This meant an interruption of his work just when he was feeling out in new directions; but Picasso agreed, and he flung himself into the task with his usual zeal and perhaps with more practical sense of the theater than he had brought to Parade: in any case this ballet was far less revolutionary than his first and it called for no prodigious innovation. The simple text dealt with an aged hidalgo’s unsuccessful attempt at seducing a village maiden engaged to a young miller, and to deal with it Picasso had only to look over his shoulder at his youth, for his youth contained not only the “Spanish” pictures that he had shown at Vollard’s and Berthe Weill’s but also his Pink Period; and a combination of these produced a charming if somewhat facile setting for the tale. His curtain was a view into a bullring, with women in mantillas and men in cloaks watching from the shade of an arched box, while in the brilliant sun beyond, a dead bull is being dragged out of the arena. The back-cloth showed a great arch among houses—perhaps the gateway of a fortified village—with a bridge in the distance: all pink and pale ocher under a blue starry sky. And his costumes were fairly straightforward versions of Spanish tradition. If it was not particularly significant, it was remarkably effective; and although the puritanical Cubists of Montmartre might call it whoredom, surely a man may have fun from time to time.
This was a period at which Picasso was determined to have fun as it is generally understood; he was extremely curious by nature, and he wanted to see whether fashionable life was all that it was represented to be—whether the efforts of Cocteau, Olga, and some of his more recent acquaintances bore any reasonable proportion to the resulting pleasure.
In this case, when he came to London in the early summer of 1919 to supervise his work on Le Tricorne and to see how the English public would react to Parade, he and Olga stayed at the Savoy, and he bought himself the clothes he considered suitable. Although in the last fifteen years or so his attention to dress had not gone much beyond the critical choice of ties, the dandy who haunted Soler’s shop at the turn of the century, who paraded the Ramblas sharing a pair of gloves with Soto, and who impressed Vollard as being “vêtu avec recherche” had not perished in the cold of the Bateau-Lavoir; now Picasso could afford a whole pair of gloves for himself; to these he added several good wool suits and even a dinner-jacket, and it was in this garment that he attended the first London performance of Parade at the Alhambra.
A few days later, on July 22, 1919, Le Tricorne was presented. The settings and costumes had been begun from his maquettes well before he left France, but in spite of frenzied work they were not quite ready even at the very last moment, and Picasso hovered in the wings, dabbing paint on to the dancers before they took to the stage.
Yet his natural anxiety must already have been relieved by the applause that greeted the curtain. This was a promising start, and in fact the ballet, beginning well, ended triumphantly, with the audience clapping and even cheering, the dancers delighted. Le Tricorne was a complete success, and one of the results of this success was to bring Picasso into contact not only with Bloomsbury but with a large number of rich and party-giving people. Perhaps they entertained the Picassos very well, or perhaps Pablo’s total ignorance of the language veiled the tedium: in any case his appetite for party-going increased, and he was now ready to plunge into the nearest vortex of dissipation.
Derain was not. He too was in London, having been invited to design the setting and costumes for the equally successful Boutique Fantasque. Although the old intimacy was gone, he and Picasso were on terms friendly enough for Picasso to draw his portrait and to invite him to the rue La Boëtie: but Derain, like Braque and many other painters, disapproved of a way of life dangerously like that of a fashionable artist. It was not that Derain or Braque or Montparnasse in general took a high moral stand; they could be as dissipated as sailors ashore on occasion, and apart from Max Jacob few seemed oppressed by a sense of guilt. But they felt that a serious painter’s vocation required him to remain aloof from the Establishment; and mixed with this attitude there was in some cases an uninformed, doctrinaire, and almost racist scorn for the “upper” classes. For his part Picasso never seems to have felt inferior to any man, much less to any woman who stepped; and his curiosity, his great vitality, and his interest in other people made him unwilling to leave any region or any potential pleasure unexplored.
When the Picassos returned to France, somewhat spent and worn, they went down to the Côte d’Azur, to Saint-Raphael; although the place was not very well chosen, being somewhat dreary and poor in beaches, and although Picasso’s mind was largely taken up with two other ballets, the peace, the sun, and the Mediterranean so stimulated him that he began a long series of brilliantly-lit paintings. They were nearly all in gouache, probably because of the hotel’s reluctance to have its floors, carpets, and furniture daubed with oil-paint: Picasso was not yet so famous that he could do exactly what he liked anywhere at all.
It is strange now to think of the Côte d’Azur as a peaceful place in high summer, but until well on into the twenties people believed that the heat was mortal, that exposure to such a sun would be certain death, and they went there only in winter and spring: in fact, it was not until about 1925, when Coco Chanel appeared with a fine bronzed back, that women thought of sun-bathing at all, and the clean, empty August beaches were left to such salamanders as Picasso.
These Saint-Raphaël pictures returned again and again to the open window, often with a table in front of it piled with a variety of objects, including of course a guitar, since they were all essentially Cubist. Several are so small that they can almost be called miniatures, and they have something of the miniaturist’s technique that he learned in his childhood; but large or small, the whole series glows with happy color.
Picasso was very pleased with them; so was Paul Rosenberg, and that autumn the dealer arranged an important exhibition, including drawings but no oils, at his gallery in the rue La Boëtie, next door to Picasso’s flat. This was the first one-man show that Picasso had had in Paris for a great while, and to honor the occasion he took to the lithographic stone and designed his own invitation, using the Saint-Raphaël window with the table and guitar; but here the table, instead of being seen simultaneously from the top and sideways in the full Cubist manner, was shown in more or less conventional perspective, almost as though it were meant to reassure the visitors. Lithography was one of the few mediums that Picasso had not yet employed, and although this invitation-card and the portrait of Olga for the outside of the catalog were not the happiest examples of his work, he was inevitably to become a master of the process and one of the most outstanding innovators.
During the last few years Picasso had neglected neither etching nor engraving, and he had often used his talent for his friends. After the illustrations for Max Jacob’s Saint Matorel, Picasso made three etchings for his Siège de Jérusalem, an engraving for special copies of Le Cornet à dés in 1917, and the next year another etching for Le Phanérogame, two books which Jacob published himself with great pains and little reward in very small editions; though in 1919 the Société littéraire de France brought out his Défense de Tartufe, with a Picasso engraving in twenty-five of the copies. For Apollinaire’s Calligrammes he produced a portrait drawing, and another for Cocteau’s Le Coq et I’arlequin, while he also designed the cover for Stravinsky’s Ragtime and supplied the illustrations for Salmon’s Manuscrit trouvé dans un chapeau—a handsome return for Salmon’s preface to the Rosenberg catalog. This brings us to 1919, and if the list were carried on into the twenties it would contain many other poets, Aragon, Valéry, Reverdy, and Breton among them; for Picasso felt more kindness for poets than any other set of men; they lived on the same plane as himself, yet there was no rivalry, no poisonous competition. He was not alone in this, nor in illustrating their books; Matisse did the same for Reverdy, Dufy for Apollinaire, Derain for Dalize and Breton, Léger for Cendrars, Gris for Paul Dermée.
The exhibition was successful, not only commercially but in show
ing a very large number of people several aspects of Picasso’s work. Gertrude Stein’s reaction is not recorded: she and Picasso had fallen out, Gris being one of the underlying subjects of discord, and they were not on speaking-terms for a year or two. But Gris himself and the minor hardline Cubists were indignant at what they considered a betrayal of the movement and what was in fact a refusal on Picasso’s part either to be bound to them or to any one language. The critics and the gallery-going public were, on the whole, pleased and impressed; and those who did not already know it were given the proof that the hand which could produce the barely legible metaphors of Cubism could also make an instantly entrancing, instantly recognizable drawing. Joan Miró was there, yet another young Catalan from the Llotja seeking his fortune or rather his way in Paris; and both his acquaintance with Picasso, who received him very kindly, and this exhibition had a decisive influence on his development. For although by this time Cubism and the esprit nouveau had so permeated the general consciousness that the Salon d’Automne and the Indépendants were now filled with works imitating the gestures of Picasso and Braque, just as for some time past the official salons had shown countless examples of diluted Impressionism, there was still enough startling freshness of vision in it to influence a young and uncommonly gifted painter and to decide him to become not a follower but a fellow traveler.
The ballet in the forefront of Picasso’s mind during the winter of 1919/20 was Pulcinella, and it was probably a far less harmful absorber of his energy, far less of an interruption of his true vocation than Le Tricorne: it was based on pure eighteenth-century commedia dell’ arte and it was therefore right up Picasso’s street. Not only had his work long been filled with the slightly watered-down characters from the commedia who still overspread the popular entertainment of Western Europe in his youth, but he had early identified himself with Harlequin. Furthermore, when he and Stravinsky were in Naples together in 1917 they had been deeply impressed by the full, traditional commedia, which they saw “in a crowded little room reeking of garlic” and where the Pulcinella, the remote ancestor of our Punch, was a “great drunken lout whose every gesture and probably every word … was obscene.”
The ballet was ideally suited to Picasso, but even so it gave him a very great deal of trouble. His first sketches for the costumes were in a mid-nineteenth-century style, with sidewhiskers instead of masks; but Diaghilev hated the whole idea, and their disagreement mounted to such a pitch that he flung the drawings down, stamped on them, and left the room slamming the door behind him. It is difficult to imagine how even so insinuating a character as Diaghilev ever induced Picasso to carry on with the project, but he did; and what is more he even persuaded him to give up his sidewhiskers in favor of the traditional black masks.
Then again, all Picasso’s maquettes, the result of a great deal of hard work, had been sent to Rome well before May 15, 1920, the date the ballet was to open in Paris, there to be transformed by the Roman scene-painters and sent back to France in the form of a most ambitious full-sized stage-set, an eighteenth-century Italian theater within the theater and a view through this play-house to arcades leading down to the harbor, the general baroque effect being tempered with that degree of the esprit nouveau which brought it into harmony with Stravinsky’s version of Pergolesi’s score, a score that Diaghilev disliked almost as much as he disliked Picasso’s costumes. On May 13th it was found that all the scenery was still in Italy. That at least is one account; but the accounts are as various and confused as the muddles they purport to describe, and the only certainty is that Picasso was obliged to run up a new setting at breakneck speed with hysteria bursting out all round him. His plans had to be drastically reduced, and the red, white, and gold baroque theater dwindled to a severe, somewhat Cubist, gray, blue, and white street going down to the Bay of Naples under the stars and the moon, with Vesuvius in the distance. Yet in spite of everything the ballet was a great success. Stravinsky, no mean judge, said that it was one of the very few in which all the elements fused into an entirely satisfying whole; and he spoke of “Picasso’s miracle.”
The praise was divided, but a great deal necessarily fell to Picasso; and this, together with the triumphant Paris production of Le Tricorne and the successful representation of Parade, made him one of the most talked-about and sought-after men in Paris: he was to be seen, looking elegant, at every cocktail-party and first night, and he dined out continually, accompanied by Olga in dresses from Chanel. If he had wanted to see “high life” his wishes were fulfilled; this was a time of great social activity, enormous parties—Scott Fitzgerald was there—and although many of his new friends were rich Levantines, Rumanians, South Americans, and their hangers-on, others belonged to great French families, for in Europe, as opposed to England or the United States, the glories of the Renaissance still hang about a successful artist, and although he may privately be considered as an amuseur, an entertainer (as Proust and others before him discovered), this is usually concealed from him, and he has the impression of being received as an equal.
With all his gadding about and with all the spiritual wear and tear of the ballet, Picasso did not age. By the calendar he was thirty-nine in 1920, but the photographs of that time show a man so young that adolescence can still be traced in his rounded features and gleaming eye; he still had energy for ten, and although the main stream of his development may have been slowed down or confused or even, as the Cubists of the strict observance said, perverted, he was not to be separated from his brush or pencil.
Among other activities he made several more drawings of his friends, including the well-known portrait of Stravinsky; and in some of these, particularly the Stravinsky, the curious magnification and foreshortening of the hands is reminiscent of the ballet-dancer drawings of Rome: it appears to be part of the same line of thought that led to the bulky sleeping peasants and the still more bulky giantesses of the years to come.
Some of these drawings were based on photographs or postcards. Why not? Picasso never made any secret of it, nor of the fact that he would use any element that caught his eye: “When things are concerned there are no class-distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it—except in our own work,” he said to Zervos. “I have a horror of copying myself. But when I am shown a portfolio of old drawings for instance I have no qualms about taking anything I want from them.” It seems fair enough: all chemists use the same elements, all writers the same few dozen basic plots. Yet there were some things about Picasso, above all his success, that irritated many people, so much so that as his success grew even more and more prodigious the sport of puncturing him reached international dimensions. These photographs and postcards were fished up as something profoundly discreditable, and all kinds of sources were discovered for his paintings: if he arranged three figures in a triangle there were critics ready to say, “But this is copied from Raphael.” Yet three figures must either be in a line or a triangle. Even now this search is carried on with surprising vehemence and sometimes with evident bad faith; often it looks like the rationalization of a general dislike, and when the sources are not absurd they are usually about as relevant as Shakespeare’s knowledge of Holinshed or Chaucer’s of Dante, which are rarely the subject of malignant triumph.
One of these drawings is of Renoir, who died in 1919 at the age of seventy-eight, and it too was probably done from a photograph, since Renoir disliked Picasso’s work (he advised Paul Rosenberg to have nothing to do with him) and they do not seem to have met. Harsh words travel fast in the world of the arts; nevertheless Picasso admired Renoir’s painting to the point of buying one of his more important pictures, and the portrait is a most intelligent, piercing, and respectful study of the old man with his poor crippled hands and his lively authoritative eye.
Renoir, as it happens, is another of those originals so often brought forward to confound Picasso, on the grounds that his later work was also concerned with massive female bodies; and to be sure, if one earnestly wishes to beat Pic
asso, Renoir will serve as a stick.
Stravinsky, Satie, Manuel de Falla, and many more: the brilliant portraits came in quick succession, all with the same pure line he had used in his more recent drawings of Max Jacob. Yet in this series Max himself is not to be seen; he and Picasso were somewhat out of touch for the moment, and a little later Max withdrew for many years on end, retiring to a religious life in the shade of the great Benedictine monastery at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, far from the noise and the temptations of Paris, and living somehow on the sale of his gouaches and the meager royalties from his books.
By the time the summer of 1920 came round and the Picassos began to think of their holiday, his own work, the turmoil of the ballet, the cocktail-parties, dinners, feasts, had worn even Picasso’s powerful frame; and although social activity continued with tireless zeal in the fashionable watering-places on the Channel, particularly at Deauville and Dinard, he longed for the Mediterranean, so much so that he painted an imaginary landscape: rocks, umbrella-pines, a beach and pure sea, all brilliant in the sun. There was Olga’s reluctance to be overcome—the Midi was not fashionable in summer—but in time he managed this and they went south together, to Juan-les-Pins in the Var, a small place then, quite unspoiled, and one that Picasso had never seen.