It obviously wasn’t the moment to carry that any further so Pablo began to talk of other things, and after a while we left Valsuani and went out into the atelier. Pablo walked around looking at all the work under way and discussing it with the workmen. Workmen always liked him because he was greatly interested in the craft side of any medium. They could see that he was interested in them and the problems they had to solve. In their eyes, that made him one of them. He began to grumble about the way Valsuani had been stalling him off. “Don’t worry about that,” one of the workmen said. “We’ll take care of your pieces. They’re not really too difficult. You’ll see.”
Valsuani came out of the office and joined us. Pablo pointed to a sculpture one of the men was finishing. It was a very academic study of a female nude. “Look at the stuff you’re turning out here,” he said, “in preference to mine.”
“Yes,” Valsuani said, “but it gives us a lot less trouble.”
“Perhaps I ought to take my things to Susse,” Pablo said. “They’re a serious outfit.”
Valsuani hesitated. “Well,” he said, “perhaps we could do something with those big heads of women. As I said, they’re more or less classical in form and won’t give us as much trouble as some of your other things.”
“It’s a deal,” Pablo said. “And that will start you off on the right track. It will bring in the other good sculptors and get rid of the junk I see around here now.” And it did. It wasn’t long before Valsuani was doing the big sculptures of Matisse—the several versions of Nude, Rear View—and his heads of Jeannette, as well as the sculptures Renoir executed, with the help of an assistant, toward the end of his life.
Bit by bit Pablo’s backlog of sculpture was taken care of. It was a long job. One of the large heads, for example, took over a year. Even when the casting is over, the work is still far from done. The irregularities have to be filed down after comparison with the original model, and then, when the bronze is an exact replica of the original, it has to be patinated. The bronze looks like a dirty penny when it first comes out. It’s neither polished nor mat, and the color is very uneven. The patina is very important because the sculpture doesn’t really reach its proper form until the right patina has been chosen for it and applied, sometimes over a very long period.
Pablo had made a small sculpture of the head of a woman during the Occupation. The patina had never satisfied him. He had changed it, I don’t know how many times, from very dark to natural metal, then green in all its varying tones. Still it didn’t seem right. He felt it should be oxydized, so he would dip it in various acids from time to time, but nothing satisfied him. He was complaining about it one day to one of the finishers at Valsuani’s, a big burly fellow. “I’ll tell you, Pablo,” the fellow said. “When everything else fails, there’s only one solution—piss on it.” Pablo always had great respect for that particular workman, so when we got home that day he followed his advice, but the results—even with time and patience—were greatly disappointing. After a few more attempts he gave up. He rubbed down the head with a rough rag.
“Nothing works,” he said. “It’s just not a good piece, so the patina only makes it worse. I was a fool to have it cast.” He stored it away in a dark corner.
A visit to Valsuani’s was one of the few things that could get Pablo up in the morning. As a rule we had finished our business with Valsuani by noon and at that point Pablo was ready to go calling. The three friends who were geographically most exposed to his visits were Giacometti, Braque, and Laurens. We couldn’t call on Giacometti, since he worked late into the night and didn’t stir about much before one. As for Braque, ever since the time he had refused to invite us to stay for lunch, Pablo always felt a little backward about going there at noon. That left only Laurens. Laurens liked Pablo but better, I think, from a distance than at close range. He always greeted Pablo by saying something like “What a pleasure to see you,” but he said it so uncertainly that we were persuaded he wasn’t quite so pleased as he claimed. I think that Pablo’s habit of picking up unkind gossip and spreading it around Paris may have made him uneasy, and so he was always on his guard. He showed us his work but didn’t talk about it. That made Pablo a little reserved, too.
A year or two later, after Laurens had been ill with a pulmonary congestion, the doctor sent him for a vacation to Magagnosc, not far above Vallauris. While he was there we called on him, and for the first time he seemed delighted to see Pablo. I think it was because he wasn’t in his studio. Most of the painters and sculptors Pablo called on were a little uneasy when Pablo was in their ateliers, perhaps because Pablo often said, “When there’s anything to steal, I steal.” So they all felt, I think, that if they showed him work they were doing and something caught his eye, he would take it over but do it much better and then everyone else would think that they had copied it from him.
AFTER WE SETTLED IN VALLAURIS, Pablo occasionally made small objects in plaster or terra cotta at Madame Ramié’s, but it wasn’t until after he had bought the atelier in the Rue du Fournas that he began to make sculpture of any consequence. Next to his new atelier was a field where some of the potters threw debris. It wasn’t exactly a dump but it served as an excuse for one. In addition to their odds and ends of pottery, there were occasionally pieces of scrap metal. Often on his way to work, Pablo would stop by the dump to see what might have been added since his last inspection. He was generally in a cheerful mood, full of high expectations. It was very hard for Claude, who was only three or four at the time, to understand why his father should be so happy about finding an old fork or a broken shovel or a cracked pot or something equally unprepossessing, but a find like that was often the beginning of a creative adventure for Pablo. The object he found became the mainspring of a new sculpture. But with The Goat it was the other way around. Pablo started with the idea of making a sculpture of a goat and then cast about for objects which might be useful for his purpose. Beginning then, he stopped being driven to work. He searched the dump daily and before he even got there, he rummaged around in any rubbish barrels we passed on our walk to the studio. I walked along with him, pushing an old baby carriage into which he threw whatever likely looking pieces of junk he found on the way. Or if it was something too big to fit into the carriage, he would send the car around for it afterward.
That was the way he picked up an old wicker wastebasket one morning. “That’s just what I need for the goat’s rib cage,” he said. A day or two later at Madame Ramié’s he came across two pottery milk pitchers that hadn’t quite panned out. “They’re rather peculiar forms for milk pitchers,” he said, “but maybe if I knock out their bottoms and break off the handles, they’ll be just about right for the goat’s teats.” Then he thought of a palm frond he had picked up as we were walking along the beach one morning at least two years before that. It had looked good to him at the time, but he hadn’t found a use for it right away. Now he saw that a piece of it would fit into the goat’s face. He carved it a bit to give the mouth and nose the proper proportions. Another part of it went into the backbone. The horns he fashioned of vinestalk and the ears were pieces of cardboard shaped like ears and filled with plaster. For the legs he used sticks of wood like thin logs, cut from the branch of a tree. The ones he used for the hind legs had knots that looked like joints and they “bent” at the knots. He stuck bits of metal strapping and ribbing from the junk pile into the haunches to emphasize them and give an effect of angularity and boniness.
Pablo never liked to overlook any anatomical detail, especially a sexual one. He wanted the goat’s sex to be indicated in clear enough fashion so that no one could be in doubt. Of course, the two long teats hanging down gave a clue but that didn’t satisfy him. He took the top of a tin can, bent it in the middle until it was three-quarters closed, and lodged it, open side out, into the plaster between the hind legs. The tail was formed by a double length of braided copper wire, which stuck up jauntily. Directly underneath that, Pablo inserted into the plaster a short length o
f pipe, about one inch in diameter, to represent the anus. He filled in the gaps with plaster and let it dry. The Goat was finished.
Pablo had always wanted to make a sculpture that didn’t touch the ground. One day, watching a little girl jumping rope, he decided that would be the way to do it. He had the ironmonger in Vallauris make him a rectangular base from which rose, to a height of three or four feet, a curving iron tube in the shape the jump-rope would have as it reached the ground. The top ends of the “rope” provided the support for the little girl. The central part of her body was a shallow round wicker basket of the type used to gather orange blossoms for the perfume factories. From each end extended a wooden holder, which Pablo set into the open ends of the metal tube. To the bottom of the basket he attached folds of heavy paper. He set plaster into those and when it had dried and he had removed the paper, that made the skirt. Below that he hung little legs he had carved out of wood. He found in the dump two large shoes, both for the same foot. He filled them with plaster and attached them to the legs. For the face, he took the cover of an oval chocolate box and filled it with plaster. When the plaster had set and he had removed the box cover, he applied the face against a flat plaster form which had been grooved by pressing it against the ribs of a strip of corrugated paper and thus gave the effect of an elaborate coiffure. The ribbed rectangular piece had been trimmed out at the bottom to form a neck, and on each side, a slightly curved flaring gave the appearance of hair falling back from the head.
For Claude, toys were not something to play with, but something to break. From the age of three on, whenever a new toy came into the house, he would take a hammer and go to work on it, not to see what was inside, as most children want to do, but simply to reduce it to rubble as soon as possible. In 1951 Kahnweiler brought two small automobile models to him and they were miraculously still unbroken when Pablo decided they would be useful to him. Claude wasn’t very happy about it, because they hadn’t served their purpose as far as he was concerned. Pablo took them, anyway, and put them together, one right-side up, the other upside down, attached to the first. That made the head of his sculpture Monkey with Young. For the ears he used two handles from pitchers he found in the scrap heap near his studio. He took the handles from a large pottery bowl called a pignate, the most common variety in use in Vallauris, and made the shoulders with them. Under the right ear he set in a piece of plaster that had been premolded in a basin and grooved so that it had greater supporting strength than soft plaster. The bulging front was a pot which he incised with a knife to make the breast and nipple. The tail was a strip of metal ending in a curl. The baby in the monkey’s arms was modeled wholly in plaster. And the legs, like the legs of the goat, were made from pieces of wood.
The Crane was very characteristic of Pablo’s method in sculpture in that it was finding the shovel which formed the tail-feathers that gave him the idea of making the sculpture of a crane. Then he found two roasting forks, a long one and another, much shorter and in bad condition, which he repaired by winding wire around it. These gave him the legs. The base he made, as he often did, by filling a candy box with plaster and when it had dried, tearing the box away to leave the block of hardened plaster. For the head he used a brass faucet fitting into which he inserted a pointed metal wedge for a beak. Once it was cast in bronze he painted it.
Every time we drove through Aix, Pablo always stopped to buy a kind of candy called calissons, made from almond paste baked onto a thin wafer and covered with glacé sugar. They were packed in a diamond-shaped box which he liked to use as a form to mold parts of his sculptures. He often used such a mold for the base, but in 1951, in doing a portrait of me called simply Woman’s Head, he formed the face by molding plaster in the cover of one of these boxes. Once the form was dry, he filed the edges to give it a bit more relief and make it lose the strict angularity it originally had. He set into that a triangular piece of plaster he had previously molded between two pieces of cardboard. That became the nose. At that time I wore my hair drawn back tightly into a bun. To emphasize that feature, the face in the sculpture is projected forward onto a separate plane, and the head and hair are grouped in a mass behind. This secondary mass Pablo formed from a damaged pottery vase he had picked up in the scrap heap. The cylinder of the neck, below this mass, has no contact with the face. He modeled the neck from plaster and set it into a rounded jar. The base he made by molding plaster inside a rectangular candy box.
One of the first sculptures Pablo made in the perfume factory was the Pregnant Woman. He wanted me to have a third child. I didn’t want to because I was still feeling very weakened even though a year had passed since Paloma was born. I think this sculpture was a form of wish fulfillment on his part. He worked over it a long time, I suppose from a composite mental image he had of the way I had looked while I was carrying Claude and Paloma. The breasts and distended abdomen were made with the help of three water pitchers: the belly from a portion of a large one, and the breasts from two small ones, all picked up from the scrap heap. The rest was modeled. The fact that the figure was only about half the normal size gave it a grotesque appearance. It had almost no feet, it swayed perilously, and the arms were too long. It always looked to me like a child-woman recently descended from the ape.
One of the finest sculptures of that period was the Goat Skull and Bottle. Pablo had made at least five or six paintings in which he had explored all the spatial relationships that existed between these objects. The composition was a sort of graphic maze based on the inspiration that had guided the two versions of the large painting La Cuisine. I told him I thought he ought to explore it in sculpture, too.
About the time I first met Pablo, he had made a sculpture of a bull’s head out of the seat and handlebars of a bicycle. He used to say that this sculpture was reversible. “I find a bicycle seat and handlebars in the street, and I say, ‘Well, there’s a bull,’ ” he explained to me. “Everybody who looks at it after I assemble it says. ‘Well, there’s a bull,’ until a cyclist comes along and says, ‘Well, there’s a bicycle seat’ and he makes a seat and a pair of handlebars out of it again. And that can go on, back and forth, for an eternity, according to the needs of the mind and the body.”
One day in Vallauris he found another set of bicycle handlebars. “There are my horns for the goat skull,” he announced. Between the horns, he filled in plaster sown with hundreds of tiny nails. The rest of the head was formed by plaster on which he had impressed corrugated paper to give that undulating form he used in so many of his sculptures of the period. He set in screws for the eyes. The bottle was formed with pieces of old terra-cotta tiles. The long, spiky forms representing the rays of light shed by the candle in the bottle were large nails that he stuck in plaster. The job of casting those nails in the flame of the candle was exasperating. Each one took a separate mold.
I asked Pablo one day why he gave himself so much trouble to incorporate all these bits and pieces of junk into his sculptures rather than simply starting from scratch in whatever material—plaster, for example—he wanted to use and building up his forms in that.
“There’s a good reason for doing it this way,” he told me. “The material itself, the form and texture of those pieces, often gives me the key to the whole sculpture. The shovel in which I saw the vision of the tail-feathers of the crane gave me the idea of doing a crane. Aside from that, it’s not that I need that ready-made element, but I achieve reality through the use of metaphor. My sculptures are plastic metaphors. It’s the same principle as in painting. I’ve said that a painting shouldn’t be a trompe-l’oeil but a trompe-l’esprit. I’m out to fool the mind rather than the eye. And that goes for sculpture, too.
“People have said for ages that a woman’s hips are shaped like a vase. It’s no longer poetic; it’s become a cliché. I take a vase and with it I make a woman. I take the old metaphor, make it work in the opposite direction and give it a new lease on life. It was the same way, for example, with the thoracic cage of the goat. One cou
ld say the rib cage resembles a woven wicker basket. I move from the basket back to the rib cage: from the metaphor back to reality. I make you see reality because I used the metaphor. The form of the metaphor may be worn-out or broken, but I take it, however down-at-the-heel it may have become, and use it in such an unexpected way that it arouses a new emotion in the mind of the viewer, because it momentarily disturbs his customary way of identifying and defining what he sees. It would be very easy to do these things by traditional methods, but this way I can engage the mind of the viewer in a direction he hadn’t foreseen and make him rediscover things he had forgotten.”
Sometimes Pablo found objects that seemed exactly right and needed no intervention from him to make them works of art. These he called, like Marcel Duchamp, his “ready-mades.” The outstanding example was the one he named La Vénus du Gaz. In a certain type of pre-war gas stove there was one burner, different from the others, that looked as though it should have been a Picasso sculpture of a woman. To make it one, Pablo mounted it on a block of wood and christened it La Vénus du Gaz.
“In three or four thousand years they’ll say, perhaps, that at our period, people worshiped Venus in that form,” he said, “just the way we so confidently catalog old Egyptian things and say, ‘Oh, it was a cult object, a ritual object used for libations to the gods.’ ”
His “Venus” pleased him immensely, just as everything he did—or adopted—pleased him. “We mustn’t be afraid of inventing anything,” he said one day when we were talking sculpture. “Everything that is in us exists in nature. After all, we’re part of nature. If it resembles nature, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, what of it? When man wanted to invent something as useful as the human foot, he invented the wheel, which he used to transport himself and his burdens. The fact that the wheel doesn’t have the slightest resemblance to the human foot is hardly a criticism of it.”
Life with Picasso Page 36