A Life of Picasso Read online

  If Picasso was out when friends called, it was because he was hiding: unwilling to interrupt his work, unwilling, too, to expose his precious fiancée to his former tertu-lia. Picasso wanted to shelter Olga from reports of his promiscuity. He would not abandon his whorehouse addiction until much later. In old age, he reminisced about the delights of such famous Parisian brothels as the Sphinx and the Chabanais, and the less luxurious establishments, which he said he preferred. In the engravings of his last years the brothel would become a microcosm of his world.

  Since his involvement with the ballet had raised questions as to whether he was still a dedicated modernist, Picasso needed to reestablish himself in the forefront of the avant-garde. As Olga’s hotel and dress bills were mounting up, he also needed to earn some money. Fees from Diaghilev, handouts from Eugenia, and the odd sale to Léonce Rosenberg were no substitute for a contract with a major dealer. Shortage of cash obliged him to sell a Renoir, La Liseuse, that he had acquired in a swap—probably with Vollard. Léonce’s hugely successful brother, Paul Rosenberg, who would become his dealer later in the year, gave him 8,500 francs for it. A few weeks earlier, Picasso had been asked by the up-and-coming Paul Guillaume to participate in a Picasso-Matisse show at his newly opened rue Saint-Honoré gallery. “I am going to have a sufficient number of important works by Matisse,” he wrote, “and am anxious that you also should be worthily represented”77—Picasso unhesitatingly agreed to do so. In fact, Matisse had refused to participate. To outdo Matisse, Guillaume encouraged Picasso to persuade such patrons as Madame Errázuriz and the Steins to lend their masterpieces. And as he always did with Picasso, Guillaume titillated him with talk of the tribal treasures he had recently acquired, including “a Babylonian Negro, the most formidable in existence,”8 in the hope of advantageous exchanges.

  Olga on the porch at Montrouge, 1917-18. Photograph probably taken by Picasso.

  Guillaume had also prevailed upon Apollinaire, who had helped launch him as a dealer in tribal art, to write a preface for a catalog to be sold to benefit war veterans. Although back in hospital and near death from a pulmonary congestion—a consequence of the 1916 poison gas attack—Apollinaire promised to do so. However, he was unable to attend the vernissage. His short essays do the artists and himself little justice. Apollinaire compared Matisse’s work to an “orange … bursting with light;” Picasso’s to “a fine pearl. Don’t toss it in the vinegar, Cleopatra!” Picasso’s ability to surprise people reminded the poet of “a plush rabbit beating a drum in the middle of the road.”9

  A few days before the show opened on January 23, 1918, Matisse wrote his wife: “just what I thought. Apollinaire’s preface well demonstrates it. In sum, I don’t know what effect it will have, but I think it was directed against me…. It’s the peak of politics, to attract someone’s works while he’s away in order to try and demolish him. What must the cubists and cubifiers be saying.”10

  As it happens, we do know what they were saying. The painter Henri Hayden told an interviewer:

  They couldn’t stand one another. Even their families quarreled. Picasso was the pet hate in Matisse’s family. I was very close to Matisse’s son Jean: it was necessary to avoid speaking about Picasso at all costs. The reason for this quarrel? Rivalry. Not material rivalry, because they were both earning a lot of money, in fact Matisse was the bigger earner of the two, but artistic rivalry. Picasso likened Matisse’s painting to “vermicelli.” Everyone has heard Picasso’s off the cuff remark (I don’t know if it’s actually true): One day Picasso was dining with some friends. He ordered vermicelli soup. Picasso remarked: “Look, this soup was made using Matisse’s drawings.”11

  Guillaume had more success with Picasso. The show included sixteen works by him and twelve by Matisse—mostly done in Morocco. Matisse’s colors outshone Picasso’s, but that did not save the former’s paintings from looking less modern than the latter’s cubist masterpieces.

  By far the most important painting Picasso lent to Guillaume’s show was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which had been exhibited for the first time two years earlier, but had yet to be recognized as a revolutionary icon.12 Louis Vauxcelles, a critic who would have been forgotten had he not coined those egregious terms “cubism” and “fauvism,” published an account—under his pen name “Pinturri-chio”—of this enormous painting’s arrival at the gallery the day before the opening. “Pinturrichio” described a “fevered mob”13 watching this “cubico-Picassic, or Picasso-cubic film” being made. It starred such “apostles of the new idol” as Max Jacob, Salmon, and Apollinaire. However, it turned out that Guillaume—one of the first dealers to promote his shows by leaking “news items” to the press—had put Vauxcelles up to this bogus reportage. Much later, Max Jacob explained what really happened: because of the size of the Demoiselles, Guillaume had difficulty getting the painting into the gallery, and passersby had gathered.14

  Despite this mishap, the Demoiselles ended up on Guillaume’s walls, as confirmed by the worldly, witty Abbé Mugnier—spiritual adviser to Parisian paupers as well as the nobility and the intelligentsia (Huysmans, Bergson, Proust, Mauriac, and many more). After a luncheon at Lucas-Carton on February 7, Baronne de Brimont took the Abbé to see the show. Among the paintings he noted was the “Femme d’Avignon [sic], for such is the name given to an indecipherable Cubist painting. Across from it a train wreck in a plate of spinach, as they call those gridded things that rise up.”15

  Most of Picasso’s close friends had had little or no news of him since his departure for Spain at the beginning of June. Even Gertrude Stein and Alice Tok-las, who were still in Nîmes doing war work, had been kept in the dark, despite an exchange of letters. In a Nîmois garage Gertrude had found some tribal sculptures which she wanted to purchase for Picasso. In his reply, he suggested that she should have her collection shipped to Nîmes—the rue de Fleurus pavilion was anything but solid, he said—but, surprisingly, he made no reference to his fiancée or his impending marriage. Despite telling her so little, he asked Gertrude to keep everything he told her to herself. Now that he was perceived as a celebrity, he had become secretive about his personal life as well as his work. It would take the members of the former bande à Picasso some time to discover that, since last seeing him, their hero had undergone a radical transformation.

  One of the few people from whom Picasso had no secrets was his neighbor, Erik Satie. Picasso was anxious to provide him with moral support and financial assistance. He was still involved in a legal battle with Jean Poueigh, who was suing him for slander. Although panic-stricken at the prospect of jail and bankruptcy, Satie was curious to meet his friend’s fiancée. As things turned out, his elaborate mock courtesy found favor with “la gentille Dame,”1617 just as her demure theatricality appealed to his ironical politesses.

  Max Jacob, on the other hand, was out of favor. He had usually managed to keep in with Picasso by inveigling himself into the affections of the women in his life—a strategy that Cocteau would copy—but he proved to be a flop with Olga. Knowing what she did about the homosexual ties that held Diaghilev and his company together and sometimes blew it apart, she is likely to have sensed the sexual nature of Jacob’s feelings for her fiancé. Whether or not these feelings had ever been reciprocated, she would have wanted to discourage them. Worse, Olga had intercepted and destroyed a letter from Jacob in which he interceded on behalf of Picasso’s unmentionable ex-mistress, Fernande Olivier.18

  Henceforth, Olga would do her best to drive a wedge between Picasso and Jacob—the oldest and closest of his French friends and one of the finest poets of his time—by imputing all manner of misdeeds to him. As a result, the artist, who always forgave Jacob in the end, would have to sneak off and see him on the sly. The penitent Max had been out of luck on Saint Valentine’s Day 1918, as he described in a heartbroken letter to Picasso: “the gate was open but the grill locked. I had brought flowers, cigars and candy. The candy has been smoked, the flowers eaten, and the cigars have faded. M
y heart’s stalled at the locked grill and my hands … my hands … my hands!”19

  With Max in disgrace and Apollinaire in and out of hospital during the first three months of 1918, Cocteau saw his chance for becoming Picasso’s laureate. As the only one of the artist’s Parisian friends to have gained Olga’s approval, he was well placed to play up to her, which he assiduously did. By the end of the year, however, Cocteau decided he was tubercular: a pretext for going off to stay at Grasse in the south with his mother’s friend, Marie-Thérèse de Croisset (daughter of Proust’s Comtesse de Chevigné). Madame de Croisset was the mother by her first husband of a brilliant young heiress, the sixteen-year-old Marie-Laure Bischoff-sheim, who would develop a crush on Cocteau in the course of his visit. Cocteau hoped to marry her, but she opted instead to become the Vicomtesse de Noailles. After six weeks in the south, the poet was back in Paris making arrangements through Olga at the Lutétia (there was no telephone at Montrouge) to visit Picasso. Cocteau was anxious to find a publisher for the Ode to Picasso he had written two years earlier, and sure enough he did so. This slick pastiche of Mallarmé, which would come out in 1919, is easily dismissed, but Cocteau turns out to be the only writer to have understood the significance of Picasso’s great Seated Man.

  Cocteau’s latest bid to reinvent himself necessitated a new strategy and a new field of activity. He wanted to transcend the superficial modernism of Parade and establish himself as an avant-garde impresario. He decided to limit his efforts to contemporary French music—a field relatively free of cubists or dadaists and bereft of leadership. To promote his chauvinistic neoclassical concepts, he published a seventy-five-page manifesto, Le Coq et l’arlequin, subtitled Notes autour de la musique, in 1919. The title was a reference to Picasso and himself.20 It took the form of a rap-pel à l’ordre: a call to order for modern French music to be as French as it was possible to be (“French music for France”). According to Cocteau, only Erik Satie, the composer of Parade, satisfied this requirement.

  Cocteau’s choice of Satie was surprising. He still resented the composer for condemning his egregious sound effects for Parade, and had recently denounced him to Paul Morand as the “Alphonse Allais of music.”21 However, Cocteau was not one to allow previous convictions to stand in the way of self-promotion. He needed a figurehead and, in an abrupt change of tactics, chose Satie. Debussy was too much of an impressionist—a Wagnerian one—and Ravel too much of a Russophile—a Stravin-skyite one—to be considered truly French.22 Although half-Scottish, Satie was decreed to be quintessentially Gallic. By dismissing Stravinsky as “an octopus which you’d do well to flee or he will eat you,” and declaring Satie to be the musical apostle of the new generation, Cocteau hoped to cleanse himself of the taint that Parade had resurrected and shine forth in French glory.23

  Les Six with Cocteau, 1931. From left: Francis Poulenc, Ger-maine Tailleferre, Louis Durey, Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, and Arthur Honegger (Georges Auric, who was absent, is represented by Cocteau’s portrait of him on the wall). Photo: Roger Viollet / Getty Images.

  Stravinsky, to whom Cocteau had dedicated his 1919 book Le Potomak in return for the composer’s kindness to him, was angered by the author’s rejection and his favoritism of Satie over himself.24 However, Cocteau was so adept at pulling strings that Stravinsky, who needed all the réclame he could muster, did not make an issue of it. Less than a year later, Stravinsky and Cocteau were back in contact, and by 1922 on the best of terms.

  Besides promoting the patriotism that the poet wore on his sleeve, Le Coq et harlequin served as a manifesto for “Les Six,” the group of young composers (Poulenc, Auric, Honegger, Milhaud, Tailleferre, Durey) whom Cocteau saw as a showcase for his own skills. That he was not a musician was beside the point. Like Diaghilev, he wanted to be an impresario, but also a star—a star whose effulgence would be generated by the composers he proposed to manage and promote. He also aspired to be a Pied Piper who would rally le tout Paris to his chic, gay banner. In this role he would achieve undying stardom.

  Le Coq et Varlequin begins portentously—“art is science made flesh”—and then loses itself in a polemical plea to composers, conducted mostly in aphorisms, to follow Satie’s example and write straightforward, down-to-earth French music that would take account of popular culture. To bolster his argument against impressionism in music, Cocteau invokes painting and quotes a comment that Picasso had copied down in one of his Parade carnets: “work with three colors—too many colors make for Impressionism.”25 Paradoxically, Picasso had made this comment shortly before doing exactly the opposite and embarking on pointillistic paintings that would be infinitely more multicolored than any of his previous work.

  Besides adopting Picasso’s anti-impressionist bias, Cocteau appropriated the artist’s burgeoning neoclassicism as a platform against Wagner and Debussy. “Impressionism is a side-effect of Wagner,” Cocteau fatuously claimed, “the last rumblings of a dying storm. The Impressionist School substitutes sun for light and sonority for rhythm.”26 Warming to his chauvinistic theme, he allows that “you cannot get lost in the Debussy mist as you can in the Wagner fog, but you can catch cold there.”27

  After being away from Paris for most of the previous year, Picasso was overjoyed to be back at long last in his own studio and to be reunited with the vast accumulation of his own work—his “offspring,” he said. But life was not easy. There were shortages: above all, of sugar, coal, tobacco, and, even more vital for Picasso, artists’ materials. Worse still, the Germans reverted to bombing Paris on January 31. French antiaircraft guns made “a shattering din night after night and all the shells they sent up returned to earth in fragments, an iron hail raining down on the city.”28 And then on March 23, “Big Bertha,” the long-range, high-velocity howitzer (named after Bertha von Bohlen, the Krupp family matriarch), began shelling the French capital from the forest of Coucy, seventy-six miles away. The bombardment recommenced every third day for 140 days. Aragon’s claim that Picasso took his paintings down to the cellar whenever there was a bombardment does not ring true.29 The cellar was very damp and there were far too many paintings.

  One night, unable to sleep because of Big Bertha, Picasso decided to work. Having run out of canvas, he took a Modigliani that he had recently acquired (or, more likely, swapped) and painted a still life over it—a guitar, bottle of port, sheet music, glass, and a hank of rope.30 He also repainted several of his own flood-damaged canvases, among them some of the eleven cubist compositions—many over six feet tall and in various states of completion—which Hamilton Easter Field had commissioned for his Brooklyn library in 1911.31 About half of them had been more or less finished. Hearing nothing from Field and receiving nothing by way of payment, Picasso concluded that the project had lapsed, so he set about turning three of the unfinished ones into post-cubist set pieces.32 Unusually thick impasto confirms that other compositions of this period have been painted over earlier images: for instance, the crusty little still life, which Palau has arbitrarily renamed Rococo Composition.33 The inclusion of a pipe and that increasingly rare commodity, a packet of tobacco, as well as a vase of flowers, newspaper, bottle, and wineglass within a decorative chocolate box garland recalls the simple pleasures of everyday life before the war, in contrast to the gloom of this freezing winter.

  Picasso. Mont-rouge in the Snow, 1917. Oil on canvas, 27 x 35 cm. Whereabouts unknown.

  Besides saving his collection from the flood, Picasso was still determined to recuperate the mass of his work from Kahnweiler’s impounded stock. Back in Paris, he had contacted Henri Danet, the lawyer who was handling this matter.34 He also met with the dealer André Level, who had helped him in his attempts to reclaim the money that Kahnweiler owed him for work that had been sequestrated. In gratitude to Level, Picasso drew his portrait one quiet Sunday afternoon in January 1918.35 Despite the sale of his Renoir, he was still short of ready money.

  To celebrate his first Christmas (1917) with Olga, Picasso did two smallish paintings and a d
rawing of the Montrouge villa: inside, the snow is falling; outside, the sky is clear.36 Cabanne associates their simplistic diagrammatic style with Russian folk art.37 When in love—and he was very much in love with Olga—Picasso enjoyed contriving keepsakes of little paintings, objets trouvés, and homemade toys for his beloved.

  After Christmas, Picasso commemorated his engagement with a portrait of Olga in all her glory38 She wears the black voile dress he had bought for her in Barcelona, holds a fan, and is seated on a slipper chair that Eugenia Errázuriz had given him.39 When she suggested that the chair be covered in tapestry, Olga offered to do the embroidery; Picasso drew a floral design on the canvas mesh as his grandson, Bernard, discovered when he had the chair repaired more than eighty years later. This might explain why the embroidery appears in the portrait as a flat decorative panel—maybe the embroidery was not yet finished or the chair upholstered— which makes for a somewhat cubist effect. The painting is Ingresque in pose, concept, and handling.40 At the same time, it is one of the first examples of Picasso’s use of a camera in preparation for a portraiture. He had Emile Délétang take photographs of Olga in the Montrouge studio41 and followed them closely on canvas. Even the color is virtually en grisaille, delicately tinted as if by a retoucher. Photographs reveal a large leather-bound book on the floor to support Olga’s foot. Photographs were needed because Diaghilev had summoned Olga back to Madrid in the hope of persuading her to dance once again for the company, which was preparing for a Spanish tour in April. Apart from a note to Picasso,42 nothing is known about this brief visit, and nothing came of it. A nude study for the portrait was certainly not done from life;43 Olga was much too modest. Around the same time, Picasso did a small painting of Olga’s head and another related drawing of her in a fur-trimmed coat.44 To save this academic image from looking remotely like a Salon portrait, Picasso has left the background unfinished. The suggestion that the sharp-edged shadow above Olga’s right sleeve constitutes a hidden profile of the artist (as in MoMA’s 1915 Harlequin) is not, to my mind, convincing.45