Picasso: A Biography

  At all events he became much attached to her; and there is one small factor that may have added to her charms. Hitherto Picasso’s companions had been Frenchwomen, who naturally spoke their language without fault, or at least without hesitation: a foreigner with an imperfect command of the tongue is at a disadvantage, for although he may be kindly treated, his words, ill-pronounced and stumbling, count for little more than the prattling of a child, and in time this weighs upon his spirits; he is oppressed by a sense of inferiority. Olga Koklova spoke French—it was the only language in which they could communicate—but she spoke it no better than Picasso. The Russian accent in French, though less hideous than the Spanish, is even more indelible: I know a member of the Académie française who came from Russia as a little boy, who was brought up and naturalized in France, who did his military service there, fighting in both wars, and who nevertheless governs the French language with the accent of Odessa.

  In about a month’s time Picasso went back to Paris. There was still a great deal of work to be done, particularly on the music. The conferences about the settings, costumes, and choreography in Rome had been wearing; those in Paris about the score were far worse. Cocteau wanted to add a great many noises to the music: typewriters, trains, dynamos, sirens, planes; noises on Cubist principles. Satie wanted to abandon the whole enterprise.

  Towards May the company came to Paris. The ballet was to be presented at the Châtelet on the seventeenth of the month, and it seemed unlikely that anything but Apollinaire’s program notes would be ready in time. This cannot have surprised Diaghilev, since it appears to be the invariable prelude to any ballet; nor can it have perturbed Olga Koklova, whom Picasso welcomed with renewed affection. There is a drawing of his dining-room at Montrouge made in this year, and although its details are not quite clear, it seems to show Picasso feasting Olga at a round table while his servant passes a dish and two large dogs sit on either side of his chair, silently yearning.

  If this interpretation is correct, and if the meal took place just before May 17th, then it is likely that she ate with far greater appetite than Picasso. The ballet was explosive stuff: if it were not a great success it would be an even greater failure, and all their work would vanish in a derisive hiss.

  On the opening night Picasso was there in Diaghilev’s box with Misia Sert: Diaghilev in tails, Misia Sert in diamonds, Picasso in a red roll-neck sweater. The house was crowded. Diaghilev had given a large number of tickets to soldiers from the Russian divisions in France, perhaps out of kindness to his fellow-countrymen, perhaps to ensure a certain volume of applause.

  Everything began well. The audience was pleased with the curtain, pleased with Satie’s overture. But the appearance of the gigantic managers was greeted with shocked surprise: first came the French manager, beating the ground with an enormous stick and announcing the Chinese conjurer; at the same time the music changed, and although many of the superimposed noises, the sirens, dynamos, and trains, could not be produced because of a failure in the compressed-air system, the typewriters—rods struck together—came in with redoubled zeal. They were disagreeably like machine-guns, and in spite of Massine’s brilliant dancing as the conjurer, the audience grew hostile. Then came the American, an even more striking, even more Cubist figure that combined cowboy boots, skyscrapers, metallic tubes, and a top-hat: he danced a stamping dance that made all his metal clank again and through his megaphone he bawled praises of his American girl. Although the United States had just come into the war and although the American girl was an important figure in French mythology he was received with even greater hostility; and in spite of the Russian applause the anger of the bourgeois who had paid to see a ballet and who were being shown Cubism in motion to the sound of typewriters grew louder and louder. Had they read Apollinaire’s introduction they would have known that their fare was to be transcendent reality, “a kind of sur-realism in which I see the beginning of a series of manifestations of the Esprit Nouveau, of that new state of mind which … cannot fail to enchant the elite and which, amidst universal gaiety, intends to change our arts and customs from top to bottom, since common sense requires that they should at least keep pace with scientific and industrial advance.” But it was too late for reading now; and in any case the elite or the universal gaiety or both were lacking.

  The American girl went through the motions of riding a bicycle, imitating Charlie Chaplin, boxing, dancing ragtime, and so on, but they were not to be appeased. The acrobats did nothing to help, either; nor did the activities of the managers, who roared to one another over the even greater roar of the audience. There never had been much of a story to Parade; it was just these performers parading before an imaginary crowd of bystanders to persuade them to come into their imaginary theater: vain efforts, the imaginary crowd supposing the parade to be the show itself and going away, but so vehement that the managers collapsed from exhaustion. Yet simple though it was, few of the audience could have followed the argument through, because towards the end the whole theater was filled with shrieks and catcalls, howls of disapprobation, malevolent hissing and boos, while some people cried “Sales Boches” from a notion that anything they disliked must be German.

  A Parisian audience can always be guaranteed to rise to anything regarded as an affront to their dignity; now they were furiously angry, and the evening might have come to an ugly end for Picasso, Cocteau, and Satie had it not been for the presence of Apollinaire, bandaged, in uniform, with his Croix de guerre, who rose splendidly to the occasion and who, passionately haranguing the mob, at least persuaded them that Parade was not the work of Huns.

  The ballet was not a success, but it was not a real failure either. It had not been received with tepid, deadly boredom; the brighter members of the audience, including Proust and his friends, had been entranced; and when it was produced again in Paris after the war it was in fact recognized as a brilliant manifestation of the new spirit that had come into the world.

  In the meantime no one was particularly upset. Picasso was hardened to abuse; Diaghilev’s confidence was unshaken; Cocteau’s friends took pains to comfort him. The only one to suffer was Satie, who was sent to prison.

  The sentence was not pronounced at the request of the outraged public, but at that of one Poueigh, a critic. His employment was mean; he rendered it infamous: at the theater he came up to Satie to compliment him on his music and then went straight home to his bed of slime to write a base and cruel review. Up until this time Satie had kept his temper wonderfully, but on reading the criticism he seized a postcard, wrote:

  Monsieur et cher ami

  Vous n’êxes qu’un cul, mais un cul sans musique.

  [My dear sir, you are a mere arse; but you are an arse devoid of music] signed it, addressed it to Poueigh, and sent it off.

  The vile Poueigh sued him on a charge of criminal defamation. The trial became a trial of modern art—Apollinaire, Dunoyer de Segonzac, La Fresnaye, Derain, and others were described as Boches (modern art being of course anti-national)—Satie’s friends were turned out for protesting—Cocteau, pale beneath his make-up, slapped Poueigh’s lawyer—the police beat him—and Satie was condemned to a week’s imprisonment.

  But by this time, Picasso was far away in Spain. The Ballets Russes were performing in Madrid and Barcelona before they left for South America, and Picasso had gone with them. During their short stay in Madrid he met with Santiago Rusiñol, who brought back something of his younger days; and in Barcelona his youth came back with a rush. He may possibly have come down from Paris for Christmas and the New Year of 1917, but if he did so then it was very privately, just to see his mother and his sister, now married to Juan Vilato y Gómez, a physician. In June his coming was known beforehand—echoes from the Châtelet had reached Barcelona—and he appeared, if not quite as a conquering hero then at least as a figure of wide and international renown; and in July his friends and admirers gave a banquet for him. Among the fifty and more who attended there were many from the old days of th
e Guayaba, the Quatre Gats and even from the Llotja—Pallarès, the Junyer and Soto brothers, Gargallo and his Magalí, Brossa the anarchist, Reventós, Jaume Andreu—and when the inevitable speeches came Iturrino, who had sh ‘red his first Vollard show, rose to state that Picasso was the only painter he admired, the only painter he envied.

  It was on this occasion that Picasso made an indiscreet but no doubt sincere remark to a journalist who asked him about Parade: the libretto, he said, was merely a pretext for the music, the dances, and above all, above all for the settings and the costumes—words that could not but cause anguish when they reached Cocteau.

  During his stay in Barcelona Picasso lived with his mother in their old home in the Calle Merced, while Olga went to the Pension Ranzini in the Paseo Colón, at the bottom of the Ramblas, quite near Picasso and the Liceo, where the company was performing. At the end of June they gave Las Meninas—how prophetic—and Olga danced the part of one of them, perhaps the highest point of her career.

  After a pause for the dog-days the performances started again in the autumn; and at the end of the season, in November, Diaghilev put on Parade. The reaction of the Catalan audience was far less extreme than that of the French; there was at least some enthusiasm, since many of Picasso’s friends and admirers, including the young Joan Miró, were in the house; but although the Anuari de Catalunya spoke of the ballet season as having been “a complete success, particularly Parade, with settings by En Pau Ruiz Picasso,” the other papers, though respectful, were more reserved.

  “It is harder to speak about Picasso than about anyone else at all,” said Aragon. “He instantly gives the lie to whatever one puts forward.” One of the reasons for this may be that Picasso’s spirit had the power, denied to all elements except quicksilver, of being in several places at once. In Barcelona he combined the duties of a son, a lover, a friend, a public figure, and a zealous follower of the bull-fight with painting in at least three styles that would, in another man, have been contradictory if not mutually exclusive.

  One of the first of these pictures was an elaborate virtuoso portrait of Olga in a white mantilla for his mother. It is a careful, almost photographic resemblance, and compared with some of the later portraits it is curiously unidealized: the undying shrew shows clear, and the old lady’s heart must have sunk when she saw it. Was he aware of what he was doing, did he know what that face said so clearly, or did he suppose that love would take away that hard look of profound dissatisfaction?

  Señora de Ruiz had always preserved every scrap of her son’s work with religious care, but in later years she let this portrait go. She is said to have told Olga, “I don’t think any woman could be happy with him,” perhaps in an attempt to avert the hopeless marriage.

  Another, in something of the same manner, is a portrait of an unnamed young woman, the companion of his friend and fellow-townsman Padilla, in whose studio Picasso worked. Large areas of the canvas are bare; the arms, lap, and part of the mantilla are only drawn in; and although it is a bold man who says that a picture by Picasso is unfinished, I doubt that he meant to leave one eye in that pretty face lightless and dead—it is not that kind of picture at all. Finished or not, it is a most arresting work, and it has been much admired for the great skill of its pointillist technique and for its purity of line. My own opinion, for what it is worth (and I do not believe it is widely shared) is that these two portraits are proof that like most great men Picasso had a streak of rather comforting vulgarity, and that the early French critic Gustave Coquiot was right in saying that because of Picasso’s astonishing command of his means the greatest danger for him was facility.

  Far removed from these are the strong red and black Cubist pictures, including the “Blanquita Suarez,” where flat green joins the black; and the pensive harlequin, based on Massine, who looks back to the days before Cubism and forward to the classicism of the coming years. Quite different again is the view, presumably from Olga’s room, of the Paseo Colón: an open window with a balcony again; beyond it trees, the tall Columbus statue, the sea, a pointillist sky; dun buildings to the right, and blazing against them, red-gold-red, the Spanish flag.

  And even more remote is the agonizing horse, disemboweled, collapsing, alone in the unseen bull-ring, its head wrenched high in a last spasm while the blood pours in a hard jet from its chest. This is a big charcoal drawing on canvas, allied in time to his pencil drawings of the bull-fight; but its nature is entirely different, and the only true parallel to this silent shriek is the horse in “Guernica,” painted nearly twenty years later.

  Picasso was strongly affected by his surroundings; he picked up an atmosphere at once. Yet the influence of place, or of things that he had seen, often took a great while before they appeared, transformed, in his work: in 1917, for instance, there is scarcely the least hint that he had ever been to Italy, that he had been enormously impressed by some of the sculptures in Pompeii, by Raphael, and so much more. But he had an unequaled visual memory, a power of draining the essence of what he saw and storing it up; and Leo Stein, speaking of his extraordinary eyes, observed that when Picasso looked at a print or a drawing, so absorbent was his gaze that it was surprising to find anything left on the paper.

  These surroundings were soon to change: the warm autumnal Barcelona, its markets overflowing with all the later fruit and every kind of fish and flesh, the neutral Barcelona where peace, the unaltered pattern, were taken as the natural order, was to give way to winter in the cold, dark, austere, and wartime Paris, threatened by an enemy far more powerful now that the Bolshevik government was taking Russia out of the war and setting free scores of German divisions for the western front, shattered by the monstrous, heartbreaking losses of Nivelle’s disastrous offensive on the Aisne, and the subsequent mutinies.

  There was trouble of course with Olga’s Imperial Russian passport. A friend of Picasso’s, Manuel Humbert, was on his way to Paris, so Picasso took him aside, explained the difficulty, and asked him to call on Cocteau. A young poet might not seem the most suitable man for such a purpose, but in the France of those days well-placed friends could work miracles, and some of Cocteau’s were very well placed indeed. Magnanimity is a quality rare in the jealous, competitive, back-biting world of the arts; but Cocteau overlooked Picasso’s injurious words about his libretto, pulled the right strings, resolved the difficulty, and Olga was free to go wherever she pleased.

  Two choices were open to her, South America or Paris. France meant marriage, protection, a nationality, probable security, perhaps even wealth: South America meant statelessness, the continuation of a career that was unlikely to see any success greater than that she had already enjoyed, and that in an unmarrying milieu. She chose France, and once again Picasso climbed into the Paris express at the Estación de Francia with a companion at his side.

  Chapter XI

  IN Barcelona he had had his first experience of being a wonder-figure, of that pleasing flattering veil which, if it grows too thick, can cut a man off from the refreshment of contact with ordinary life and which can cruelly distort his relationship with others, even with those nearest to him in blood. Few people speak to a wonder as if he were a man, which is disagreeable no doubt and impoverishing; but how much more painful when he finds that he is a wonder even in his own home, worse still when he is living on the other side of an invisible barrier—a wonder that can be exploited, and therefore by definition an outsider. If that were to happen to a suspicious mind every word, gesture, or kindness would come to have an ulterior motive. At some point, unspecified in time but certainly after Barcelona, he said to Gertrude Stein, “You know, your family, everybody, if you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you as a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.”

  But this first experience was neither intense nor long-lasting, and it was tempered by the
presence of very old friends: one can hardly imagine Pallarès being deferential to En Pau. If it did affect him, if Picasso did have a bitter foretaste of what success might mean, there was a great deal to overlay the painful impression: his present attachment, of course; his future work; plans for more ballets. And back in France he was one among many, a respectable but not a unique figure: Matisse probably stood higher, to say nothing of the older men; at Sorgues Braque was beginning to paint again; while presently Modigliani, Utrillo, and Gris were to achieve reputations that brought them if not to the front rank then very near it. In Paris there were no banquets for Picasso.

  Circumstances also helped to restore the common realities: torrential rains had flooded the studio at Montrouge; coal was very hard to find; and although the German air-raids seem trifling to later generations, the antiaircraft guns made a shattering din night after night and all the shells they sent up necessarily came down again in fragments, an iron hail rattling on the city.

  The house was a dull little box from the outside, and neither its position nor its style suited Olga: yet the inside had a special quality of its own. The poet Ramón Gómez de la Serna first saw Picasso there, and he describes his visit: he was greeted by what he calls a Labrador; Picasso quietened the dog and led Gómez into “the most perfect example of bourgeois dining-room, with a few pictures from his earlier periods on the walls… the most important detail, the one that came to him from his Spanish past, was one of those alabaster fruit-dishes… a centre-piece dating from his childhood.” He observes that Picasso was aware of alabaster’s great longing to be woman’s flesh, and goes on to speak of the rest of the house. He was surprised to see a huge polychrome figure of Christ on the Cross in the well of the staircase, and on the upper floor a whole infant-school of Negro figures—he calls them ídolos—quite covering the lower walls. Higher up were pinned bits and pieces, children’s toys, guitars and the like made of cardboard boxes, string, lengths of wood, “the pure exoskeleton of pure stringed instruments.” And there were the pictures, of course.