A Life of Picasso Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN RICHARDSON

  Manet

  Georges Braque

  Braque

  A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906

  A Life of Picasso, Volume II, 1907-1917

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice:

  Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper

  Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters:

  Beaton, Capote, Dalí, Picasso, Freud, Warhol, and More

  For Mercedes with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is greatly indebted to Mrs. Sid Bass, who was instrumental in setting up the John Richardson Fund for Picasso Research, without which the author’s ongoing biography of the artist would have foundered for lack of financial support. Mercedes has been tireless in persuading her friends, fellow collectors, and other art world luminaries to contribute to the considerable costs of the project: four years of intensive research on both sides of the Atlantic as well as substantial copyright fees, photographic work, and other office and travel expenses.

  Besides expressing his gratitude to Mrs. Bass, the author would like to thank the generous donors whose names are listed below, especially Eugene Victor Thaw, who came up with the idea for the Fund. He is likewise beholden to Jerl Surratt, for supervising the fund-raising, and the Fund’s advisory board: Bernard and Almine Picasso, Annette de la Renta, John Russell, E. V. Thaw, and Nicholas Fox Weber (director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, through which the Richardson Fund’s assets have been funneled).

  My deepest thanks to all those listed below:

  Acquavella Contemporary Art, Inc.

  The Annenberg Foundation

  Anonymous

  The late Mrs. Vincent Astor

  Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation

  Mercedes and Sid R. Bass

  Leon D. Black, The Leon Black Family

  Foundation The late Bill Blass Robert Mnuchin, C&M Arts Mr. and Mrs. Gustavo A. Cisneros Douglas S. Cramer Foundation The Nathan Cummings Foundation Michel and Hélène David-Weill

  Dame Vivien Duffield, The Clore

  Foundation The Charles Engelhard Foundation Mica Ertegün and the late Ahmet

  Ertegün H.RH. Princess Firyal and Lionel I.

  Pincus Dr. Guido Goldman Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro Drue Heinz Trust Jorge Helft and Sylvie Robert Dr. and Mrs. Henry A. Kissinger Henry R. Kravis Foundation Jan Krugier, Jan Krugier Gallery

  The Lauder Foundation, Leonard &

  Evelyn Lauder Fund Ambassador and Mrs. Ronald S. Lauder Mr. and Mrs. George S. Livanos Mr. and Mrs. John L. Marion Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Marron The Richard Meier Foundation Mereville Foundation The Museum of Modern Art, Library

  Committee James G. Niven

  Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg Bernard Ruiz-Picasso The late Khalil Rizk David Rockefeller Ambassador and Mrs. Felix Rohatyn

  Mrs. Janet Ruttenberg

  Mrs. Lily Safra

  Mr. and Mrs. Julio Mario Santo

  Domingo Mrs. Edouard Stern Thaw Charitable Trust The Ann and Erlo Van Waveren

  Foundation

  Mrs. Linda Wachner

  Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation

  Russell and Eileen Wilkinson, The

  Villore Fund

  Mrs. Charles Wrightsman

  Elaine and Steve Wynn

  Mr. and Mrs. Ezra Zilkha

  * * *

  When I started on Volume I of this biography, some twenty-five years ago, Picasso’s widow, Jacqueline, was kind enough to give the project her blessing. She had me stay at Notre-Dame-de-Vie and let me have the run of the studios. She also answered any questions I chose to ask. As always, I am very indebted to the artist’s son Claude and daughter Paloma for their support. Their mother Françoise Gilot, has also been generous with inside information. Salutations, too, to the artist’s daughter by Marie-Thérèse Walter, Maya Widmaier Picasso, and her family—her daughter Diana, who has shared her discoveries about her grandmother with me, and her son Olivier, whose Picasso Family Portraits has been a useful source of facts about the family. I would also like to acknowledge the help of General Juan Picasso’s family, María-Teresa and Luz Martínez de Ubago.

  In writing this book, my greatest debt has been to Bernard Picasso, the only surviving son of Paulo, the artist’s son. Bernard once told me that he has only one dream in life: to honor his grandfather as best he can. With the support of his wife, Almine, and his mother, Christine, Bernard has lived up to his aspirations and, among much else, has helped to create a magnificent new museum at Málaga, under the exceedingly effective directorship of Bernardo Laniado-Romero. To further his grandfather’s renown, Bernard has held exhibitions of his holdings all over Europe and published an important series of catalogues and books. I would like to thank Bernard and Almine with all my heart for their constant encouragement and their generosity in providing this book with archival material vested in their foundations: Collection Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte; and Archives Olga Ruiz-Picasso. Working with Bernard has been especially pleasurable thanks to his meticulous assistants, Marta Volga Guezala and Cécile Godefroy

  As always, the Musée Picasso in Paris has proved an incomparable source of biographical material—much of it still unpublished—which the former director, Gérard Régnier, and his staff kindly made available to me. Heartfelt thanks also to the museum’s former chief curator, Hélène Klein—most scrupulous of Picasso scholars. Gérard’s innovative successor, Anne Baldassari, and her staff have been no less helpful—all thanks to them for being so accommodating. I also want to thank María Teresa Ocaña and the staff of the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, and to Jean Louis Andral, director of the Musée Picasso in Antibes, for many kindnesses. Isabelle Monod Fontaine and the staff of the Centre Pompidou have also been unfailingly helpful—thank you all very much.

  On this side of the Atlantic, I would like to acknowledge the award of a fellowship (2001) from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Coming as it did at the start of a seven-year venture, the fellowship had a most beneficial effect. As for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the sheer scale of its Picasso holdings and the generosity of those in charge have been a constant inspiration. I am very grateful to the director, Glenn D. Lowry; the former chairman, Ronald Lauder; the former president, Agnes Gund; her successor, Marie-José Kravis. Special thanks also to Kynaston McShine and John Elderfield. At the Metropolitan Museum, my old friend the late William S. Lieberman was always ready to ransack his memory for the all-important detail. Thanks to the great director of this great museum, Philippe de Montebello, and Gary Tinterow.

  Hosannas to my publisher, Sonny Mehta, the almighty head of the house of Knopf, and also to his phenomenally gifted associates. Thanks above all for taking on my Picasso project and envisioning it afresh. My editor, Shelley Wanger, treasured friend, has been heroic in keeping everything, including myself and my demons, under control in the face of incessant setbacks. For all of this, Shelley deserves canonization. As for her colleagues at Knopf, they have been wonderfully helpful, efficient, and patient: to Andy Hughes, Katherine Hourigan, Carol Devine Carson, Peter Andersen, Ken Schneider, Kevin Bourke, Erinn Hartman, Roméo Enriquez, and, especially, Robert Grover, heartfelt thanks.

  All praise, too, for my agents, Andrew Wylie and Jeff Posternak, for enabling me to switch to Knopf and giving this biography a new lease on life; praise, too, for dealing with an inordinate amount of tedious problems.

  As for the home front, I would like to acknowledge the crucial role played by my companion, Kosei Hara, and my assistant, JoAnn Chuba, in the birthing of this book. JoAnn’s good sense, sharp wit, and warm heart have kept me going. Thanks also to her predecessors, Rui Lopes and Priscilla Higham; also to my no less supportive helpe
rs, Sonam Chadon and Taeko Miyamoto. I’m also greatly indebted to my dear friends Hugo and Elliott Guinness, Rachel Mauro, and Ugo Rondinone.

  Before embarking on the long list of all the other people I want to thank I need to apologize for not having written them personally, but the stress of finishing this book has taken up all my time. I also want to single out three people on whom I depended for advice: the late Richard Wollheim, the philosopher who knew more about other peoples’ fields than they themselves usually did, and whose death after sixty years of friendship deprived me of a crucial mentor; John Golding, eminent teacher, painter, and author of a book on cubism—written fifty years ago when I first knew him— which is still the most authoritative work on the subject; and the infinitely perceptive Lydia Gasman, whose Mystery, Magic and Love in Picasso (1981) penetrates further into the artist’s creative process than any other study, although it has yet to be properly published. To her much love.

  The following have all contributed more than they may realize to the present volume: Joan Acocella; Nuria Amerigo; Linda Ashton and staff at the Ransom Center; Dr. Gaetano Barile; the late Count Henri de Beaumont and his daughter Gaia; James Beechey; Peter Bemberg; Laura Benini; Pierre Bergé; the late Heinz Berggreun; Olivier Berggreun; Rosamund Bernier; Olivier Bernier; Marc Blondeau; Carmen Cadenas; Graydon Carter; Dr. Stanley Chang; John Clarke; Lucien Clergue; Victoria Combalía; Gerald Corcoran; Elizabeth Cowling; Pierre Daix; Brenda Danilowitz; Countess Dembinski; Christian Derouet; Simon Dickinson and associates; François Ditesheim; Grace Dudley; John Eastman; Antoine and Marianne Estène-Chauvin; Pierrot Eugène; Hector Feliciano; Evelyne Ferlay; John Field; Sylvie Fresnault; Lucian Freud; the late Vicente García-Márquez; Claude and David Gilbert; Carmen Giménez; Arne Glimcher; the late Princess Gortchakow; Gijs van Hensbergen; Roseline Hierholtz; Lord Hindlip; Waring Hopkins; Rafael Inglada; Ryan Jensen; Pepe Karmel; the late Billy Kluver; Agnes Knopf; Quentin Laurens; Wayne Lawson; Brigitte Léal; the late Alexander and Tatiana Liberman; Ralph Lerner; Laura García Lorca de los Ríos and Andres Soria Olmedo; James Lord; the late Carlos Lozano; Robert Lubar; the late Dora Maar; Laurence Madeline; Julie Martin; Earl and the late Camilla McGrath; Bernard Minoret; Charles S. Moffet; Isabelle Monod-Fontaine; S. I. and Victoria Newhouse; the late Roberto Otero; Maria Luisa Pacelli; Josep Palau i Fabre; Alexandra Parigoris; Francesc Parcerisas; Michael Peppiatt; Christine Pinault; Antoni Pixot; Peter Read; Elaine Rosenberg; Jane and the late Robert Rosenblum; Deborah Rothschild; James Roundell; Angelica Rudenstine; Kader Salouh; Peter Schell; Susan Scott; Laurence Séguin; Nicholas Serota; Richard Shone; Kenneth Silver; Robert Silvers; Werner Spies; Natasha Staller; Leo Steinberg; Charles F. Stuckey; Juana María Suárez; Jeanne-Yvette Sudour; Lord Hugh Thomas; Gertje Utley; Kenneth Wayne; and Jeffrey Weiss.

  I would like to thank Marilyn McCully, who did so much valuable work on the first two volumes, for all the research work she has done for the present book. I would also like to thank Marilyn’s husband, Michael Raeburn, for working with the diligent Phyllis Stigliano in assembling the illustrations. And I am especially grateful to the brilliant, sharp-eyed young scholar Dakin Hart, who proved to be a deus ex machina with regard to the final chapters. If I have left anyone out I hope I will be forgiven.

  CONTENTS

  1. Rome and the Ballets Russes (1917)

  2. Naples

  3. Parade

  4. The Ballet in Spain

  5. With Olga in Barcelona (Fall 1917)

  6. Return to Montrouge (Winter 1917–18)

  7. Marriage (Summer 1918)

  8. Death of Apollinaire (1918)

  9. Rue la Boétie (1918–19)

  10. London and Tricorne (1919)

  11. Summer at Saint-Raphaël (The Gueridon)

  12. Pulcinella (1919–20)

  13. Summer at Juan-les-Pins (1920)

  14. L’Epoque des Duchesses (1921)

  15. Summer at Fontainebleau

  16. Beau Monde (1921–22)

  17. Paris (1923)

  18. Summer at Cap d’Antibes

  19. Cocteau and Radiguet

  20. Mercure (1924)

  21. Still Lifes at La Vigie (Summer 1924)

  22. La Danse (1925)

  23. The Villa Belle Rose (Summer 1925)

  24. Masterpiece Studio (1925–26)

  25. Summer at La Haie Blanche (1926)

  26. Marie-Thérèse Walter (1927)

  27. Summer of Metamorphosis

  28. The Apollinaire Monument (1927–28)

  29. The Beach at Dinard (1928)

  30. The Sculptor (1928–29)

  31. Woman in the Garden (1929)

  32. The Bones of Vesalius (1929–30)

  33. Golgotha (1930)

  34. L’Affaire Picasso

  35. Château de Boisgeloup

  36. The Shadow of Ovid

  37. Annus Mirabilis I—The Sculpture (1931)

  38. Annus Mirabilis II—The Paintings (1931–1932)

  39. Paris and Zurich Retrospective (1932)

  Epilogue

  Short Titles

  Notes

  Olga Khokhlova in L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1913.

  1

  Rome and the Ballets Russes (1917)

  Picasso’s visit to Rome in February 1917 had originally been conceived as a wedding trip, but at the last moment his on-again off-again mistress, Irène Lagut, who had promised to marry him, changed her mind, as her predecessor, Gaby Lespinasse, had done the year before. Instead of Irène, Jean Cocteau accompanied him. In a vain attempt to set himself at the head of the avant-garde, this ambitious young poet had inveigled Picasso into collaborating with him on Parade: a gimmicky, quasi-modernist ballet about the efforts of a couple of shills to lure the public into their vaudeville theater by tantalizing them with samples of their acts. Cocteau had desperately wanted Diaghilev to stage this ballet in Paris. The meddlesome Polish hostess Misia Sert had tried to scupper the project. However, Picasso’s Chilean protector and patron, Eugenia Errázuriz, had persuaded Diaghilev to agree, provided Picasso did the décor, Erik Satie the score, and Léonide Massine the choreography. Sets, costumes, and rehearsals were to be done in Rome, where Diaghilev had his wartime headquarters. Picasso’s cubist followers were horrified that their avant-garde hero should desert them for anything as frivolous and modish as the Ballets Russes, but he ignored their complaints. After two and a half years of war, with its appalling death toll, its hardships and shortages, and above all the absence of his closest friends—particularly Braque and Apollinaire at the front—Picasso was elated at the prospect of leaving the bombardments and blackouts behind to spend a couple of months in the relative peace of Rome, which he had always wanted to visit. Besides working on Parade, he was determined to get married.

  Picasso and Cocteau arrived in Rome on February 19, 1917, a day later than they had intended. Cocteau, who had forgotten to get a visa from the Italian embassy, had lied when telling him that no reservations were available. Diaghilev had booked them into the Grand Hotel de Russie on the corner of the Via del Babuino and the Piazza del Popolo. So that Picasso could work in peace on the costumes and sets for Parade, he had also arranged for him to have one of the coveted Patrizi studios, tucked away in a sprawling, unkempt garden off the Via Margutta. Although most of the artists are now gone, the Patrizi studios are still as idyllic as they were in 1917.

  Serge Diaghilev in New York, 1916. Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris.

  “I cannot forget Picasso’s studio in Rome,” Cocteau later wrote. “A small chest contained the maquette for Parade, with its houses, trees and shack. It was there that Picasso did his designs for the Chinese Conjurer, the Managers, the American Girl, the Horse, which Anna de Noailles would compare to a laughing tree, and the Acrobats in blue tights, which would remind Marcel Proust of The Dioscuri.”1 From his window Picasso had a magnificent view of the sixteenth-century Villa Medici, seat of the French Academy, towering above the studio garden. As he well knew, the Academy had associations with some of
his favorite artists. Velázquez had painted the garden; Ingres had spent four years there as a fellow at the outset of his career and, later, six years as director; Corot had also worked there and caught the golden light of Rome and the campagna, as no other painter had done.

  “Rome seems made by [Corot],” Cocteau reported to his mother. “Picasso talks of nothing else but this master, who touches us much more than Italians hell bent on the grandiose!”2 That Picasso infinitely preferred the informality of Corot’s radiant views to the pomp and ceremony and baroque theatricality of so much Roman painting is confirmed by his sun-filled pointillistic watercolors of the Villa Medici’s ochre façade—as original as anything he did in Rome.3

  Diaghilev insisted that Picasso and Cocteau share his passion for the city. Sightseeing was compulsory that very first evening. Since there was no blackout as there was in Paris, they were able to see the Colosseum all lit up—“that enormous reservoir of the centuries,” Cocteau said, “which one would like to see come alive, crowded with people and wild beasts and peanut vendors.”4 The following morning, Diaghilev picked them up in his car for another grand tour. In the evening he took them to the circus. “Sad but beautiful arena,” Cocteau wrote his mother. “Misia Sert (or rather her double) performed on the tight rope. Diaghilev slept until woken with a start by an elephant putting its feet on his knees.”5

  When he arrived in Rome, Picasso was still suffering from chagrin d’amour. Eager to find a replacement for Irène Lagut, he had promptly fallen in love with one of Diaghilev’s Russian dancers, the twenty-five-year-old Olga Khokhlova. Although he courted her assiduously and did a drawing of her, which he signed with his name in Cyrillic, Olga proved adamantly chaste. Chastity was a challenge that Picasso had seldom had to face. Both Diaghilev and Bakst warned him that a respectable Russian woman would not sacrifice her virginity unless assured of marriage. “Une russe on I’epouse,” Diaghilev said. Olga personified this view. She was indeed respectable: the daughter of Stepan Vasilievich Khokhlov, who was not a general, as she claimed, but a colonel in the Corps of Engineers in charge of the railway system.6 Olga had three brothers and a younger sister. They lived in St. Petersburg in a state-owned apartment on the Moika Canal. Around 1910, the colonel had been sent to the Kars region to oversee railroad construction, and the family had followed him there. Olga stayed behind. Egged on by a school friend’s sister, Mathilda Konetskaya, who had joined the Diaghilev ballet after graduating from the Imperial Ballet School, she decided to become a dancer.