Life with Picasso

  Pablo’s association with Larionov and Gontcharova was much closer, since their aesthetic outlook was more closely related to his than was that of Bakst or Benois. Pablo struck up a friendship with Massine, the choreographer, and with Stravinsky, people he would not otherwise have had the occasion to know, probably. Until then his horizon had been limited to the other painters who were searching for new solutions, to the few collector-critics, like Gertrude Stein and Wilhelm Uhde, who were interested in such painters, and to a small circle of bohemian poets and writers like Apollinaire and Max Jacob. With Diaghilev he was introduced to another world. Even though basically he disliked that kind of social nonsense, it tempted him for a time and his marriage with Olga corresponded, in a sense, to that momentary temptation.

  I could see from the way he spoke of their beginnings that Pablo had thought this well-born young woman would make a very effective partner in a social stratum a good deal higher than the one he had occupied until then. They were married in the usual civil ceremony at the mairie, and also, as a concession to Olga, at the Russian church in the Rue Daru, wearing crowns on their heads in the customary Orthodox ritual.

  According to Pablo, Olga didn’t have the sacred fire of her art. She knew nothing about painting or about much else for that matter, he told me. She married thinking she was going to lead a soft, pampered, upper-crust life. Pablo figured he would continue to lead the life of a bohème—on a loftier, grander scale, to be sure, but still remain independent. He told me that when he went to Barcelona with Olga before their marriage and introduced her to his mother, his mother had said, “You poor girl, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for. If I were a friend I would tell you not to do it under any conditions. I don’t believe any woman could be happy with my son. He’s available for himself but for no one else.” Later, Olga tried to enlist Pablo’s family’s help in convincing him to lead a more normal—this is, more bourgeois—way of life. She had one idea in her head, not twenty, and she was capable of repeating that one idea until something happened.

  Paul Rosenberg, who became Pablo’s principal dealer about that time, found him an apartment in the Rue La Boétie–number 23–near the Champs-Elysées. That seemed an ideal place to Olga, so they moved in. Because there was no atelier there, Pablo began to work in a large room in the apartment but it had none of the advantages of a real studio. Since he found it very inconvenient and also, as he told me, almost from the start he and Olga did not get along, he rented an apartment on the seventh floor, just above theirs, and turned that into a suite of ateliers.

  Olga’s social ambitions made increasingly greater demands on his time. In 1921 their son Paulo was born and then began his period of what the French call le high-life, with nurse, chambermaid, cook, chauffeur, and all the rest, expensive and at the same time distracting. In spring and summer they went to Juan-les-Pins, Cap d’Antibes, and Monte Carlo, where—as in Paris—Pablo found himself more and more involved with fancy dress balls, masquerades, and all the other high-jinks of the 1920s, often in company with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the Gerald Murphys, the Count and Countess Etienne de Beaumont, and other international birds of paradise.

  In 1935, a little while before the birth of Maya, his daughter by Marie-Thérèse Walter, Pablo and Olga separated. He wanted to divorce her because their life together had become unbearable. She screamed at him all day long, he told me. Olga didn’t want a divorce so their separation negotiations were long and involved. Then, too, they had been married on a community-property basis, which meant that if he had divorced her, he would have been obliged to give her half of his paintings, and he was not at all eager to do that. So he, too, although in one sense he wanted a divorce, was dragging his heels to see if things couldn’t be arranged in some other way. According to French law, a marriage ceremony involving two foreigners could be dissolved only in accordance with the laws of the husband’s country. While the discussions were going on, the Spanish Civil War flared up, the government was overthrown and General Franco came to power. Under the new regime, divorce was no longer allowed for a Spanish subject who had been married in a church. They had already separated but were never able to be divorced. He turned over to her the Château de Boisgeloup. He continued to live in the apartment in the Rue La Boétie but he stopped working there in 1937 when he acquired the ateliers in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. In 1942 he began to live at the Rue des Grands-Augustins.

  One winter morning soon after our first visit to the bank, he took me to the apartment in the Rue La Boétie. I saw the whole story, which he had told me in all its detail, come to life again. And yet I wasn’t at all prepared for what I saw. We entered the reception hall of the sixth-floor apartment. All the rooms were shuttered and everything was covered with dust. The place had been closed from 1942 until that day. We went into the bedroom on the left, which had been Pablo’s and Olga’s. The two twin beds were made up, one of them in the way one sometimes makes up a bed that is going to be slept in right away: the bedspread pulled back, the sheet and blanket turned down. On those sheets and pillowcases lay five years’ dust. Beside each bed was a night table and on one of them still lay the remnants of the last breakfast: something that looked like Melba toast and some sugar. In that room were six or seven small Corots Pablo had bought from Paul Rosenberg or taken in exchange for works of his own. In addition to the Corots there were two paintings in a post-Impressionist manner. “Who is it?” he asked me. I looked carefully at one of them. It was a mountain landscape. “It must be Matisse,” I said, “judging from the way the pink and the green are keyed in together.” “That’s right,” he said. “They’re both early Matisse.” The other was a still life: flowers in a pewter pot, very colorful and perhaps more recognizable as Matisse, but very early also, before the Fauve period.

  We went into the bedroom next to that one. It had been Paulo’s room. The walls were covered with photographs of bicycle-racing champions and the floor was littered with toy cars, just as though the room had been occupied recently by a boy about eight. Yet when Paulo left that room he had been fourteen. From there we went into the salon, on the front of the house. It was a very impersonal room with a concert grand piano on which Paulo had been obliged to practice his scales under the supervision of Marcelle Meyer, regardless of the fact that he had, according to Pablo, neither taste nor talent for the piano. Everything was covered with loose slip covers and they, in turn, with five years’ dust. Pablo went from one piece of furniture to the next, pulling off the covers to show me that every chair was upholstered in satin of a different color. Everywhere newspapers were piled up, and sticking out from between them, here and there, drawings of his.

  We opened a door with difficulty and found ourselves on the threshold of another room, which was, I should guess, about sixteen feet square. It was impossible to tell exactly because, with the exception of a small open area just inside the door, it was full from the floor almost to the ceiling. This was Pablo’s storeroom, where he kept everything that was to be saved. But since Pablo had never thrown anything away—whether an empty matchbox or a little watercolor by Seurat—the range of its contents was enormous. Old newspapers and magazines, notebooks of drawings he had made, and copies by the dozen of various books he had illustrated formed a wall almost to the ceiling. I picked up a group of letters and saw that they included some from friends like Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob as well as a note from the laundress that he had once found amusing. Suspended on the face of this wall was a charming seventeenth-century Italian puppet, strung together with wires and dressed as Harlequin, about four feet high. Behind it here and there, wedged into the mass, I saw paintings. I looked into a box. It was full of gold pieces.

  After that room, the others were an anticlimax: the dining room with only a normal amount of disorder and then another room whose chief feature was a large round table, vaguely Second Empire in style, laden with the same kind of pack-rat accumulation. It was the table one sees in many of the mildly Cubist
paintings and gouaches of the early 1920s, standing before an open window, sometimes with the dome of Saint-Augustin in the distance. Many of those pictures show the table pretty well crowded with objects. Since then nothing had been removed but a good deal had been added.

  The main rooms of the apartment were laid out in the form of a semicircle around the entrance. From there a long corridor led to the service quarters: the linen room, the laundry, the bedroom where Inès, the chambermaid, and her sister slept and, at the very end, the kitchen. In the linen room Pablo opened one of the closets. Five or six suits of his hung there, like dead leaves that had become entirely transparent, with only the tracery of their fibres remaining. Moths had eaten away everything woolen. There remained only the buckram and the threads around the lapels and pockets, wherever the tailor’s needle had passed. In the skeleton breast pocket of one was a crumpled, dusty, yellowed handkerchief. Some of the doors of the wardrobe were missing.

  “I thought they’d be good to paint on so I had them removed and taken upstairs to the studio,” Pablo said.

  We went into the kitchen. The dishes and pots and pans were all in place. I looked in the pantry and saw jams and jellies all turned to sugar.

  On the floor above, the disorder was about the same but the accumulation less. There were paintings of all sizes stacked against the walls, tables loaded with brushes, hundreds of empty, split-open tubes of paint all over the floor. Pablo showed me the rush-seated wooden armchairs and canapé from the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937 where he had exhibited Guernica. They were Catalan peasant work and he had liked them so much that after the exhibition was dismantled they were given to him as a present. There was what remained of the gaunt frame of a philodendron onto which Pablo had hung all sorts of odd objects: a brightly colored feather duster, the horny beak of a bird, and a number of different-colored empty cigarette boxes. The chance accumulation of so many unrelated objects, end to end, had achieved a result that was more Picasso than anything one could have put together consciously. In fact all these objects seemed so obviously and intimately related to his work that I had the impression of having entered the cave of a very familiar Ali Baba, but an Ali Baba who would have preferred looting an alchemist’s shop rather than Cartier’s or van Cleef and Arpels.

  “One summer I went on vacation and left one window half-open,” Pablo said. “When I returned, I found that a whole family of pigeons had established residence in the atelier. I never wanted to chase them away. Of course they left droppings everywhere and it would have been too much to expect that the paintings should have been spared.” I saw several paintings of the period that had been decorated in that way by the pigeons. Pablo had never seen any point to removing their droppings. “It makes an interesting unpremeditated effect,” he said.

  I told him it looked to me as though his painting gloried in the most common-ordinary things. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “If anyone could go broke for things that don’t cost any money, I’d have been bankrupt years ago.”

  Not long after that, Pablo said that since I had seen the other houses, I ought to see Boisgeloup. If the apartment of the Rue La Boétie was the cave of Ali Baba, Boisgeloup was the house of Bluebeard. It is a very handsome eighteenth-century country estate but the day we visited it that winter, it seemed especially forbidding. It is built around a square courtyard. On the right, as we entered, was a rose arbor, and behind that, a lovely small thirteenth-century chapel. Beyond the chapel was a circular pigeon house, very large but in bad condition. There were seven or eight acres of land with the place and a caretaker-gardener to look after it.

  The day we were there the sculptor Adam was working in the studio where Pablo had once worked and was living in the little apartment that had been used by the concierge in the days when Pablo had lived there with Olga. The main residence was not open to us, strictly speaking, since it was the domicile assigned by the court to Olga at the time of her separation from Pablo. However, Olga lived most of the year in Paris, in the Hotel California, just off the Champs-Elysées in the Rue de Berri, and went to Boisgeloup only occasionally. Since Paulo—her son and Pablo’s—was with us, Pablo decided to go in anyway. It was very dreary and cold that day and the house had neither heat nor electricity.

  “Just because I bought it, that’s no reason to modernize it,” Pablo said. So in spite of its appealing architecture, the interior was not very presentable. Since Olga was hardly ever there, the town had requisitioned it—under French law it was considered “insufficiently occupied”—and used the ground floor as an annex to the village school. Some of the rooms were filled with wooden school benches. In one of them there was a very pretty Delft faïence stove. Resting on top of that was the skeleton of a rhinoceros head with two large horns. The kitchen was huge, with a dirty long black stove.

  Upstairs the place took on a sinister aspect. There was a long series of rooms, one after another, empty but for a few trunks scattered about. Pablo opened them up. They contained Olga’s old ballet costumes. On the next floor above, we went into just one of the rooms. There was nothing in it but a chair, the one that appears in the rather Ingresque 1917 portrait of Olga sitting in a chair, holding a fan. I began to have the feeling that if I looked into a closet, I would find half a dozen ex-wives hanging by their necks. The atmosphere was all dust, decay, and desertion, and it gave me a chill.

  ONE OF THE HARDEST of the jobs that fell to me was getting Pablo out of bed mornings. He always woke up submerged in pessimism and there was a definite ritual to be followed, a litany that had to be repeated every day, sometimes more insistently than others.

  The bedroom, long and narrow with an uneven, sloping red-tile floor, was entered through the bathroom. At the far end was a high Louis XIII secretary and, along the left-hand wall, a chest of the same period, both completely covered with papers, books, magazines and mail that Pablo hadn’t answered and never would, drawings piled up helter-skelter, and packages of cigarettes. Between the two, in the middle of a large brass bed, lay—or sat—Pablo, looking more than ever the Egyptian scribe. Above the bed was a naked electric-light bulb. Behind the bed were drawings Pablo was particularly fond of, attached by clothes-pins to nails driven into the wall. The so-called more important letters, which he didn’t answer either but kept before him as a permanent reminder and reproach, were pinned up, also with clothespins, onto wires that stretched from the electric-light wire to the stovepipe. The stove, a little wood-burning Mirus, stood in the center of the room. Even when the central heating was working, Pablo always made a wood fire because at that period he used to enjoy making drawings of the flames. The stovepipe was so long and took up so much space, it was the most important decorative element in the room. With its letters waving in the draft it was a hazard to almost everyone but Pablo, Sabartés and Inès, who were short enough to find their way through the maze without getting caught in the wires. Pablo always insisted on keeping the stovepipe, even though, after my first years there, the stove wasn’t used any more. There was almost no other furniture except a Swedish chair in laminated wood completely out of character with the rest of the room.

  Inès, the chambermaid, went in first, carrying Pablo’s breakfast tray—café au lait and two pieces of salt-free dried toast—followed by Sabartés with the papers and mail. I brought up the rear. Pablo would always start to grumble, first about the way his breakfast was laid out on the tray. Inès would rearrange it—differently every day—to suit him, curtsy, and leave. Then Sabartés would set down the papers and hand him the mail. Pablo would flip through it indifferently until he came to a letter from Olga. Olga wrote him almost every day long tirades in Spanish, so that I wouldn’t understand, mixed with Russian, which no one understood, and French, which she wrote so badly that it wasn’t very understandable either. She would write in every direction: horizontally, vertically, and in the margins. She would often enclose a postcard photograph of Beethoven in one pose or another, frequently one that showed
him conducting an orchestra. Sometimes she would send a picture of Rembrandt on which she had written, “If you were like him, you would be a great artist.” Pablo read these letters through to the end and was tremendously bothered by them. I suggested to him that he just put them aside but he couldn’t; he had to know what she said.

  Then he would groan and begin his lamentations. One day typical of many they went this way: “You have no idea how unhappy I am. Nobody could be more unhappy. In the first place I’m a sick man. My God, if you only knew what sicknesses I have.” Of course, he had had trouble with an ulcer off and on since 1920, but when he started to list all the diseases he was suffering from, that was only a point of departure. “I’ve got stomach trouble. I suppose it’s a cancer. And nobody cares. Least of all Doctor Gutmann, who’s supposed to be looking after my stomach. If he cared at all about me he’d be here now. He’d find a way of coming every day. But no. When I go to see him he says, ‘My friend, you’re not so badly off as all that,’ and then what does he do? He shows me some first editions. Do I need to see his first editions? What I need is a doctor who is interested in me. But he’s only interested in my painting. How do you think I can be well under conditions like that? My soul itches. No wonder I’m unhappy. Nobody understands me. How can you expect them to? Most people are so stupid. Who is there to talk to? I can’t talk with anybody. Under those conditions life is a terrible burden. Well, there’s always painting, I suppose. But my painting! It’s going very badly. Every day I work worse than the day before. Is it any wonder, with all the troubles I have with my family? Here’s another letter from Olga. She doesn’t miss a day. Paulo is in trouble again. And tomorrow it will be worse. Somebody else will show up to make life miserable for me. When I think that it’s like that day after day, going from bad to worse, do you wonder I despair about going on? Well, I do despair. I’m pretty nearly desperate. I wonder, really, why I bother to get up. Well, I won’t get up. Why should I paint? Why should I continue to exist like this? A life like mine is unbearable.”