica” and the preliminary studies should go to Spain, but only when the Republican liberties were restored; and in the event of his death (the word actually used was I believe “disappearance”) then his family and Maître Dumas, the lawyer, were to decide when this condition was fulfilled.

  Then when Aries gave him the freedom of the city, and he gave Aries more than fifty drawings; and when representatives of the New York Museum of Modern Art came to Mougins in 1971 Picasso sent them away with the present of one of his few surviving and highly treasured Cubist constructions, the “Guitar” of 1911; and there were many private donations.

  The year 1971 was also that of his ninetieth birthday. Paris celebrated it not with the massive splendor of 1966 but with the crowning homage of an honor never yet paid to any living artist. The great gallery of the Louvre itself was rehung, and some of the most illustrious names in the history of art having been moved aside, eight magnificent Picassos took their place. It was a most delicate, triumphal stroke, worthy of the nation and the man.

  But Picasso was not there to see it. He sent Paulo to represent him at the opening by the President of the Republic, while he stayed at Notre-Dame-de-Vie, painting still. Some photographs were taken of him on the day itself, and they show him looking much as he had looked for the last twenty years and more, his huge dark eyes gleaming with intelligence and life, not at all an ancient man: a perfectly human being. Yet in some way the ceremony of the Louvre resembled the shadow of death: no man had entered there alive: it was the painter’s true apotheosis. For no one can become a god without first dying—“Die, Diagoras,” said a Spartan to the Olympic victor, “thou hast nothing short of divinity to desire.”

  And although I knew from common report that he was busily at work in his retreat, still painting in the powerful color of these later years, he seemed to me to be living now in a world removed, somewhere between this and the next: an impression made the stronger by his much increased seclusion and by the reverential tone with which these last exhibitions and above all the homage of the Louvre had been received.

 
It was not until late in 1972 that I could get to Avignon to see his recent pictures in the Palace of the Popes. My excitement at the prospect of seeing an unknown aspect of Picasso’s work was mingled with anxiety, because as I have said I was there for the first exhibition, the showing of all he did in 1969 and the first few weeks of 1970. In 1970 the hundred and sixty-seven paintings were hung in the great chapel of Clement VI, the hall of the notaries, and that of the chamberlain, but filming of some kind was going on when I arrived and it was not until much later that I was able to form any reasonable idea of them: those that I could make out through the intervening screens, cameras, technicians, and the attendant crowd bore all the marks of furious haste, coarse slashing brushstrokes, the paint flung on to the canvas or in some cases on to the bare brown paper and running down in streaks, a deliberate denial of all technique. There were some huge heads, sometimes coupled in a violent kiss and always crammed into their limits, always too large, too near for comfort, an enormously emphatic gesture right in front of one’s nose. They made me feel uneasy for the painter, for although it was absurd to look for the serenity of Matisse in Picasso or his particular aged wisdom, this half-seen striving had a nightmarish quality.

  “Do not go gentle into that good night,/Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” says Dylan Thomas, and it seemed to me that this was just what Picasso might be doing. It would have been in accordance with his extreme character that in his old age he should defy and smash everything in reach; yet such an attitude, however natural and even awe-inspiring, could not be reconciled with any kind of happiness. But, as I say, at that time my view of the pictures was little more than a fleeting glimpse.