A Life of Picasso Read online

  Just as writers like to identify Picasso’s Saltimbanques as members of his tertulia (intimate group of male friends), people have tried to stick name tags onto the rideau rouge figures:31 members of the ballet company, relaxing backstage in costume or rehearsal clothes. Apart from allegorical references to Massine, Olga, and himself, the only other figure who may stand for a specific person is the mustachioed sailor in blue. He resembles Carlo Socrate, the scene painter whom Picasso liked, although his late arrival put the curtain at risk. The Mallorquín woman in a conical hat is an interloper—a survivor from the Saltimbanques painting—which may explain why Picasso sets her against a white canvas, a picture within a picture. The turbaned Arab is also an interloper from Diaghilev’s biggest hit, Schéhérazade, whose set décor Picasso somewhat surprisingly admired. The Arab stands for the black slave originally played by Nijinsky, and thus symbolizes the company’s past glories and, possibly, Picasso’s promotion over the head of the no longer fashionable Bakst.

  The so-called torero is not a torero. The big hat, the beard, the guitar, above all the cross-gartering identify him as a folk dancer, possibly Massine, who was always at pains to conceal the way he padded out his disappointing legs—hence the cross-gartering. Palau sees the winged mare as what he chooses to call “Pegasso,” who had “returned from Rome at full gallop, his wings outstretched and a girl on his back.”32 Pegasus is more likely to be a symbol of Picasso’s lifelong pacifism. Remember he was working on the rideau rouge maquettes at a time when World War I had reached its nadir. Both sides were bogged down in blood and mud. Casualties numbered hundreds of thousands, mutinies were breaking out on the Western Front, and Russia was in the throes of revolution. The death toll was once again on the rise. Picasso’s winged mare suckling a piebald foal on the curtain would be followed thirty-five years later by another parable of peace. To exorcise the Korean War, what else did Picasso choose for the centerpiece of his huge paean to peace on the walls of Vallau-ris chapel but a very similar Pegasus, this time a male one with outspread wings, harnessed to a plow, handled by a child.

  At first Picasso had seen himself as a monkey perched on the back of Pegasus,33 while a stagehand on a ladder, hoists a cardboard sun into position. In subsequent drawings, he transforms himself into a laurel-wreathed monkey scampering up the ladder—painted red, white, and blue in the hope of appeasing belligerent chauvinists in the audience—to reach for the heavens above.34 In the course of his climb, Picasso’s simian alter ego gets a helping hand from a reddish-haired dancer in a tutu, Olga, who has taken the monkey’s place on the back of the Pegasus and is poised to join the artist at the heart of his cosmology, as represented by the zodiacal sphere that lies at Pegasus’s feet.35 As well as evoking his fiancée, the figure evokes Picasso’s first love, Rosita del Oro, an equestrienne who had become his mistress when he was fifteen. A star of the Tivoli Equestrian Circus, this wasp-waisted, big-bosomed bareback rider lingered in the artist’s memory shortly before he died; Rosita reappeared alongside images of Picasso as a very old, very small clown in many wish-fulfilling autobiographical fantasies.36

  The gala opening of Parade took place on May 18, 1917, at the celebrated Théâtre du Châtelet, the scene of many of Diaghilev’s former triumphs. Due to the blackout, the performance was scheduled for three-thirty in the afternoon rather than the evening. Since the gala benefited the French Red Cross and other worthy causes,37 the audience consisted largely of generous supporters of the charities in question rather than of modern art. To neutralize militant chauvinists and other possible troublemakers, Diaghilev had “papered” the cheaper seats of the house with wounded Allied soldiers, many of them Russian. He had also invited key members of the avant-garde: Apollinaire, Gris, Lipchitz, Miró, Laurens, Kisling, Valentine Gross, Max Jacob, Pierre Albert-Birot, Cendrars, E. E. Cummings, as well as the composers Georges Auric, Francis Poulenc, Ricardo Viñes, Germaine Tailleferre, and Louis Durey.

  The older generation was represented by Misia’s celebrated friends, Debussy and Renoir.38 Debussy was dismayed. Poulenc describes him leaving the auditorium as if “at the gates of death,” murmuring “Perhaps! Perhaps! But I’m already too far away from all that.”39 He had reason to be upset. Satie, who had been one of his closest associates, had recently taken a public stand against the musical impressionism that Debussy personified. Feeling betrayed, the great man did not congratulate him on Parade, whereupon Satie fired off one of his poisonous letters, which would cause Debussy much sorrow in his last year of life. The cultural divide between the two composers, or rather between Debussy’s romantic fin de siècle impressionism and Satie’s radical twentieth-century “cool,” was as nothing compared to the more brutal divide between “the left, who thought Cocteau a reactionary arriviste and imposter, and the right, who thought Satie a charlatan and Picasso a crook.”40

  Diaghilev, Misia, and Cocteau had seen to it that their friends from the gratin (high society) were also well represented. The Amazonian American Princess Edmond de Polignac—a Singer sewing machine heiress, celebrated as much for her generous patronage of modern music as her autocratic stinginess—was much in evidence, dressed severely in a nurse’s uniform. The Countesses de Chevigné and Greffuhle (together the inspiration of Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes), the Count and Countess Etienne de Beaumont (the inspiration of Radiguet’s Bal du Comte Orgel) were there at the behest of Cocteau. Many more of their ilk attended because it was the thing to do. Proust, ever curious, made an appearance and, as was his way, sent Cocteau an exquisite letter of congratulation, ending with the observation, “comme Picasso est beaul”41

  As usual, when Diaghilev had an important opening, Misia dominated the proceedings as if, Cocteau said, she were “marrying off a daughter.”42 At the side of this woman who had done her best to sabotage Parade443 was her lover, José María Sert, also her latest crush, the innovative couturière, Gabrielle Chanel. The occasion signaled Chanel’s acceptance by the beau monde. Hitherto, this dressmaker of genius had been snubbed by snobs, particularly by Picasso’s admirer, the far from kindly Etienne de Beaumont, whose taste for revolutionary art and music did not preclude a refusal to receive “people in trade.” Chanel would become a close friend of Picasso’s. In 1921, when his apartment was closed for the summer, she lodged him in her palatial apartment, and they are said to have had an affair. Chanel was already Olga’s favorite couturière. “Olga… had many new robes from Chanel to show,” Stravinsky reports.44 Having fallen desperately in love with Chanel, he was well placed to know.

  According to a drawing45 by Michel Georges-Michel, Misia’s box included Picasso, Diaghilev, Cocteau, and Marie Laurencin. In fact Marie Laurencin was in Spain; and Picasso had his own box, but was mostly backstage painting arabesques onto the costume he had had to improvise for Lopokova after Massine had made a last-minute decision to provide the male Acrobat with a partner.46 Lopokova giggled to a friend that Picasso had tickled her nipples with his brush47—an act he would replicate in the early-1960s Painter and Model series. Olga was also backstage, preparing to go on in Les Sylphides later in the program. Meanwhile, Satie wandered around. When hissing broke out, he was seen to join in. He then went to Picasso’s box, where Apollinaire stood out dramatically, his wounded head bandaged in black. He and Pierre Albert-Birot (poet, painter, and founder of the new magazine SIC) had been asked to lead the claque. So dense was the crowd in the foyer that the artist had to shout out “Picasso, Picasso,” as if the celebrity was ahead of him in order to clear the way. While doing so, he stumbled on Matisse: “Ah! How happy I am to meet a real friend in such circumstances.”48 Happy or not, the old rivalry would start up once again when Matisse was commissioned to do the décor for The Song of the Nightingale.

  The first performance left Cocteau consumed with envy. Picasso and Satie were perceived as the stars; Cocteau had been eclipsed. Apollinaire mentioned him only in passing and reserved his plaudits for Satie’s “astonishingly expressive music, so clear and simple that it [re
flects] the marvelously lucid spirit of France,” and for Massine’s success at “adapting himself… to the discipline of Picasso’s art.”49 “[Massine] has produced something totally new—a marvelously appealing kind of dance, so true, so lyrical, so human and so joyful.”50 So upset was Cocteau that he fired off a plaintive letter to Apollinaire: “If even a man like yourself cannot fathom my depths, no one will succeed in doing so.”51 In his quest for stardom, Cocteau had failed to make allowances for “L’Enchanteur’s” concern with his own glory. Apollinaire was fearful that Parade might overshadow his more modest but intrinsically more sur-realist play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (Tiresias’s Teats), which was due to open a month later. Indeed, Apollinaire had been so worried about its reception that he had asked Satie to do a score for it; and to silence Cocteau’s bitchery he had him contribute a poem, “Zèbre,” to the play’s text.

  The theme of Apollinaire’s hilarious farce—his last major work—was androgyny. Picasso greatly enjoyed it, and would draw upon the theme, ten years later, when he began work on a monument to Apollinaire. Les Mamelles de Tirésias is set in Zanzibar; its protagonist, Thérèse, declares herself a liberated woman, who would rather fight battles than give birth. She becomes Tiresias, grows a beard and, instead of burning her bra, as later feminists would, she unbuttons her blouse and unleashes two balloons—one red, one blue—which she pops with her cigarette lighter. “I’m virile as the devil,” she announces through a megaphone. “I’m a stallion / From my head to my heels / Look at me. I’m a bull. … As for my husband, he is much less virile than I.” While the wife becomes a macho man, the husband turns into a woman and gives birth to 40,049 babies. Eventually, the two of them resume their original genders and settle back together again as man and wife.

  To describe his lyrical approach to art and literature—indeed to the whole creative field—Apollinaire had been searching for a magic word. As we have seen this word first appeared in his Parade essay, where it is hyphenated: sur-réalisme. On its second appearance, a month later, as the subtitle (Drame surréaliste) of Les Mamelles de Tirésias, it is not hyphenated. However, hyphenated or not the word, as used by Apollinaire, would correspond to Picasso’s concept of it. The meaning that Breton eventually imposed on it was a very different matter.

  Left: Picasso. Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire with Head Bandaged, 1916. Pencil on paper, 29.7 x 22.5 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Right: Guillaume Apollinaire in Paul Guillaume’s apartment (photograph inscribed to André Breton), and Adolph Basler on the left, 1916. Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.

  Back to opening night of Parade and Cocteau’s dramatically distorted account of it: “The audience wanted to kill us, women rushed at us armed with hatpins. We were saved by Apollinaire because his head was bandaged, he was in uniform and … set himself in front of us like a rampart.”52 Cocteau went on to boast that “the cries of a bayonette charge in Flanders … were nothing compared to what happened that night at the Châtelet theater.”53 Parade coincided with one of the blackest episodes of the war, the horrendous carnage—the French lost 140,000 soldiers in two weeks—caused by General Nivelle’s senseless advance, which had sparked a flash fire of mutinies on the Western Front. Since Cocteau had used powerful friends to have himself invalided out of the army in the face of battle, the statement that Parade was “the greatest battle of the war”54 infuriated anyone who had suffered in the trenches. The only performer to be seriously booed was Cocteau’s “girlfriend,” Shabelska, who played the part of the Little American Girl: a dactylo who had to dance a cakewalk, crank up a car, ride a bicycle, box, mimic Charlie Chaplin, fire a pistol, and other items from Cocteau’s bag of tricks. Shabelska burst into tears in the wings and had to be forced back onstage by Massine. Apart from this resounding rejection of Cocteau’s gimmickry, the performance was relatively uneventful compared with the violence of dadaist evenings to come. Juan Gris reported that “Parade had quite a lot of success, although a group was organized to boo it—boo cubism that is—but applause prevailed.”55 Paul Morand, who was very close to Cocteau and fairly close to Picasso, thought that the idea of replacing balletic clichés with the movements and noises of modern life did not work. “Some whistling, but much applause,” he said.56 Metzinger saw the event historically: “the first time cubism has had to face the crowd. Just enough whistles to add a dash of vinegar to the well-nourished thunder of applause.”57

  Maria Shabelska as the Little American Girl in Parade, 1917‘. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  Nevertheless, for the rest of his life, Cocteau persisted in describing Parade as an epic battle between the reactionaries and the avant-garde, as if it had been Victor Hugo’s Hernani or a replay of the first night of Stravinsky’s Sucre duprintemps in May 1913, which Cocteau had attended and his friend Valentine Gross had described as an “earthquake.” “The theater seemed to shudder. People howled and whistled, drowning out the music. There was slapping and even punching.”58 The police were summoned and gentlemen challenged each other to duels. “Exactly what I wanted,” Diaghilev had said.59

  The notoriety that the impresario had wanted and duly received for Sucre was exactly what Cocteau wanted and failed to receive for Parude. Instead of acceptance by the avant-garde and a heroic martyrdom at the hands of a Philistine mob, he ended up as the dadaists’ “Aunt Sally” of choice. Paul Morand even brought an Aunt Sally figure back from London for Cocteau; it had a pipe in its mouth and looked just like one of the Managers. For all his Fingerspitzengefühl, for all his captivating eloquence, for all his genius as a pusticheur, Cocteau never was, and—with the exception of he Sung d’un poète and one or two other films—never would be an innovator. He was too mercurial to be anything but a star, a star that still twinkles remorselessly. By trying so hard to thrust himself to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde, all Cocteau did was mobilize an army of enemies. “Why coming from so far and setting out so late, should [he] push ahead of everyone else?” as Pierre Reverdy asked in Nord-Sud

  André Breton and his group of young poets—soon to be known as the surrealists—were already fomenting a campaign tinged with envy against Cocteau. Most of them were every bit as bourgeois as he was, but less affluent, less well connected, and less scintillating. Whereas the surrealists were in rebellion against their humdrum family backgrounds, Cocteau took the fullest advantage of his more fashionable milieu. Hence the fiendishness of the surrealists’ denunciation of this rich, spoiled, homosexual narcissist, who had less gravitas but a lot more wit and surface brilliance than most of them.

  Parade was so poorly received by the critics that Diaghilev took it off after two performances. In December 1920, Cocteau nagged the impresario into reviving the ballet in Paris with most of his egregious gimmicks restored, but the public had become so inured to the shock of the new that its modernity was taken for granted. No protests, therefore no réclame. André Gide describes Cocteau at the ballet’s revival: “walking up and down in the wings, older, tense and uneasy. He is perfectly aware that the sets and costumes are by Picasso, and that the music is by Satie, but he wonders whether Picasso and Satie are not by him.”606162

  Unlike Diaghilev’s other fairground allegory, Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, Parade never became a staple of the company’s repertory. When asked about this, Diaghilev reportedly said, “[Parade] is my best bottle of wine. I do not like to open it too often.”63 And so, as grands crus do, Diaghilev’s “best bottle of wine” became a legend. Over the years, the magic of Picasso’s name and Cocteau’s lifelong campaign to perpetuate this ballet, which very few people had ever seen, provided Parade with a mythic cachet. Had Parade been performed as much as Diaghilev’s other ballets, it is unlikely to have retained its iconic status. Picasso and Satie’s next collaboration, Mercure (1924), would have much more of a modernist edge to it, but then Cocteau was not the begetter; he was the target.

  After the demise of the Ballets Russes, Parade would not be revived until the Béjart Company put it on in 19
64. And then in 1973, with Massine’s help, the Robert Joffrey Company revived Parade in New York.64 At last America, to which Parade makes so many references, would be able to judge what the fuss had been about. It was fascinating but disappointing. Diaghilev’s “finest bottle of wine” was no longer drinkable—bouquet and body, all gone. The reconstituted sets and costumes—not least the timid colors—had no Picassian impact; as for the interplay between cloudlike trees and jagged diagonal buildings, it failed to register.

  I had been fortunate to see the Managers’ original outfits—battered and clumsily repaired—at Richard Buckle’s Diaghilev exhibit in 1955. As well as being masterpieces of cubist sculpture, they left one in no doubt as to their all-important role as the “heavies.” After the exhibit, these relics disappeared, presumably thrown away. By comparison, the Joffrey replacements looked like fake Picassos, which is what they were. As for the choreography, Massine had remained faithful to the spirit of the libretto, which is perhaps why it seemed so stale compared to the “Pop” manifestations that had broken out in New York.

  The only element to survive unscathed was Satie’s music, a deceptively simple mix of cabaret songs, ragtime, and much else, as subtle and inventive in its way as a cubist collage. Cocteau had wanted background music; what he got, to his carefully dissembled dismay, was “the most imposing piece of musical architecture that [Satie] had ever conceived,” as deft and effective as Picasso’s contribution.6566676869 As Auric said, it captured “the nostalgia of the barrel organ, which will never play Bach fugues.”

  Neither Satie nor Picasso emerged from the Parade opening unscathed. Satie had become entangled in a lawsuit with a dangerous enemy, the reactionary critic Jean Poueigh. After congratulating him on Parade, Poueigh had denounced the ballet in print as an outrage on French taste. Satie fired back a postcard: “You are an asshole—and if I dare say so—an unmusical ass-hole. Above all, never again offer me your dirty hand. …” He followed this up with other fecal insults addressed to “Monsieur Fuckface Poueigh, Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits.” Poueigh sued Satie for slander on the grounds that these open postcards had been read by his concierge.