A Life of Picasso Read online

  A drawing for the largest of Picasso’s Barcelona paintings, Seated Man Leaning on a Table,14 reveals that it may have begun as a portrait of a friend: the exceedingly Spanish-looking Basque painter Francisco Iturrino. Picasso’s large 1901 portrait of him had failed to sell at his first Paris show, so he had painted another composition on the back of it.15 Picasso had also done a cubist drawing of the same man in 1914 when they were both in Avignon.16 Iturrino’s dramatic Spanish appearance had likewise inspired major portraits by the Belgian painter Henri Evenepoel and Derain.17 And now the two of them were reunited once again: fellow honorees at the June 10 banquet. Picasso needed a model—a Spanish-looking one for preference—and Iturrino liked to sit. Picasso would later try to fix him up with a Paris dealer.

  Picasso. Colón Monument, Barcelona, 1917. Oil on canvas, 40.1 x 32 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona.

  The prospect of staying on in Barcelona delighted Picasso—at least at first. The war news from France was increasingly depressing: mutinies on the Western Front, the bloodbath at Ypres, air raids on Paris, the revolution in Russia. People were beginning to despair that hostilities would never end. Everything was in short supply. In Barcelona, on the other hand, industrious Catalans were profiting from Spanish neutrality. Far from shortages, there was an abundance of meat and poultry, fruit and vegetables, even French wines, and for Picasso the greatest wartime luxury of all, unlimited tobacco. The city had expanded and, thanks to an influx of refugees, become more international. Vice—a traditional local industry—flourished as never before. Prostitution was no longer limited to the Barri Xino (the red-light district), it was everywhere; so was pornography. Drugs, too, were readily available. The major worry was not the war; it was the Spanish flu epidemic, which would soon reach Paris and the rest of the world.

  To Picasso’s surprise, the art world of Barcelona had become not only more active but more progressive. In April 1917, the Palau de Belles Artes had put on an enormous exhibition (1,458 works) of French art in a bid to take the place of the Paris Salon, which had been closed down by the war. To promote the show, Ambroise Vollard had given a lecture on Renoir and Cézanne.18 When it closed in July, Picasso, who usually avoided such things, attended the closing ceremony. To capitalize on this, the Dal-mau Galleries organized a show of local artists that included the leading lights of the Catalan school, Isidre Nonell, Joaquim Sunyer, and Joaquim Mir, all of them alumni like Picasso of Els Quatre Gats.

  Nonell had died, Mir had gone mad, and Picasso’s old enemy, Sunyer, had come to the fore. This was a far cry from 1904, when the two of them, newly settled in Paris, had fallen out over Fernande Olivier.19 Fernande’s rejection of Sunyer had left him bitterly envious of Picasso’s superior skills as a seducer as well as an artist. Years later, Sunyer raised the value of one of his pastels by appending Picasso’s signature to it.20 Surprisingly, this derivative painter, who is remembered principally as a portraitist, had become leader of the Catalan art movement, noucentisme.

  The term “noucentisme”—literally “twentieth-centuryism”—had been coined in 1906 by Eugeni d’Ors, a literary pundit who wanted to be the ideologue of a new movement. D’Ors had written about Picasso in the past and would write a fulsome book about him in 1930. Later, he would turn violently against him for painting Guernica. Despite the prominent names that d’Ors invoked—above all Picasso’s— as forerunners of his movement, noucentisme was far too timid and passé to live up to its portentous name. In this respect, it was reminiscent of the preceding Catalan art movement, an offshoot of art nouveau, which had given itself an even more impossibly ambitious name, “modernisme.” What d’Ors and Sunyer wanted noucentisme to evoke was a modern Arcadia: a pastoral countryside inhabited by idealized Catalan women, whose strong bodies would testify to their roots in an ancient culture. Miró diagnosed their problem—an excess of local piety—in a letter to a friend: “That business about our native carob trees performing the miracle of awakening [Sunyer] is fine when the intellectuals of the Lliga say it…. You have to be an international Catalan, a homespun Catalan will never be worth anything in this world.”21

  Having dabbled in Catalan Mediterraneanism many years earlier, Picasso would have found d’Ors’s pretensions antiquated. However, McCully sees a hint of it in the decorative Harlequin that Picasso painted early on in this visit: specifically in its thin washes of color and classicistic head and hands, so typical of noucentisme.22 This Harlequin looks back to the self-referential Harlequin in the Parade curtain. He allegorizes Picasso’s involvement in Diaghilev’s commedia dell’arte troupe and has once again become Apollinaire’s Harlequin Trismegistus—a strolling player out to devise new imagery for a new audience in a new age.

  It was not just for Olga’s sake that Picasso distanced himself from his Catalan friends. Over the last fifteen years, few if any of the Quatre Gats group had come to much and he no longer had much in common with them. The formerly bright young Bohemians and “champagne anarchists” had mostly gotten married and settled down into bourgeois smugness. They would have found Olga a somewhat distant star. She would have found them provincial and uncouth, particularly Picasso’s oldest painter friend, Manuel Pallarès,23 who spoke only Catalan and, as Picasso said, could be counted on to bore people straight to sleep. Picasso’s other very old friend, the sculptor Manolo, who had resurfaced in Barcelona with his wife, Totote, posed a different problem. He was such a devastating wit and such a ruthless practical joker that Picasso would have been wary of having him around.

  Picasso. Harlequin, Barcelona, 1917. Oil on canvas, 116 x 90 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona.

  Had he been on his own, Picasso would have welcomed his Catalan cronies, whom, in later years, he loved to entertain. But for Olga’s sake, he fought shy of them and was accused of being standoffish for doing so. One local journalist described Picasso at this time as “condescending, friendly, jovial, ornate.”24 “His friends no longer recognized … [this] refined gentleman who took his splendid girlfriend to cafés on the Paralleo or strolled with her on his arm down the Ramblas.”25 Rumors of this transformation soon reached Paris: “Picasso is said to be marrying the young Russian dancer,” Jacques Doucet wrote Roché; “he is still in Spain, all elegance and refinement, as to his circumstances, his best friends don’t know what’s become of him.”26 Doucet’s information came from Max Jacob, who had reported that “for the last two months, Picasso has written me every week … to say that he is about to return home.”27

  Almost all the artist’s output from his six months in Barcelona in 1917 hangs together in a revelatory gallery at the Museu Picasso, revelatory in that it enables us to study a six-month period of his work in its entirety. Although stylistically diffuse— pointillism alternating with Ingresque representationalism and synthetic cubism—it is unified by a pervasive Spanishness. After Diaghilev and Massine left on a tour of Spain, there was nobody around to provide Picasso with the avant-garde stimulus on which his work thrived. The longer Picasso was obliged to wait in Barcelona for Olga’s visa, the deeper he probed the darkness of his Spanish spirit. Where better to find the duende he was after than in his afición—specifically at the bullfight in honor of the Virgin of El Pilar on October 12.

  Picasso. Disemboweled Horse, 1917. Charcoal on canvas, 80.2 x 103.3 cm. Museu Picasso, Barcelona.

  To the fascination of Ernest Ansermet, who accompanied him to this corrida— Olga may have been squeamish about bullfights: she is never recorded as attending one—Picasso proceeded to do a mass of rough drawings. Sketchbook in hand,28 he skipped back and forth between cubist and more traditional methods of representation. “Observing my astonishment, [the artist] said ‘but can’t you see? It’s the same thing! It’s the same bull seen in a different way’ ”29 Surprisingly, none of these drawings depicts the torero doing his passes or the mise-à-mort. Virtually all of them portray the picador on his horse, savagely jabbing the bull with his pike, while the horse—its flanks not mattressed as they are now—is being gored by the w
ounded bull. These drawings prepare us for a horrendously expressive image of the gored horse in its death throes—the more expressive for being executed in black chalk on canvas the color of the sand in the bullring.30 Bowels dangle from the horse’s belly like testicles; its monstrously elongated neck and penile head rear up as if about to explode in orgasm.

  A couple of observations in a Barcelona sketchbook31 reveal how confused Picasso felt about his work at this time. The first, “One must not learn to draw,” is interesting in that Picasso was forever saying the opposite. The second, “Has anyone put a prism in front of an X-ray?” confirms Picasso was still puzzling over the direction that cubism might take.

  Since parting company with the ballet, Olga had persistently tried and repeatedly failed to get a French visa. As weeks and months went by and the status of Russian expatriates became ever more precarious, she and Picasso realized that a visa was never going to materialize in Barcelona. They would have to pull Parisian strings. Cocteau, who had powerful connections at the Quai d’Orsay, discovered that a visa could be granted if Olga obtained an engagement to perform in Paris. He had discussed the matter with Misia Sert, who was sure she could arrange something. Misia approached her great friend, the celebrated actress Réjane, whose husband Paul Porel was director of the Théâtre du Vaudeville. Porel had readily agreed, Misia reported, to draw up a contract guaranteed to get Olga her visa.

  To check that everything was going according to plan, Picasso asked Manuel Humbert, a local noucentista painter and close friend of Manolo, to go and see Cocteau on his forthcoming trip to Paris. The news was discouraging. On August 10, Porel had dropped dead, leaving Olga’s contract unsigned on his desk. Cocteau wired the news to Picasso and promised to have a new contract mailed in a week. There was a further problem. On September 1, Valentine Gross, who took over the handling of the negotiations from Misia, sent Picasso a card saying that they should wait another week or two before asking the grieving widow to amend the contract.32 Unfortunately the grieving widow had departed on tour and nothing could be done until she returned to Paris. “Very bored. Still here. I don’t know when I am getting back,” Picasso wrote Apollinaire on October 18.33 Olga’s visa would not come through for a month, by which time they would both be sick to death of Barcelona.

  At the end of October, the Ballets Russes returned from South America for the autumn season in Barcelona (November 5-18). Ansermet—according to Picasso, “the hardest-working member of the company”34—moved into the room next door to Olga’s. They had adjoining balconies, from one of which Picasso painted a lively cubist view of the monument to Christopher Columbus.35 He also did a drawing of the conductor. Meanwhile, Diaghilev and Massine had gone back to the Ritz. After touring Spain, they had spent the last few months in Madrid working on a new ballet, La Boutique fantasque, with décor by Derain—a potential crowd pleaser. Tri-corne had been temporarily set aside.

  Diaghilev’s first move was to assemble the company and tell them that he had failed to arrange any future bookings. German and Austrian troops had broken through the Italian lines, so Rome was out; the third battle of Ypres was going badly, so Paris was out; Sir Thomas Beecham, the rich and powerful London conductor, wanted only British music, so London was out. Apart from a few appearances in Spain and Portugal, Diaghilev had nothing in view. To make matters worse, flu was now raging out of control in Barcelona (several of the dancers, including Sokolova, had caught it). So the Liceo was not nearly as full as it had been in the spring. Always a possibility, bankruptcy had become a probability. The Russian Revolution had wiped out Diaghilev’s private means and there were only the slimmest pickings to be had from patrons like Misia, Lady Ripon, or Otto Kahn, who had lost $250,000 on the last American tour and was averse to losing more.

  The impresario had insisted on the inclusion of Parade in the Liceo season in the hope that the pride the people of Barcelona took in Picasso (although an Andalusian, he was regarded as a native son) would guarantee the ballet’s success. It did not. Most of the Catalan critics were as reactionary as the Madrileño ones: “If Parade is a joke, it is a joke taken to the extreme, a joke in poor taste. … It would be enough for the French to demand extradition for its author, who is Spanish” (Fausto in La Van-guardia); or “everything is cubist, even the music has been cubed” (Aladin in El Dilu-vio). To their credit, Picasso’s admirers struck back: an anonymous critic in El Poble Català wrote that Fausto had every right to censure Parade, but that his call to extradite “the greatest painter Spain has produced since Goya was in abominable taste.”36 Writing in La Kevista, Picasso’s friend, the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García, congratulated him on a “magnificent show. Picasso has made us—at least many of us, aware of something very new.”37 Miró was also very impressed by Parade. Although aged twenty-four, he was already a figure to be reckoned with; but he was much too shy to approach Picasso. The two of them did not become friends until Miró’s first trip to Paris in 1920.

  Delaunay had returned to Barcelona, vindictive as ever, and was once again vilifying Picasso. To Gleizes, his fellow Picassophobe, Delaunay wrote that Parade “is a completely crazy story—no success here, or even curiosity, when confronted with this hysterical thing—hysterical is the only word for the painting of this sick tortured mind.” Besides lambasting Parade, Delaunay criticized Picasso’s return to represen-tationalism: “having left behind cubist incomprehensibility, he accommodates himself marvelously with his so-called classic … drawings which have neither father nor mother.” And he warns Gleizes against “certain parties” who “want to make French painters out to be followers of the famous genius”—that is, Picasso.38 Obsessive resentment continued to corrode the spirit of this formerly influential pioneer.

  Delaunay was especially envious of Picasso’s success with the Ballets Russes. On the first night of Parade he had Sonia, who had met Diaghilev back in Russia in 1905, introduce him to the impresario in the hope that he, too, would be asked to do a ballet. The lobbying worked. In 1918, Massine would commission Delaunay and his wife, who had taken to calling herself Sofinka Modernuska, to replace Bakst’s sets and costumes for Cléopâtre, which had caught fire in a South American railroad tunnel. Delaunay’s draft dodging had gotten around, and he received as bad a reception in London, where the ballet opened, as he would in Paris. Nevertheless, there was talk of Delaunay doing a sports ballet: a project that Nijinska would later resurrect with Cocteau as Le Train bleu. Also, Delaunay executed the portraits of Massine that Picasso had not as yet got around to painting.

  As Cocteau would report to Picasso a year later (September 30, 1918), Sonia had suckered Diaghilev into promoting them “as ferocious patriots who had suffered in Spain.”39 Suffered? Sonia had been ecstatic when revolution broke out in Russia— less ecstatic when the large income she received from her adoptive family ceased. To replenish her coffers, Sonia had followed her mother-in-law’s example and opened a boutique in Madrid to market her simultaneist garments and bric-à-brac. With Gómez de la Serna’s powerful supervision and backing, she was an enormous success and was able to launch boutiques all over the country. Sonia’s mean-spirited husband, whose life had been blighted by “Picasso’s eternal shadow,”40 would soon find himself increasingly overshadowed by his wife.

  As the Barcelona ballet season drew to an end, Olga heard that her papers had finally arrived in Madrid. And so, on November 19, she and Picasso took the train to the capital. Once again they traveled with the company, which had been engaged to give six performances at the Teatro Real. The performances were a disaster. The outbreak of flu had driven half the population of the city out into the countryside. However, Picasso was elated. After a week, which he and Olga spent in separate but adjoining rooms at the Madrid Palace Hotel, they finally left for Paris on the twenty-eighth: he to his villa and beloved dogs in Montrouge and Olga to the luxurious Hôtel Lutétia. Despite the food shortages, bombardments, and blackouts, they were delighted to be back in Paris. Everything in their perso
nal and professional lives was about to change. Picasso had only one regret: he had thought it safer to leave everything he had done since June back in Barcelona,41 everything, that is, except for his portrait of Olga and a couple of sketchbooks. Officials at the frontier still mistook cubist works for plans of fortifications, and Picasso—the most fearful of men in the face of officialdom—did not want any trouble at the frontier.

  6

  Return to Montrouge (Winter 1917-18)

  The winter of 1917-18 was bitter, and the villa at Montrouge, to which Picasso now returned, was bleaker than ever. The place had been flooded. Several works had been damaged, and the artist’s first concern was to have them dried and cleaned up. Some needed to be repainted. On a visit to welcome him back, Severini was surprised to discover that the artist had moved much of his work to his upstairs bedroom.1 Despite the cold and the discomforts, Picasso was happy to be back home with his pet bird and his dogs and the good woman who looked after the place. A sketch dated December 9 reveals that order had been reestablished: Picasso depicts Olga and himself lunching on roast chicken at a well-set table, waited on by a comically disheveled maid.2 Two dogs kneel on either side of their master, waiting to be fed. Hanging on the wall, beside the birdcage, is the great Grebo mask that had left such a decisive mark on Picasso’s cubism.3

  Olga settled back into the confort moderne of the Hôtel Lutétia where she would stay for most of the next six months. The bills, which Picasso carefully kept, confirm that she took only breakfast at the hotel.4 Olga, who still aspired to be a prima ballerina, went off to do daily exercises at a ballet school, but there were portraits to sit for, so she spent most of her time at Montrouge. Sometimes the bombing may have obliged her to stay there overnight. A nighttime trip with shrapnel raining down could be fatal. Satie, who lived nearby at Arcueil, narrowly escaped death. “The shells were terribly close to me,” he wrote Roland-Manuel, “I thought I was done for! People were killed but not me.”5