A Life of Picasso Page 11
On April 26, Picasso mailed Gertrude Stein a drawing and photographs of his recent work including one of the representational portrait of Olga—“like a photographic enlargement,” he said.46 “Perhaps the best thing you have ever done,”47 Gertrude replied—a surprise, given her modernist stance. The secretive artist did not reveal that the sitter was his prospective bride, nor that she had recently had an accident and been hospitalized.
While portraying Olga in the flattering, academic style she favored, Picasso portrayed himself as a cubist Harlequin: a Harlequin of utmost gravity (note the large, round, melancholy eyes on either side of the Picassian slab of nose). The title of the painting derives from the sheet music of a popular song called “Si tu veux,” that the Harlequin holds in his hand. A comment on the forthcoming marriage?48 It would seem so. The modesty implied by the song is an ironically courteous touch. Si tu veux has either been heavily reworked or probably painted over an earlier image. In its starkness it harks back to the Museum of Modern Art’s equally self-referential, equally melancholy Harlequin of 1915. The war is present in both paintings. The violin clutched in the Harlequin’s curlicue hand might suggest that the diamond-headed Harlequin is courting his sweetheart. However, the grimness of the image, the touches of snowflake pointillism, and the frosty gray background exorcises the song’s sentimentality
Picasso. Head of Pierrot, Montrouge, 1917. India ink on paper, 64 x 46 cm. Whereabouts unknown.
Si tu veux is very much an exception to the other festive commedia dell’arte subjects that immediately precede Picasso’s marriage. Most of the subjects are no longer Harlequins, therefore much less self-referential than before. Picasso seemingly wanted to shake off the mantle of the dark, demonic Harlequin Trismegistus that Jacob and Apollinaire had placed on his shoulders when he first came to live in Paris.49 As a bridegroom, he preferred to identify with the comical Pulcinella,50 whom he, Diaghilev, and Massine had decided to use as the subject of a ballet. With this in mind, the artist took to working from a model wearing Pulcinella’s traditional wide-brimmed, conical hat, baggy white shirt and trousers, and enormous ruff. Pulcinella’s bouffon costume is very unlike the Harlequin costume Cocteau had given him. Sometimes Picasso combines different commedia dell’arte costumes in the same image: MoMA’s Seated Pierrot’s white costume includes shadowy hints of Harlequin’s multicolored motley51
Despite claiming that he used models only for portraits—and by no means always for them—Picasso exceptionally had recourse to models for his Harlequins and Pulcinellas: a sharp-looking, bony-faced man with a pointed chin and nose; and sometimes a younger, coarser character, endowed with a large waxed mustache.52 Cocteau may have had the latter in mind when he told Picasso, “Your Harlequin is great looking—a charming truck-driver astonished to find himself dressed as an apache. ”53
A painstakingly academic drawing of a nude woman seated on a chair54 suggests that if he was going to challenge Ingres, he needed to do academic exercises much as a concert pianist practices scales. Picasso also decreed that every artist should have an Ecole de dessin sign on his studio door. These assertions are less contradictory than they might seem. Picasso believed that only supreme graphic mastery could enable an artist to break every conceivable rule and, if he wanted to, draw as “badly”—that is to say as instinctively—as he liked.
While doing his prenuptial Harlequins, Picasso worked on other disparate projects: a series of minimalist cubist still lifes and, less successfuly, another stab at pointillism. The cubist still lifes are small and geometrically neat—a single glass or pipe or guitar—and often embellished with sandpaper cutouts. Hard-edged as square-cut diamonds, these gems do not always have an upside or downside.55
“We need a new name to designate them,” Picasso wrote Gertrude Stein: Raynal suggested “crystal cubism.”56 These little gems may have constituted a response to the so-called Salon cubists who had accused Picasso of betraying cubism—the style that he and Braque had invented and the Salon cubists had dishonored and devalued—by experimenting with classicism. In fact, Picasso was keeping cubism in a constant state of renewal. That his “crystal cubist” experiments should be so fresh and so simple made his critics the more resentful. Pigheadedness blinded them to the protean range of Picasso’s powers, to the ease with which he switched back and forth between cubism and classicism, irony and sentimentality, cruelty and tenderness. To envious cubist hacks this smacked of stylistic promiscuity and insincerity.
As for Picasso’s attempt to exploit the possibilities of pointillism—this time to fracture light as he had formerly fractured form—it ended in failure. Given his distrust of theory and his preference for local color over le ton juste, this was inevitable. Picasso should have avoided pointillism. This was French (and Belgian) territory— Matisse not Picasso was the heir to it. Wisely, Picasso never allowed his garishly pointillistic still lifes and flower pieces of 1918 to be exhibited or published in his lifetime. What a letdown after the watercolors of the Villa Medici, where he handled pointillism subtly and discreetly. Picasso’s sense of color was as phenomenal as Matisse’s, but it functioned very differently. Whereas Matisse used color instinctively, Picasso saw color as having a separate function from form; he liked to work it out diagrammatically in drawings to eroticize, etherealize, demonize, or otherwise dramatize a specific image.
The principal vehicle for the artist’s Picassification of Seurat’s method was a large (162 X 118 cm) pointillistic version57 of the seventeenth-century artist Louis Le Nain’s Happy Family (57 X 67 cm) in the Louvre:58 a cheerful scene of a grandmother, father and mother, two boys, and a baby at their evening meal. Back in 1905, Picasso had drawn on a painting by the recently rediscovered Le Nain Brothers for his Saltimbanques.59 So fascinated was he that he would eventually acquire two “Le Nains,” neither of which is now accepted as authentic. Picasso told Kahnweiler that he liked the simplicity and awkwardness of their compositions. “It is perhaps their awkwardness that gives them their charm. And then it is very French. Look at all the French painters and you will see [that] basically the French painters are all peasants.” Alas, this leaves out of account most of Picasso’s favorites: Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and many more.
A significant source of inspiration for Picasso’s pointillistic Le Nain was Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu The obsessive twentieth-century artist closely identified with Balzac’s fictive seventeenth-century painter, Master Frenhofer. In the vain hope of rendering light so palpably that you could drive a nail through it, Picasso has blanketed Le Nain’s happy family in a blizzard of multicolored snowflakes. If only these snowflakes did not congeal into molecular blobs—tactile but not very light-invoking! True, there are beautiful passages in this painting—notably the boy and the woman on the left, who melt into the paint, but Picasso found pointillism too laborious, time-consuming, and lacking in spontaneity to spend any more time on it. (See page 305 for the story of Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu.)
Although he had little faith in Apollinaire’s eye, Picasso must have been delighted to receive a letter (March 30, 1918) of congratulation from him on this “copie éblouissante d’après ce tableau du 17e.”60616263 At the end of the summer, he would have been less delighted to receive Apollinaire’s account of a conversation he had had “with Sert that isn’t bad: he is in favor of the Jesuit, i.e. baroque, style as a traditional one for Catalan artists. It’s an idea. They are launching Carolus Durand in Paris. I would like you to paint big pictures like Poussin, something lyrical like your copy of Le Nain.”64 Picasso would indeed go on to “paint big pictures like Poussin”— his huge Three Women at the Spring (1921). However, Apollinaire’s suggestion that José María Sert, “the Tiepolo of the Ritz,” might be on the right track would have appalled him. Carolus Durand reeked of the Salon.
In April 1918, Olga’s career as a ballerina came to a sudden, painful halt. She had woken up with a terrible pain in her foot. She could not bend it or move it or even get out of
bed. A doctor was called.
Olga posing for her portrait in the Montrouge studio, 1918. Photograph by Emile Délétang. Musée Picasso, Paris.
Dancers can be reticent about their injuries, so we have to guess at the cause of Olga’s: an accident in the course of her daily workout at the barre, a previous injury, or some inherent weakness. An old photograph of Olga with a stick at San Sebastián in 1916 (that is, before she met Picasso) suggests that an earlier injury might have been to blame. In later years, when Cocteau needed to avenge one of Picasso’s sadistic slights, he would suggest that the artist “had struck her with a chair during an altercation,” as he told James Lord.656667 Olga’s papers confirm that Picasso was in Montrouge when the injury occurred.
Picasso. Olga Stretched Out Knitting with Leg in Plaster Cast, 1918. Pencil on writing paper from Dr. Bonnet’s clinic, Paris, 27.8 x 21.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
What we do know for certain is that her condition worsened. Olga may have left the clinic too soon. A week or two later, she was back in Dr. Bonnet’s maison de santé on the rue de la Chaise around the corner from the Lutétia, where she underwent an operation, which left her entire right leg encased in plaster. The clinic had a large, shady garden, so she was able to convalesce on a chaise longue under a tree. Picasso did a cubistic drawing of her on the clinic’s writing paper, with her leg in a cast, as well as a small painting done after it. Plans for an April wedding had to be postponed.
For a dancer who had not given up on dreams of balletic glory, an injury of this nature must have been traumatic. It would take five months to mend. Cocteau, who was suffering from Spanish flu—“doubtless a virus that originated in Sert’s beard,” he said—wrote his mother at the end of June that Olga was “still very much an invalid. She is trying out her leg on Dr Bonnet’s lugubrious lawns. I am going to be a witness at their wedding, which is imminent. They want to regularize things and get away once and for all.” Olga would give the clinic as her address on the marriage certificate.
During Olga’s convalescence, Picasso took to using her clinic as his Parisian headquarters. Toward the end of May, he allowed Apollinaire to hold a meeting there to promote an operetta that he was writing—“a light, gay work to celebrate the peace that was in the air”686970—based on an incident in Casanova’s memoirs. Henry Defosse, leader of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes orchestra, was composing the music; and, it was hoped, Picasso would do the décor. Nothing came of this project, except Apollinaire’s treatment and some music.71
Apollinaire, who had very nearly died in January, continued to convalesce at the Villa Molière (annex to the overcrowded Val-de-Grâce hospital). At the end of February he went back to work—a new job at the Ministry of Colonies—but he still had to sleep at the hospital. The job left the poet enough time for his own multifarious activities. As well as finishing two novels—Les Clowns d’Elvire (also known as La Femme assise) and La Mormonne et la danite—he wrote several poems, some film scripts, a play, Couleur du temps, the Casanova operetta, assorted journalism, and countless letters. He also helped edit the magazines SIC and Nord-Sud.
That Apollinaire guessed he did not have long to live might explain this compulsion to write and write and spread himself too thin. In his determination to stay ahead of the game, he gave his blessing indiscriminately to anything that could be described as avant-garde. At the same time, the poet, who was still revered as the pope of modernism, was succumbing to the wartime wave of patriotic classicism. He had allowed friends to request the Légion d’Honneur for him, only to be informed that it would not be granted.72 His involvement in I’affaire des statuettes73 was still held against him. He had hoped to live this down by volunteering for military service, but, to his mortification, his police record was held against him.
Meanwhile, Apollinaire told André Billy that he was in search of a wife: “I need to marry a woman capable of devotion, who will bring me, if not a fortune, enough comfort to ease my anxiety—in my case very severe as with anyone of intellectual audacity…. Time rushes by and I am about to be 37.”74 Over the last two years, there had been two prospective candidates: Madeleine, “la petite fiancée d’Oran,” the young teacher he had dumped in 1916; and a mystery woman called Georgette Cata-lain. The wife Apollinaire ultimately chose, Amélie Kolb, better known as Jacqueline or Ruby (because of her red hair), would prove supportive and affectionate, all the same a financial burden. Henceforth he would have to work all the harder to provide for this nice, unsophisticated girl from Nancy as well as himself.
Jacqueline was ten years younger than Apollinaire and had known him before the war. He had fancied her, but she was in love with a lesser poet, Jules-Gérard Jordens. After Jordens was killed on the Western Front in 1916, she had run into Apollinaire outside a department store. He was still convalescing from his trepanation; she was a volunteer nurse. Realizing how disabled he was, she had taken him home in a cab. Her solicitude convinced him that she would make a good wife, even though she went off to Brittany to have an affair with Irène Lagut.75 Apollinaire had insisted on joining them. Irène’s stories about her scabrous past inspired him to write a book about her, La Lemme assise Far from advancing her career as she had hoped, the book enabled Apollinaire to get his own back on Irène, whose affair with Jacqueline would linger on, as would Picasso’s sporadic involvement with Irène, into the 1920s. On March 22, 1917, Jacqueline announced in a postscript to a letter written by Apollinaire to Picasso that “the first-born heir is expected.” Jacqueline apparently miscarried.7677 Meanwhile, Apollinaire’s health had declined even further. Jacqueline nursed him with utmost solicitude and persuaded the doctors to let her wear a nurse’s cap and be with him at the hospital.78 They decided to get married in May 1918.
The death of Jacqueline’s brother in action necessitated a very simple wedding. The witnesses for Apollinaire were Picasso (without Olga, who was in the clinic) and a useful new friend, the writer Lucien Descaves, a member of the Académie Goncourt, which Apollinaire was anxious to join. He also had a brother, Eugène, who was an official at the Préfecture de Police and in that capacity would prove a help to Picasso in his bid to get married. Jacqueline’s witnesses were Vollard, Picasso’s first Paris dealer, and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia. Cocteau, who longed to become a close friend, gave the bridegroom an Egyptian statuette as a wedding present, which Apollinaire wrote a poem about by way of thanks. Nevertheless, Cocteau was not invited to the ceremony.
Apollinaire had had to obtain special leave for his marriage. The civil ceremony took place on May 2 at the mairie of the seventh arrondisement, and the religious ceremony immediately afterward at the nearby church of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The wedding group then repaired to Poccardi’s on rue d’Amboise for lunch. That evening, Picasso dined alone with the Apollinaires. He gave them one of his latest paintings: a guitar executed in parallel lines that mimic the corrugations of cardboard. The paint may not have dried, for the poet wrote asking Picasso to fix it.79 At night Apollinaire returned to hospital. A week later, Jacqueline went back to Brittany, this time to escape Big Bertha.
Picasso was also anxious to arrange his own wedding. He and Olga could then go and stay with Eugenia at La Mimoseraie, her cabane at Biarritz. As the honeymoon was to last the rest of the summer, Picasso had sent the materials he needed and also some unfinished canvases he hoped to work on to Biarritz. On June 18, Eugenia wrote Picasso that her cabane was not yet ready. She proposed an alternate arrangement: rooms on two floors of a nearby pension—“very modest but good beds and clean.” She and Olga would be on the ground floor, Picasso on the floor above. “There’ll be a large wicker chair for her to spend the day in the garden.”80 Eugenia was very thoughtful; she was also very manipulative. The couple decided not to leave Paris until La Mimoseraie was habitable. Meanwhile, they set about planning their marriage.
Picasso and Olga in the garden of La Mimoseraie Biarritz 1918.
7
Marriage (Summer 1918)
Apollinaire’s marr
iage served as a prelude to Picasso’s. By early July, Olga’s leg had healed sufficiently for a date, July 9, to be set for the wedding. Her plaster cast would be off by then; also her papers would be in order, thanks to Eugène Descaves (brother of Apollinaire’s witness Lucien Descaves). On June 10 Apollinaire had written Lucien, “Our friend [Picasso] is probably going to have need of [Eugène’s] services for his marriage. He requires notarized papers for his fiancée, who has nothing but a passport, and the Bolsheviks won’t let her obtain any documents from Russia.”1 Descaves must have done what was expected of him, for Max Jacob informed Picasso that he had recently sold Descaves a Picasso drawing for one hundred francs and that Max had asked the official what remuneration he expected for his services. Descaves had stipulated a drawing of a Pierrot in a ruff that he had seen Picasso walk over on the studio floor. True, the artist left things lying around all over the place, but he put too much of a premium on his work to trample on it.2 Descaves failed to get his drawing.
At the last moment there was a hitch—seemingly occasioned by Olga’s leg. The wedding had to be postponed until July 12. Even then the bride had to hobble around on a stick—a galling experience for a ballerina on her wedding day. The civil ceremony was held at the mairie of the seventh arrondissement on the rue de Grenelle.3 The witnesses for Picasso were Apollinaire and Jacob; and for Olga, Cocteau and Valerian Svetlov, ballet critic and historian and a great friend of Diaghilev, known for his white “quiff” as “Mr. Parrot.” One of the mayor’s assistants, Gustave Reynier, also signed the register.4