With all this present to his spirit and with innumerable other stimuli, reflections, decisions for which his subsequent work is the only evidence, Picasso’s mind was in a ferment during the autumn of 1906 and the spring of 1907. The outcome, after the pictures that have just been mentioned and a few more, was a long series of drawings and preliminary studies for a most ambitious composition in which he was to combine his pictural and sculptural concepts and a great deal more besides, ideas to do with space, volume, mass, color, surface, and line: the starting point in conventional reality was a brothel and its more or less naked women, a recollection of his younger days in the Calle d’Avinyó; and in an early sketch a sailor is sitting in the middle of them with fruit and flowers at his feet, while on the left a student appears, carrying a skull. As the studies progressed and as Picasso came to grapple with the real issues at stake (morality went by the board as soon as anecdote) the sailor vanished, leaving only his melon, grapes, pear, and peach; and when the final painting reached completion in the spring of 1907 only five whores remained. Their humanity had been abstracted, left behind, together with all trace of feeling: their pink or ocher bodies, almost devoid of modeling, are arranged in a low left to right diagonal anchored by a squatting figure on the lower right, a figure resembling one of Cézanne’s bathers. The three women on the left have the mask-like faces of Gósol, but more so; one head in profile shows a full-face eye and two full-face heads show the nose in profile, as sharp as a wedge of cheese; the bodies are made up largely of straight lines and angular planes and they stand against a shallow background of varying blue, the only hint of depth being a brown curtain thrust by an upheld hand. But on the right the violence of distortion reaches a new pitch and a difference of kind: the face of the squatting figure, turned right round over her back, has its features savagely jumbled, and that of the woman above is a long ridge, a snout, strongly hatched to give it height, very like some Congo masks: neither of these heads is of the same nature as the other three, and in this half of the picture, the last half painted, all the angular planes—drapery, breasts, interstices—are much sharper, much more definite. At one point he thought of repainting the earlier, left-hand half; but then he reflected, “No: people will understand what I am trying to do,” and he left it alone.
When at last he stood away from the whole great incantatory picture he had produced the first direct statement of Cubism with its whole range of new potentialities and its new aesthetic; a frightening, revolutionary canvas, his anarchist bomb tossed into Western European painting. If he had meant to equal or even to surpass Matisse he had certainly done so.
He called some chosen friends to his studio, wishing to communicate this message from another world whose aesthetics were based not on conventional beauty, still less on anecdote, prettiness, or charm, but on some great force without a name. They could not grasp it at all: their only reactions were shock, alarm, regret, dismay, some nervous or indignant laughter. Even the percipient Shchukine shook his head and said, “What a loss to French art.”
The bomb had not gone off. At least, it had not gone off when Picasso hoped it would: for the explosion came in time, if a long, gradually strengthening process can be described as an explosion, and the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” (it was André Salmon who gave it that arch and foolish title) proved one of the most dynamic, liberating pictures of our age.
Chapter VII
THE ordinary human side of Picasso was discouraged, hurt, and even dismayed by this reception: by Braque’s “You want to make us eat tow and drink paraffin,” by the anger of Matisse, by Leo Stein’s “You have been trying to paint the fourth dimension; how amusing,” accompanied by a braying laugh that Picasso could still imitate a generation later, and by Vollard’s “It’s the work of a madman.” He put the picture by and about ten years later he even took the carefully prepared reinforced canvas off the stretcher, rolled it up, and laid it away in a corner. But the extraordinary side of the painter paid no attention to any judgment but his own. The idea was still strong in him; he had not fully worked it out, and he continued painting brilliant postscripts to the “Demoiselles” for months. It is true that Uhde and Kahnweiler liked the picture; but Uhde, though enthusiastic, was not the wisest of men, and Kahnweiler, a very young German Jew who, to Vollard’s indignation, had recently opened a gallery, wanted to be Picasso’s exclusive dealer. He did in fact buy all the preliminary sketches in time, but for years the wounded Picasso would not sell the picture itself, on the pretext that it was not finished; and in the end it was not Kahnweiler who bought it but Jacques Doucet, who added it to his collection in 1921. In the intervening period, however, while it stood about in his various studios it was seen by the countless painters and lovers of painting who called on him, and it worked on them powerfully, like a radio-active source whose effects are seen in the long term rather than in the moment of its creation.
The essential Picasso carried straight on into this new country, into what is labeled his Negro Period, although his other half, the ordinary, ambitious man, was perfectly aware of the probable consequences of his action. He had appeared in a most respectable light when he took to his unmarketable blue pictures in 1901 and 1902; but he was then little more than a boy and the material success he threw away did not amount to a great deal. But by 1907 he was on the threshold—beyond the threshold—of a great career leading to fame and wealth; he had already tasted the delight of real money in his pocket, all the canvases, colors, and sable brushes he could want, a carefree, properly-nourished life; and his deliberate renunciation, which would mean a return to his old shifts, to Père Soulié and a most dubious future, perhaps to a short lifetime of poverty, was heroic. Yet he took the step without the least hesitation, as the most natural thing in the world: and if those people who still speak of Picasso as a charlatan, an impostor perpetually trying to scandalize the bourgeoisie, a professional publicity-seeking outrager, cannot be convinced by his painting (and obviously they cannot) then this gives them the lie direct.
On some occasions Picasso said that his painting was one continuous process of research; on others he said it was nothing of the kind. For the moment it is convenient to take the first dictum, since it allows one to say that the “Demoiselles” brought him to the verge of explicit Cubism, and that before he carried on in that direction his quest led him to those associated studies of form and volume that constitute his Negro Period.
The whole question of “who discovered the blacks first and who told whom” is hopelessly confused. Vlaminck had two Dahomey figures and four from the Ivory Coast in 1905, one of which, a white mask, he sold to Derain, in whose studio Picasso and Matisse beheld it with amazement: Matisse bought a Negro head at an antique shop in the rue de Rennes because of its affinity with Egyptian art and showed it to Picasso at the Steins: and there are many other accounts. Picasso’s own version was that he happened to be in the Musée de Sculpture Comparée in the Trocadéro sometime after he had painted the “Demoiselles,” that out of mere curiosity he walked through the door that led to the Musée d’Ethnographie and that there African sculpture was first revealed to him.
Here the priority of dates is irrelevant; nor does it seem to me to matter whether Picasso saw Itumba masks before he painted the upper right-hand figure in the “Demoiselles” or not, though he almost certainly did. What does matter is the word revealed, because although Braque, Matisse, Vlaminck, and the whole advanced artistic world of Paris took to admiring and collecting what they called fetishes, they admired them as sculpture, whereas Picasso alone saw them for what they were.
In La Tête d’Obsidienne Andre Malraux relates a conversation that he had with Picasso in 1937, at the time he was painting “Guernica.” Picasso said, “People are always talking about the influence of the blacks on me. What can one say? We all of us liked those fetishes. Van Gogh said, ‘We all of us had Japanese art in common.’ In our day it was the Negroes. Their forms did not influence me any more than they influenced Matisse. O
r Derain. But as far as Matisse and Derain were concerned, the Negro masks were just so many other carvings, the same as the rest of sculpture. When Matisse showed me his first Negro head he talked about Egyptian art.
“When I went to the Trocadéro, it was revolting. Like a flea-market. The smell. I was all by myself. I wanted to get out. I didn’t go: I stayed. It came to me that this was very important: something was happening to me, right?
“Those masks were not just pieces of sculpture like the rest. Not in the least. They were magic. And why weren’t the Egyptians or Chaldees? We hadn’t understood what it was really about: we had seen primitive sculpture, not magic. These Negroes were intercessors—that’s a word I’ve known in French ever since then. Against everything: against unknown, threatening spirits. I kept on staring at these fetishes. Then it came to me—I too was against everything. I too felt that everything was unknown, hostile! Everything! Not just this and that but everything, women, children, animals, smoking, playing … Everything! I understood what their sculpture meant to the blacks, what it was really for. Why carve like that and not in any other way? After all, they were not Cubists. Because Cubism did not exist… all these fetishes were for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people not to be ruled by spirits anymore, to be independent. Tools. If you give spirits a shape, you break free from them. Spirits and the subconscious (in those days we weren’t yet talking about the subconscious much) and emotion—they’re all the same thing. I grasped why I was a painter. All alone in that museum, surrounded by masks. Red Indian dolls, dummies covered with dust. The ‘Demoiselles’ must have come that day: not at all because of their forms, no; but because it was my first exorcizing picture—that’s the point.
“And that’s why later on I also painted pictures like the ones I had painted earlier on—Olga’s portrait, other portraits. You can’t be a witchdoctor all day long! How could you live?
“That’s another thing that cut me off from Braque. He liked the Negroes, but as I’ve said because they were good sculpture. He was never just a little afraid of them. He was just not interested in exorcism. Because he never felt what I’ve called Everything, or life, or what shall I say—the World? Everything around us, everything that is not us: he never thought it hostile. Nor even strange: can you imagine that? He was always at home.… Still is, even now … he hasn’t the least notion of these things: he’s not superstitious.”
This is by far the most revealing piece of Picasso’s conversation that I have ever heard or read. Whether the reference to the “Demoiselles” is literally, chronologically, true or not is insignificant compared with the statement of his attitude of mind. Admittedly the conversation is reported by a brilliant writer of fiction thirty-seven years after the event; admittedly Picasso was speaking to an author deeply concerned with aesthetics, and Picasso could play any man’s game and often play it better; but even when all allowances are made it seems to me that this account of his reaction to Negro art is perfectly sincere, and what is much more important—indeed fundamental to an understanding of the man—that it is a truthful record of his spiritual state, the state of one who is not at home but who is surrounded by an inimical world: a true outsider.
I have rarely felt the inadequacy of translation so much as in trying to convey the feeling of this piece: I have done what I can, but the English does not and perhaps cannot bring Picasso’s racy tone across, the slightly inaccurate though fluent French, the slightly incongruous foreigner’s slang. But I hope the sincerity does come through, together with his strong sense of the immanent (immanent evil in this case, but immanent good in others) that constituted his largely but not wholly pagan religion and that explains so much of his outlook, including, among other things, his comparative unwillingness to touch traditional Christian subjects.
Picasso’s Negro Period certainly had nothing remotely to do with Christianity nor with current Western tradition: to the learned eye the strange figures of 1907 and 1908 show a merging of ancient Iberia, of Romanesque Cataluñia, and of Africa in varying proportions, while to the unlearned they seem to be essentially Picasso, a Picasso thinking along new lines and in an idiom enriched by fresh acquisitions. There was still the old conflict between the pictural and the sculptural, between vivid decorative color and somber monochrome, movement and stillness; sometimes the one prevailed, as in the barbaric “Dancer,” sometimes the other; and hindsight sees Picasso working back towards the Cubist solution he had already used, without perhaps realizing its full potentiality, in the “Demoiselles.”
Among the fresh acquisitions of 1907 and 1908, Picasso’s twenty-sixth year, were a deeper knowledge of Cézanne, the friendship of Braque, and the discovery of Rousseau. To these might be added a large number of Negro and Oceanic masks and the two Iberian figures of mysterious provenance, given him by Piéret.
The Salon d’Automne of 1907 had a retrospective exhibition of Cézanne’s work, a far larger number of paintings than Picasso had ever seen before, and his admiration for the great man increased still more. In spite of his unshakable determination and his dominating personality, Picasso’s was a lonely spirit, often tormented by doubt; and he found deep comfort, a source of strength, in the knowledge that another mind had moved in the same direction as his, grappling with the same problems and arriving at not dissimilar answers, answers improbable in the France of his day and misunderstood or ignored by most of his contemporaries. And however much he and Matisse and the other advanced painters of the early century might differ, they all agreed in this. “For us, Cézanne was like a mother who protects her children,” he said to Kahnweiler; and to Brassaï, “He was my one and only master.… I’ve spent years studying his pictures … Cézanne! He was as you might say a father to us all. It was he who protected us.” Yet influence (for want of a better word) was a process that took a long time to work on Picasso, and little that is obviously connected with Cézanne can be seen until the summer of 1908.
In the case of Braque and Picasso there was no question of influence: it was a matter rather of interaction, the exchange of ideas, of the most animated, stimulating conversation, often shared by Derain, in the fetid atmosphere of Azon’s eating-house, and eventually of collaboration. Braque was a tall, burly Norman, a few months younger than Picasso. He came from a family of house-painters and decorators; he was himself apprenticed to the trade, and he had a professional’s respect for technique and sound craftsmanship. Although he had gone to the lycée at a time when secondary education in France was reserved for the privileged few, he preferred an artisan’s style of life: Fernande did not care for him—”a powerful head like a white Negro, a boxer’s neck and shoulders, dark complexion, curly black hair, heavy… an often deliberately rough, churlish expression, a coarse way of speaking and acting. No kind of elegance, but free and easy in his ready-made clothes. By way of a tie, the loosely-knotted little black string that Norman peasants often wear. Rather carelessly dressed or wishing to appear so. Features deeply marked with a subtle intelligence: suiting himself very easily to others, suspicious, clever, cunning—in short, a typical Norman.” It may be that the accordion-playing Braque offended her gentility, which would suddenly dart out at strange moments, or it may be that she was jealous of Picasso’s incessant conversations with him on subjects that he rarely discussed with anyone. At all events she did not cherish Braque, and she accused him of secretly cribbing Picasso’s Cubism: yet in the long run he and his wife, Marcelle, were better friends to Fernande than her former lover.
At this time Braque was a leading Fauve: he was doing well, and Kahnweiler had taken him under contract. At first, when Apollinaire brought him to see the “Demoiselles,” he would have nothing to do with the picture nor with the concepts behind it; he argued with Picasso for weeks and went away unconvinced. But both Cézanne’s and Picasso’s words and example worked on him; he embarked upon a fresh series of plastic experiments, and by the end of 1907 he had painted his “Grand nu,” of a definitely Cubist tendency; while duri
ng the summer of 1908, which he spent at Cézanne’s old haunt of L’Estaque, near Marseilles, he carried them still farther in that direction.
1908 was also the year in which Picasso bought his first picture by Henri Rousseau: this was a very large canvas, the portrait of Yadwigha, a kind Polish schoolmistress. “It obsessed me from the moment I saw it,” he told Florent Fels. “I was walking along the rue des Martyrs. A secondhand dealer had piles of canvases all along the front of his shop. A head stuck out, a woman’s face with a hard look … French penetration, clarity, decision. A huge canvas. I asked the price. ‘Five francs,’ said the dealer, ‘You can paint over it.’ It is one of the most revealing French psychological portraits.”
At this time Rousseau was sixty-four, a timid, gray-bearded man who blushed easily: a self-taught painter of wonderful oneiric pictures whose true worth was recognized by few people in his lifetime. Even now many writers adopt an insufferably condescending tone, calling him a “little man” (he was no smaller than Picasso), a naif, and challenging his statement that he went to Mexico in the 1860’s as a bandsman; and many of his contemporaries in that unspeakably vulgar Belle Epoque made open fun of him. Apollinaire called him the Douanier because he had been employed in the octroi, the internal customs, at the gates of Paris, and the nickname has stuck, losing its unkindness with the years; the initial hostility lasted, and even as late as 1912, when Uhde observed in the preface to the catalog of the Rousseau exhibition at Berheim-Jeune that his detractors were being defeated, a newspaper critic replied, “Defeated? Yes, it is true. It seems that Henri Rousseau is much prized in Germany and the Russias. That is quite possible. But most fortunately we are Frenchmen, and we are in France.”