It may seem trifling to speak of a somewhat vain young woman’s reaction to Cubism, but Fernande was an important part of Picasso’s life away from the easel her reaction necessarily affected him, and she was intimately concerned with this particular phase. Her face was her fortune; and she could scarcely watch with philosophic detachment while it was carved into ridges, especially as the ridges and their corresponding hollows in the sculpture belonged to a woman of sixty or more. Braque once said something to this effect: “A portrait is a job in which there is always something wrong with the mouth.… Show a bourgeois the most advanced art you like, and he is delighted; but just you touch his mug and there’s all Hell to pay.” And as far as her physical appearance went Fernande was a true bourgeoise. Hitherto Picasso had been kind to her face and her person; there are some exquisite drawings and pictures, and the sculpture he did of her head in 1905 had a calm, smooth, classical beauty that any woman would be proud of. Now all this was changed. Fernande did not like Cubism, and although she fought like a tigress to defend Picasso as its only begetter he cannot have been unaware of her feelings. But nothing on earth could stop Picasso painting exactly as he chose to paint: neither the threat of poverty nor the possible loss of a valued and beautiful woman.
In the event poverty never returned at all, and Fernande and Picasso continued their life together for another two or three years: but among the many discontents that caused their parting it may well be that Cubism was not the least.
Poverty never returned. Perhaps that was a pity, for although it is difficult to imagine any outside force that could have changed the course of his work, a more modest financial success would surely have spared him the crowd of toad-eaters, the silly and pernicious adulation, that tended to cut him off from ordinary humanity and that certainly depressed his opinion of his fellow men, thus making him unhappier than he need have been. However, the Midas-touch was not to come for several years: in 1909 Picasso was not rich, although Kahnweiler had been doing well for him (and for Kahnweiler) and although his faithful Russians and some Germans introduced by Uhde were buying steadily. Kahnweiler was now Picasso’s dealer; but he had either not chosen to drive the exclusive, permanent, and often leonine bargain under which some painters suffer all their lives or he had not been able to do so, and this year Vollard also exhibited Picassos, mostly the blue pictures that he had bought in 1906. Against all reasonable expectation and against almost all critical prediction, Cubism was gaining a wider audience; Picasso’s reputation as one of the most important painters of the rising generation had spread far beyond Paris and Barcelona; foreign pilgrims came to his studio in ever-increasing numbers, and in Munich the Thannhauser Gallery put on a show of his work.
Foreigners also sought his acquaintance at the Steins’, one of the few swept and dusted houses he frequented. On his return to Paris in the autumn Gertrude (though not Leo) Stein received his Horta pictures with enthusiasm, buying three and hanging them among the astonishing collection that was building up in the rue de Fleurus, the most useful place for any young painter’s work to hang—a place where it would be seen by an endless stream of visitors, some of whom were rich, some appreciative, some both, and nearly all talkative and eager to be in the swing. Yet it would be unwarrantable to say that Picasso went there from interested motives. On the contrary, everything goes to show that he visited the Steins because he liked them, particularly Gertrude, whose portrait is a noble piece of work (Leo’s is that of a comparatively dull man, painted without much distinction). He either let her have his pictures for very small sums or, as in the case of the portrait and his “Homaje a Gertrude” (angels, one of them blowing her own trumpet), for love.
And he continued to go to her evening parties although he was bored there and morose, although people badgered him to explain his painting, although the Steins varnished two of his pictures, a crime that altered their delicate values, and although there could never be any certainty that even Gertrude knew what he was at—”Gertrude Stein joyfully announced to me the other day that she had at last understood what my picture of the ‘Three Musicians’ was meant to be. It was a still-life!”
The Steins’ must have been the strangest great room in Paris: the general aspect was that of a rich person’s studio—good waxed furniture, artistic knickknacks and rapiers carefully arranged, yet still retaining its painter’s windows and its grim old working stove. But then, all round the walls, four or five deep, there were these amazing pictures. Some were by painters such as Manguin, Vallotton, Maurice Denis, and later Francis Rose, but there were also Cézannes, Matisses, and Picassos in such numbers as to make one gasp. The numbers grew with the years until there was scarcely any wall to be seen; so did the crowds who came to see them on Saturday evenings, crowds that included foreigners visiting Bohemia, lovers of the arts, hangers-on of the arts, and sometimes the producers of the highest, most adventurous art the century had seen.
Matisse and Picasso often met there. A certain rivalry for the friendship of the Steins was one of the causes of friction between them; another was the fact that Derain, who had been particularly intimate with Matisse, staying with him at Collioure, was now far closer to Picasso—physically closer, too, since he had moved to Montmartre. But the animosity has been exaggerated by their followers: it was industriously put about that when the two painters exchanged pictures each chose a poor example of the other’s work, a miserable ploy far beneath either of them; and André Salmon goes so far as to tell a story of the bande à Picasso throwing rubber-ended darts at Matisse’s present, a portrait of his daughter, and crying “Bang! One in the eye for Marguerite!” The gang might have done so—there were some vulgar brutes in it—but I am very sure that Picasso was not there at the time. He valued the picture highly, keeping it all his life. He did not store it away, as he did in so many other cases, and it was so much part of his daily existence that fifty years later his children Claude and Paloma used to copy it to give him pleasure: when he showed it to John Richardson he said, “At the time people thought I had deliberately chosen a bad example of Matisse’s work out of malice. That is quite untrue. I thought it a key picture then, and still do.” He had a great respect for Matisse, and although he would sometimes let fly with a cruel gibe he would never allow anyone else to criticize him. There is a great deal of evidence to prove this, and of the many testimonies that come to mind one of the best is that of Christian Zervos. It is contained in a letter to Dore Ashton, the author of Picasso on Art, a valuable collection of his sayings, and it runs, “One afternoon we were at the Coupole with a number of people, among them Matisse and Picasso. Matisse left for a minute. When someone asked what had become of him, Picasso answered that he was assuredly sitting on his crown of laurels. Most of those present, thinking they might please Picasso, began attacking Matisse. Then Picasso became furious and cried out: ‘I refuse to let you say anything against Matisse, he is our greatest painter.’”
Speaking of Salmon and a little girl brings me to another story that he relates: it is difficult to place chronologically, because although Salmon’s general picture of literary and artistic Paris is entirely convincing, his dates are unreliable; but it certainly occurred in the days of the Bateau-Lavoir, which Salmon now inhabited—he was married there in the summer of 1909, and Apollinaire wrote an epithalamium. I have been able to supplement his account with the recollections of a friend who knew the Bateau-Lavoir well, and briefly the story is this: Fernande Olivier, unable to have a child herself, went to look at the orphanage in the nearby rue Caulaincourt. There she found a girl of about eight or ten: the child hated spinach, but was obliged to eat it. Fernande hated spinach too, and in her indignation she adopted the child out of hand, bringing it back to the Bateau-Lavoir. For some time the little girl was fed with sweetmeats, given dolls and toys: Picasso and everyone else in the Bateau-Lavoir was kind to her, particularly Max Jacob. Then Fernande suddenly grew tired of it: she decided that she had nothing maternal in her composition and asked Max J
acob to return the little girl to the home. This he did; but in the course of the formalities an official stated that once relinquished the child could never be taken back; at this she burst into tears, threw her arms about Jacob’s neck, and begged him not to leave her. He could not bear it; he led her away, fed her at a restaurant, and took her home.
“I can’t keep you,” he observed.
“Why not?” said the little girl. “No one will want to take me away. I am only a waif.”
“I too am a waif,” said Max Jacob, weeping.
In the end he placed her with a local concierge. Picasso’s share in all this, apart from general kindness and the provision of dolls, is not recorded.
Most biographers would like to sympathize with their heroes’ vices and shortcomings even when their subject is a painter, whose excellence has nothing to do with any kind of moral quality whatsoever apart from artistic integrity; and it would be pleasant to think that during this wretched episode Picasso was absent or bemused or misled, or at least that it had some bearing on his decision to leave the Bateau-Lavoir.
The only certainty is that in 1909 he did leave, abandoning his squalor and his happiness for a flat in the boulevard de Clichy not far away, just by the place Pigalle. Abandoning his happiness is not mere rhetoric: many years and many women later, as he passed in front of the Bateau-Lavoir with a friend he said, “That is the only place where I was ever happy.” This relatively sumptuous new flat had a studio, naturally, but it also had a real bedroom, a dining-room, and a small sunny drawing-room that looked out onto the trees of the avenue Frochot: there was even room for a servant, and improbable as it may seem a maid appeared in time, a real maid with a long white apron. But before her advent Picasso and Fernande had to move in and furnish the place: first came the easels and the canvases from the Bateau-Lavoir studios (Picasso had taken a second for the increasing number of unfinished paintings—he liked to go from one to another and he hated finishing any—and to house the cardboard boxes in which objects and papers necessarily accumulated, since they could not be thrown away); then the few sticks among which they had lived all these years, consisting of one spring-mattress with no feet, one round table, one stained white-wood chest of drawers, several broken chairs; then the tin bath in which he kept his books (Sherlock Holmes, Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé); three cats, the huge furniture-like bitch Frika, and one small ape.
At first they could only furnish the maid’s room, but presently Picasso filled the rest of the flat with more or less seventeenth-century oak, some mahogany, and a huge cherry-wood sideboard for the dining-room; and his parents sent him the Chippendale chairs he had known as a child, together with some other pieces. By the time the maid arrived there was plenty for her to dust, had she felt so inclined; but on the whole it must have been an easy place for her. Picasso and Fernande slept until eleven or twelve, and soon the maid took to doing much the same; the studio was never, never to be swept except once in every two or three months, when Picasso arranged it for the ordeal; and the cooking was pitifully simple. Picasso was now pushing Cubism farther and farther; the stress of doing so affected his digestion, and he could eat nothing but vegetables, fish, rice pudding, and grapes. He had even given up his wine. Fernande could not fail to see his diet; but just as she never noticed that he had painted the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” so now she had little idea of his inner tension.
He ate little; he drank mineral water: yet his new appetite for acquiring objects never flagged. He had started with reasonable purchases, such as the large brass bed, but now things bought primarily for delight began pouring into the flat. A great many pieces of moth-eaten tapestry; a vast nineteenth-century couch upholstered in worn violet velvet and sprinkled with bright yellow buttons; a pedal-organ that no one could play but that emitted a scent of incense on being pumped; guitars; mandolins; boxes; chests; popular colored prints in frames of plaited straw; countless African and Oceanic figures. A great many of these went into the studio, which soon took on the perilously overcrowded and slum-like appearance that best pleased his muse.
Yet the flat could be made respectable, and sometimes it was. Picasso and Fernande not only received all comers on Sundays but they also gave small dinner-parties—small, because the table took up so much space that there was little room for guests, particularly for guests as bulky as Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein. Sometimes Matisse came, and his natural dignity always acted as a restraint; but even when Max Jacob, van Dongen, Pichot, Salmon, or Braque were there it was no longer the same; and for Fernande at least the old comradeship of their poorer days was slowly dissolving. Devouring bread and sardines at a table covered with newspaper, with one napkin for everybody, in a studio smelling of turpentine and dominated by the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” was one thing: eating a regular number of courses in a proper dining-room, waited upon by a starched and silent maid, was another. Whether Fernande was right about its causes or not, the change was there; it was felt by them all, and it is apparent in a pair of photographs taken in the following year. In the one, taken by Pichot, Picasso is sitting on a sofa with a cat on his stomach, a Siamese, not an alley cat; his feet are on a rug, and a mandolin stands by him, propped against a respectable piece of Aubusson tapestry: he is still dressed in terribly wrinkled clothes and he still looks like a boy, but it is one of the few photographs in which he does not seem at ease: in the other, taken by Picasso, poor Pichot sits stiff and glum, wearing a collar and tie, with his boots shining and a strained, formal expression on his bearded Christ-like face. On the wall behind the couch can be seen roots of the past: Pallarès’ “Muntanyade Santa Barbara,” Matisse’s portrait of Marguerite, Picasso’s first Negro mask; and now they have something of the look of souvenirs.
But in the studio past and present came together, with the future rapidly taking shape. The man most often there with Picasso was Braque, the cofounder of the movement. Their temperaments were entirely different: Braque was sure of himself, Picasso was tormented by doubt; and as far as these national distinctions have any sense when they are applied to exceptional individuals, Braque was perfectly French in his sense of restraint and measure, whereas Picasso had been nourished on a tradition that loved monstrous excess and enormous gestures. Yet the two worked together in the most remarkable harmony, and in their hands—hands not easily to be distinguished in some cases—Cubism became steadily more and more analytic; modeling diminished and with it the sculptural quality of the figures, plane surfaces replaced volumes and these surfaces, more and more fragmented into luminous and often transparent facets, tended to fold back upon themselves so that another conception of volume returned; and whereas Cézanne’s “passage” or the merging of one plane with another became more general, his evocative color, particularly his blues, gave way to pale ocher, gray, and green. At no point did Cubism ever abandon nature; the original object was always present, different aspects of it sometimes being seem simultaneously (hence the talk about the dimension of time in Cubism), always existing as the painter knew it to exist and possessing a reality beyond that of its immediately perceived appearance. To divorce the painting from the object, to turn the picture into abstract design, would have been to make nonsense of what Picasso was trying to do, since for him the whole strength and validity of his work resided in the vital link between the two realities, the initial reality of the object, the thing that “started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred his emotion,” and the ultimate reality of the picture. The existence of the object in itself was essential to that of the picture in itself.
Andre Level proposes the analogy of a fugue on a known theme: as the fugue abbreviates, inverts, and transposes the air, eventually suggesting it only by a few notes, so the Cubist picture merely hints at the original object by a line or so, sometimes repeated, sometimes shown in depth. It is a useful comparison, although perhaps it does not convey the full value that Picasso attributed to his starting-point.
As Cubism progressed
so its symbolic language grew less legible, the starting-point less evident; and this is apparent as early as the portrait of Braque that Picasso painted late in 1909, a picture in which the planes of the features slide, not into a chaos but into a new order, with a taut rhythm of its own yet into one whose systematic dislocation, transposition, and near-disintegration was to grow virtually hermetic as the years went by.
Braque’s was accompanied by several other portraits. A much more accessible, almost naturalistic, Clovis Sagot, which may have been painted before Picasso went to Horta; and in the autumn of 1910 a somber Vollard, glooming out of his cubes and prisms, half asleep; an intricate, difficult Wilhelm Uhde, for which Picasso was given a little Corot; and a most interesting, complex Kahnweiler that is a compliment to that dealer’s clarity of mind and his real comprehension of the new language. It was painted a full year after the Braque, and it shows a far higher degree of analysis as well as a hallucinatory shifting of the facets back and forth, so that the picture seems to possess not one surface but several. The “Jeune fille a la mandoline” is not a portrait in the strictest sense, seeing that the girl was a model hired to sit, but it has so much the character of a portrait that it belongs with the rest. It was probably painted earlier than the Kahnweiler and it retains a good deal of modeling, even an attenuated chiaroscuro; but it is wholly Cubist, and the girl’s geometrized breasts and shoulders are dislocated with the happiest effect. Her head, reduced to a square with an immense eye in it, rises with singular grace above the dark pear-shaped mandolin, and the picture is among the most delightful that he ever painted. It has been said that in the “Jeune fille à la mandoline” Picasso was getting the best of several worlds, and certainly he makes use both of immediate and of remote symbols in what even the most sullen and dogged opponents of Cubism confess to be a masterpiece of its kind.