At all events she was no fool: she may have had little notion of what Picasso was at, although his prodigious, disinterested, and persevering industry did impress her, and no understanding of Cubism nor liking for it; she may have been so vague about Spain that when he took her there she was not sure of what part of the country she was in; but her book, Picasso et ses amis, has some brilliant portraits in it. Where ill-will distorts her judgment, as it does in the case of Juan Gris and Marie Laurencin, she talks nonsense; but where it does not, and where she writes about those she liked, such as Max Jacob or Salmon, or those she watched objectively, such as Apollinaire, her descriptions are sharp, concise, and finely shaded. It is a book that no mere odalisque could have produced; and whatever Gertrude Stein may say, Fernande was capable of a great deal more than talking interminably about hats, furs, and scent.
Picasso was proud of her; he was also intensely jealous. A true descendant of the Moors in this, he liked to keep her shut up indoors, and at least to begin with it was he who did the shopping, going out daily with a small string bag. It could not last, and presently Fernande took over, doing as well as she could on an allowance of one franc a day, or two at the most, and those handed over with reluctance. But their Spartan regime was more theoretical than real except in the hardest times, because they often ate out. There were small restaurants in Montmartre where one could eat cheaply and often on credit; Vernin, for example, or Azon, where dinner cost ninety centimes (and dear at the price, said some). Then there was the Lapin Agile, to which Frédé had moved from the Zut with his guitar, his ass, and his Burgundian wife (a famous cook) and where an excellent supper with unlimited wine cost two francs. Some purists said Lapin á Gill in memory of the caricaturist who painted the sign, a rabbit leaping out of a pot, when the cabaret no longer wished to be called Aux Assassins; but Agile won the day—there was already a Lapin Vengeur near enough for the force of analogy to come into play. It was an agreeable place, in spite of the remaining assassins, and the painters who went there now sound like a Hall of Fame or the pride of the Museum of Modern Art—Picasso, Braque, Derain, Utrillo, Vlaminck, sometimes even the grave Matisse, to say nothing of van Dongen and a host of minor lights. There were writers too, though none of a comparable magnitude; and one of them, Pierre Mac Orlan, married Frédé’s daughter, that enigmatic girl whom Picasso painted with the Lapin’s tame crow, her shoulders hunched over the bird in that typical Blue Period attitude and her long bony fingers fondling its feathers. Then there were the pimps of nearby Pigalle, whores and demi-whores, journalists, actors, riffraff, second and third murderers: but no tourists as yet. Both the gaiety and the squalor were still authentic, as authentic as the pictures that lined the walls and that ranged from a yellow and red “Toulouse-Lautrec” Picasso to the vilest daubs.
Most of his life, and even more at this time, Picasso could live at a high rate of tension, playing hard and working harder still. Well before he took Fernande into keeping, she had often been woken by the return of the bande a Picasso bawling speeches in the moonlit square or letting off pistols or shrieking, ‘ ‘A bas Laforgue! Conspuez Laforgue!”—it seems that they preferred Verlaine. This band, a loose shifting association, consisted at various times of such people as Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Manolo, Braque, Derain, and Vlaminck; and it is significant that although its members were often very considerable men—and in the case of the last three very big ones too, topping six feet—Picasso was always named as the leader.
Not that he was aggressive or dominating in those days: he never attempted to trample on Max Jacob as he trampled on Sabartés, for example. Many reasons could be brought forward in explanation, such as that Picasso’s French, although improving, was still no more than an indifferent weapon; and that whereas in Barcelona many of his acquaintances had been no more than slightly disguised bourgeois, this did not apply in Paris, and in any case the people he met here were of a far greater intellectual quality. But surely, if explanations are required, they must take into consideration the fact that throughout all Picasso’s inconsistencies there ran a deep kindness and a great capacity for affection. He felt it for Jacob—it would have been strange if he had not—and he felt it for Guillaume Apollinaire, in many ways a completely different being spiritually, physically, and sexually, mean where the other was generous, flamboyant rather than reserved, superficial and sometimes obtuse where Max Jacob was deeply-read and extremely sensitive. Guillaume was another love-child, born in Rome to Angelica Kostrowicka or de Kostrowitzky, who is said to have been expelled from a convent for young ladies of good family on his account; she was the daughter of a Polish papal chamberlain and her lover was probably a former Neapolitan officer called d’Aspermont. He did not marry her, nor did he recognize the child; but two years later he was good enough to give her another son, and three years after that he left her. Guillaume was first registered, shortly after his birth in 1880, as Guglielmo Alberto Dulcigni; then his mother legally gave him him the name of Guillaume Albert Vladimir AlexAndré Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky; but at home he was always called Wilhelm. He and his brother were brought up somewhat at haphazard, first at Monte Carlo, where d’Aspermont’s brother was a Benedictine abbot and where Angelica could indulge her passionate love for gambling, then at Cannes and then at Nice, where he failed to pass the baccalauréat. Here his formal education came to an end, and for a while his life followed the movements of his increasingly formidable mother and her then “protector,” a much younger Alsatian Jew whom Guillaume must have liked, for he was a convinced supporter of Dreyfus. He went to Aix-les-Bains, Lyons, the Ardennes; and from Paris a tutorial job took him to Germany and even as far as Prague. And all the while he wrote and fell unhappily in love with a variety of young women. By the time he met Picasso late in 1904 he had had almost as many jobs as Max Jacob; he had published some excellent verse, several short stories, and some anonymous pot-boiling erotic novelettes; and he and André Salmon had run a little magazine, Le Festin d’E-sope: he knew a great deal about the literary life in Paris and a great deal more about poetry, but not much about the plastic arts; in fact it is said that his natural taste inclined rather to Bouguereau and straightforward representation. But Picasso filled him with enthusiasm, if not with instant knowledge; and since Apollinaire was an immensely active journalist as well as a poet and a novelist, he spread the fame of Picasso and the new painting abroad.
He and Picasso and many others of the band used to go to the Closerie des Lilas, far over on the Left Bank, particularly for the evenings of Vers et Prose, when poets spoke or tried to speak their verse in the vinous tumult. Paul Fort, the editor of the magazine, piped away with some success, but the great voice there was that of Jean Moréas, the founder of the Ecole romane, a group that was heartily tired of decadence, lilies, and languors, and that saw classical, Mediterranean purity as the one salvation. Moréas was himself a Greek, born Papadiamantopoulos; he was poor, quite old (nearly fifty), exceptionally dirty in his person, completely uncompromising in his verse, a magnificent talker, and a great leader of the young. He liked Picasso, referring to him as a “monsieur tres bien.” Whenever he appeared Moréas would boom out, mocking his Spanish accent in a kindly way, “Tell me, Picasso, did Velásquez have any talent?” There were scores of other poets there as well, all labeled: Symbolists, of course (no longer modern now), Romanists, Naturists, Instrumentists, and many, many more, for no French writer could rest happy without a label and a cause; and even Jacob and Apollinaire were united as Unanimists. Alfred Jarry might be there too, the father of Pere Ubu, in whom many have seen an influence on Picasso: certainly they were kindred spirits in unreason, and certainly both were so strongly individual that they escaped all easy labels. Jarry too was fond of Picasso, and gave him a pistol, a little Browning that Picasso always carried in his pocket. If people spoke slightingly of Cézanne he would lay it on the table and say, “One word more and I fire.”
Then there were the parties in other studios. The whole of the Bateau-Lavoi
r was soon known to Picasso, all its inhabitants from the concierge (his portrait of her, a charming little gouache, shows a kind face under a mob-cap, a face that would never dun for the rent), to the laundresses and a couple called Princet: Alice Princet was a handsome dissatisfied woman who eventually ran off with Derain, and Princet was a mathematician who is said to have explained Einstein’s theory of relativity—the fourth dimension was in all the newspapers around 1905—to Picasso, thus precipitating Cubism: a likely tale. Some of these parties were devoted to merriment; Picasso drank a little in those days, and was occasionally disguised in wine. Others, in his own studio, were long calm nights of opium during which the chosen friends lay about the floor on mats, drinking cold tea and floating in a mild and infinitely wise benevolence: Picasso had his own seasoned bamboo pipe and his little lamp. Others were for the more direct purpose of eating. Apollinaire and Picasso’s Spanish acquaintances would often arrive at meal-times—Jacob in his dark lair farther down the rue Ravignan was far more discreet, and he always waited for an invitation—and quite as often Picasso and Fernande would dine with other painters. With the Pichots, for example, or with Canals, Nonell’s great friend and a companion from Picasso’s early days in Barcelona, although he was some ten years older. By now Canals was reasonably well established; he had a contract with Durand-Ruel, supplying him with fairly easy “Spanish” pictures in exchange for an assured though frugal living, he also had a Roman wife, the lovely Benedetta Coletta, who had posed for Renoir and Degas and many another great man. She was a strong-minded wife and she kept her husband hard at work, allowing him only one cigarette at stated intervals; but she was a good-natured one, feeding him and Picasso and Fernande and often others too with mountains of spaghetti. Picasso’s friendship for the pair can be gauged by his portrait of Benedetta, a big oil that he painted in 1905. This is one of the few studied pieces that can be called flattering in the ordinary sense of the term; his mother’s is another. It is usually reckoned an admirable picture, and as a picture no doubt it is, though some may feel that here Picasso did not altogether resist the mortal danger of virtuosity; but as a portrait it seems to me to represent Benedetta Canals as she would have wished to see herself, proud, statuesque, and touch-me-not; and although neither money nor career nor ambition nor poverty could wring the least concession from Picasso, on some rare occasions affection could. Most of his women had pretty pictures at first; so did his children; and the drawings of Max Jacob are invariably very kind.
Then again there were the animals: the mouse, more cats, more dogs, eventually a little ape. A photograph of Fernande and Picasso—Picasso in a most horribly wrinkled suit, Fernande in a becoming head-scarf—shows a huge and stupid brute having its head scratched, while a very large vague white puppy swarms over Picasso’s shoulder, its eyes closed in adoration: and Alice Toklas, visiting the studio for the first time, saw a massive bitch that Picasso moved about from one place to another exactly as if it had been a large piece of furniture. Later there was a sick fox-terrier that often had to be taken to the vet. But although Picasso certainly loved these creatures in his own way, demanding no semi-human intelligence, no fanatical cleanliness, and only a limited fidelity, he was no more tender to them than he was to himself; in hard times they were expected to find their own victuals; and one particularly enterprising cat, coming home with a length of sausage, unwittingly fed the entire household.
From animals to circuses is but a step; and at this time the circus was Picasso’s great delight. The splendid traditional Médrano was just at hand, with its lion-tamers, elephants, broad white horses, trapeze-artists, jugglers, riding-girls, acrobats, clowns, and at least figuratively its harlequins: when they were in funds Picasso and his friends went there three and even four times a week. He loved the smell of the place, the artistic integrity, and the total professionalism of the people: it was an international world—Dutch clowns, Serbian tumblers, Indian elephants—making little use of any language, French or otherwise, a world apart, remote and often hungry, made up of outsiders whose contact with the public was confined to the performance of very highly skilled and often perilous motions, the fruit of endless practice. Furthermore, the circus was a link with his past: not that the glories of the Médrano had been familiar to him, but all over the Spain of his childhood hereditary troupes of tumblers were to be seen, sometimes leading apes or bears; and fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, and mountebanks were common at the fairs. They were essentially from the same world as the circus-people; and it is significant that most of the “saltimbanque” pictures that he painted in these years show not so much the circus proper as dusty vagrants, wandering through bare, indeterminate landscapes in the clothes they wear for their performance, just as they were to be seen on remote roads in Spain and southern France until some twenty years ago. And then there was boxing: Picasso loved the beauty of a fight; he looked like a boxer himself, with his well-made broad-shouldered body and little round head, and he loved to be taken for one; but he did not box.
All this sounds extravert and gay, a rosy, conventional Bohemia in which the hard times appear only for their picturesque effect, the Chelsea or Montparnasse of any painter’s nostalgia; and above all it seems to leave no room for the immense amount of work that was actually done.
Yet we possess the physical evidence of this work in hundreds of canvases, drawings, etchings, and sculptures. The early years of the Bateau-Lavoir saw not only the whole of the late Blue Period, the harlequins, the saltimbanques, and the Rose Period, but the beginnings of Cubism too, together with many other works that do not fit into these categories.
It may seem obvious to say that the Blue Period was not only a large group of pictures but also a state of mind; and not only a state of mind but also a continual inquiry into the nature of volume and form, movement and immobility, the balance between sculpture and painting, and many other aesthetic problems whose partial solutions are more profitably expressed in paint than in words. They are problems to which there is of course no final answer, but the inquiry was essential to him: he carried it out in solitude, uneasiness, and doubt. Leonardo da Vinci said, “The painter who has no doubts makes little progress”; and although Picasso would not have it that there was progression in his art, he never for a moment denied his continual self-questioning and anxiety, an everlasting trial in which he was the judge, the jury, and the accused and in which only his verdict counted.
The process often led to unhappiness, particularly during those years when his painting was still deeply concerned with fairly direct, subjective statements about the human condition; and although it would be as absurd to speak of uniform sadness in the Blue Period as it would be to find general gaiety in the Rose, there are some pictures belonging to 1904 and 1905 that make one wonder how he reached the apparent detachment of Cubism without hanging himself. One of these is a big oil that shows Picasso and Germaine Pichot at the bar of the Lapin Agile with Frédé in his wooden shoes playing a guitar in the background: Germaine, wearing a tawdry hat and a pink dress, is sulking in front of her empty glass; Picasso, dressed as a harlequin—and the red lozenges clash subtly with her pink—is half turned from her and his greenish face has a look of profound disgust and weariness. In another, a watercolor of 1904, he is sitting by the side of a bed with a woman in it, a vaguely-drawn, generalized, stupid woman; she is fast asleep, peaceful and relaxed; he leans his chin on his hand and gazes forward into the void with an expression not far removed from despair. He and his half of the picture are blue; blue spills from his tea-cup: the woman is in a golden light with a rosy haze above her. Almost anything can be read into almost any picture; but surely, aesthetic considerations apart, this is a statement about the failure of communication if not its ultimate impossibility. At all events the picture conveys a sense of the man’s utter loneliness. This solitude, weariness, and exhaustion is to be seen in so many of the Blue pictures, even very late in the period: for example there is the famous “Repasseuse,” the young woman in a
white shift pressing with both hands on her smoothing-iron in an atmosphere of blue that has invaded her hair and the deep hollow of her eyes; and however much Picasso’s gregarious social life may have masked it, his work, his night-time work with Fernande sleeping close at hand yet removed from him by an immeasurable distance, very often bears its trace. What kind of a companion was she for a man like Picasso? Did he ever want a woman as a companion in anything but a Moorish sense? Apart from Dora Maar he never chose one who was anywhere near his own level. But in such a matter the springs of a man’s conduct are so infinitely numerous and so deeply hidden that speculation is not only impertinent but useless: one can only look at the more obvious results, which seem generally to have been more unhappy than otherwise in Picasso’s case. Yet most men, or at least most creative men, do expect their women to show an interest in their work, if not necessarily a deep understanding; and although it is unfair to tax Fernande with forgetting the year of their first meeting and the time of Picasso’s journey to Holland (not all people have a biographer’s passion for dates), it is surely a sign of stark insensibility that the “Demoiselles d’Avignon,” one of the most important pictures of the century, should have made so little impression on her that her memoirs pass it over without a word. And then although Cubism was certainly difficult to accept at first—difficult, that is to say, for minds formed and set in the traditions of late European painting—it may be thought that affection would have led her through its shifting planes. She did know that he was rarely satisfied with his work and she speaks of him as a “perpetually uneasy, dogged seeker” for whom painting was never really going very well; but she does not appear to have tried to help him much, even materially. There seems to have been a certain complácency, a satisfaction with her own undoubted beauty, an assurance of her own worth, and a persuasion that as a witty Parisienne, speaking excellent French, she was at least the equal of any foreigner—”I never knew a foreigner less suited for life in Paris” she said of Picasso: a very severe reflection in the mouth of a Frenchwoman.