Picasso: A Biography

  Most authorities say that after Monte Carlo the Picassos went to Juan-les-Pins for the summer of 1925; and either there or in some unnamed but certainly Mediterranean retreat he certainly painted, and dated, several more of these pictures, as if his flow had never been interrupted. One of them has a fish-net, carefully brought into existence by a point scraping away the dark surface to show the light priming underneath: another has a splendid ram’s head, lying among sea-shells: and another is dominated by the bust of a bearded classical person, with a couple of arms broken from a statue on the table beneath him. They are quite large for this kind of painting, about four foot by three; they are all highly colored; they are all in the general Cubist idiom, particularly the last, in which a set-square and some fine hard angles recall the severity of former years; and, so long as the definition of the term is wide enough, they and most of the painting of these years can be said to represent late Cubism, a Cubism diluted from the point of view of discipline, cerebral rigor, and clarity, but sumptuously enriched from that of curve, color, and sensuous relish.

  If he had not seen the entirely exceptional “Dancers,” a critic writing in the middle twenties might have supposed that the different currents of Picasso’s thought were now converging to form the mainstream of his art, a stream that would carry with it all he had learned in the various regions he had explored but that would run its course with no new important tributary.

  The critic, with his hypothesis of a unified vision, would find it difficult to account for the curious drawings made about this time, unlike anything Picasso had done before or was ever to do again. The easiest solution would be to dismiss them as unimportant exceptions; and striking though they are, no one would claim that they are epoch-making. They consist of dots joined by lines. The dots vary from the size of a pea to that of a pin-head: the lines are sometimes straight, more often curved. Sometimes the drawings have to do with violins or guitars, but those which are perhaps the most confident and most successful seem to be abstract calligraphies; and it may be that when he made them he had the Surrealists’ sessions of automatism in mind. But their great significance is that they prove his readiness and his ability to break out in new directions.

  The form that his new directions would take could be foretold by no one: the time of their beginning was less unpredictable. Picasso was the very type of the creative man, and since upon the whole creative men have more sensibility than they have sense it is rare to find them happy; in a world that has so much to distress even a common mind they pay a high price for their keener perceptions. And often their sexual drive is very strong, which may procure them vehement joys but which is quite certain to lead to unhappiness, equally piercing and far more durable. Picasso’s own emotions were passionate, complex, and extreme; he had been brought up in a culture that had little to say to self-control in personal relationships; and early in his life both Señora de Ruiz and Fernande observed that his nature was not of a kind to make him happy.

  Whether this was inevitable or not, whether or not fate, the planets, or his humors necessarily put steady mild contentment, domestic felicity, out of his reach, he now had external reasons for unhappiness: his marriage was deteriorating, and some years later it fell to pieces entirely. That it should have lasted so long is puzzling until one recollects Picasso’s strange want of decision in ordinary life, the extreme difficulty he experienced whenever he had to make up his mind, a characteristic noticed by all his friends from Sabartés to Françoise Gilot. When it was all over Gertrude Stein wrote: “when I saw him again I said how did you ever make the decision and keep it of leaving your wife. Yes he said you and I we have weak characters and no initiative and if I had died before I did it you would never have thought that I had a strong enough character to do this thing. No I said I did not think you ever could really do a thing like that, hitherto when you changed anything somebody always took you away and this time nobody did and how did it happen. I suppose he said when a thing is where there is no life left then you either die or go on living, well he said that is what happened to me.”

  It may be that a man has only a given power of decision, and if he uses it all up, making vital choices every day in his studio, he has none left for everyday life. Certainly Picasso came to none as far as his marriage was concerned during these years that led to the great depression, nor about his way of life. His show at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery was one of the fashionable events of 1926; the same year found him at a fancy-dress party given by the Beaumonts at Antibes, for he spent that summer at Juan-les-Pins once more, just along the coast; and when he went down to Barcelona in the autumn for a big show at the Galerias Dalmau (which also included Dalí, Jaume Sunyer, Manolo, Robert Delaunay, Raoul Dufy, and Marie Laurencin) he stayed at the Ritz. When he was interviewed on this occasion he begged them not to ask him to talk about painting: his trade was simply to paint and to draw. Making up his mind was a long process with Picasso: the seed of an aesthetic idea, for example, often took several years to germinate. But the process, with its hesitations, reversals, and changes of attitude can be followed in his work: most clearly, of course, where his thoughts on expression—on what was to be expressed and how it was to be accomplished—are concerned, but also in connection with the whole man, the source of the expression itself. It is absurd to make a distinction between even a mediocre artist and the man—no disembodied spirit ever held a pen or brush—and even more absurd in the case of painters like Picasso, whose lives, including of course their sexual lives, and painting were so inseparably linked. Renoir, asked whether painting came from the heart or the head, said, “From the balls”; and Cézanne’s words, though coarser, mean much the same. This conjunction, so clear in so many great men, is even more obvious in Picasso: the tide of his work obeyed the pull of Venus and each new love was marked by a flood, each new disappointment by an ebb that left strange wreckage on the shore. For a great many years common circumstances, wealth and poverty, success or the want of it, squalor or comfort, had no effect upon him; but women always did, and so did family.

  Olga was both woman and family: and she was cursed with a jealous, possessive nature, and with as little training in self-control as her husband. She had nothing to do—servants were plentiful then—and her decisions were at once simpler and more easily reached. “After a while,” says Crespelle, “she had only one aim left in life—to make her husband’s existence unbearable—and she even gave up her social activities to devote herself entirely to this exhilarating task.” Crespelle is not a wholly reliable witness, but even a far less extreme attitude on Olga’s part, to say nothing of the dark, impersonal revolt against women in general, would be quite enough to account for the monsters that began to appear in her husband’s painting.

  She had no obvious causes for dissatisfaction: Picasso, though a difficult and exigent companion at times, had a great deal of kindness to make up for it; he had given her a nationality, a handsome income, and a baby; he was at least an adequate husband. But want of obvious causes has never prevented anyone from being dissatisfied and it does not appear that she ever had much liking for Picasso or his work. Then again the gap between her social pretentions and her real acceptability would set up conflicts that could only result in gloom, a gloom increased by the fact that an active ballerina’s liver, kept as trim as an egg by daily exercise, is apt to grow flabby and sullen when she leaves the stage. And as for the baby, it does not seem to have been markedly less disappointing, troublesome, noisy, selfish, and unamiable than most as it grew to be a child and then a hairy adolescent.

  Picasso himself said that his work was his diary, and although it is easy to read this diary in too literal or too literary a fashion, the presence of these monsters is deeply significant: so is the absence of the child: there is no important reference to Paulo between the brush-drawing of a child with a rocking-horse in 1926 and the painting of the boy dressed as a pier-rot in 1929. And after that, nothing at all.

  One of the earliest of the mon
sters is the “Femme endormie dans un fauteuil” of January, 1927, a grotesquely distorted figure with her snoutlike face thrown back, her toothed and probably snoring mouth wide open: the metamorphosis of a woman’s body into an amoeba with a cruel and deadly trap, the whole defined by a flowing line as firm and solid as those which surround stained glass. But before the “Femme endormie” he had made a collage: he took a floor-cloth, made a hole in the middle, stuck it to a canvas beside a long piece of newspaper, stretched two vertical strings to turn it into a guitar, and then drove sharp nails right through from behind so that their points stood out a couple of inches. Although this sounds innocuous or even trifling, the effect of the rough texture of the cloth, of the menacing nails, and of the whole spare composition is very striking indeed: the savagery of the collage is surely allied to that which produced the painting, and here the symbolism is clear enough; in Spain a guitar, with its curves, its hole, and its responsive cords often figures a woman’s body, and Picasso had used the metaphor quite explicitly, though more kindly, in former years.

  Yet these were early days: they were not all trouble and strife, and his painting was not filled with these toothed, predatory women. An artist in his studio, sometimes a painter, sometimes a sculptor, often with a model, made his appearance as a member of Picasso’s cast: this figure, who was to stay until the end of Picasso’s life, takes a great many forms, none of them to begin with self-regarding.

  He is often a burly man, bearded, rather classical apart from his drawers, apparently bemused or stupid, as a bull seems bemused at times or stupid; and in one of the first etchings he is sitting right up to his easel, gazing intently at or through his model while his right hand sweeps out a magnificent series of curves and rectilinear planes that on the face of it seem to have little relation to her, for she is a pleasant middle-aged woman in a pinafore, knitting, and like the artist himself she is drawn with that perfection of descriptive realism which Picasso could produce whenever he chose.

  It would be extremely interesting to know whether the etching was made before Vollard began talking to Picasso about his intention of bringing out an illustrated edition of Balzac’s Chef d’oeuvre inconnu or not, since the book is about a painter whose masterpiece can be understood by no one but himself, but unfortunately scholars differ and Vollard’s own memoirs are vague. It would also be interesting to know whether Picasso read the book through: from his description of it to Geneviève Laporte many years later it would seem that he did not, yet few works could have pleased him more. Very briefly the tale, set in 1612, is this: the youthful Nicolas Poussin goes to see the well-known painter Pourbus in the rue des Grands-Augustins, and after some hesitation he walks in at the same time as a rich aged man called Frenhofer. Frenhofer criticizes Pourbus’ work with great freedom, saying some remarkable things about painting: Poussin, unknown to either, breaks in and is acknowledged by both as a true artist. Pourbus is kind to the young man; urges him to work; tells him that Frenhofer was a pupil of Mabuse, is now a painter, amateur in the sense that he has never had to sell, being rich, but so brilliant that Pourbus has taken his work for Giorgione’s. The acquaintance grows, helped by the fact that Poussin has a lovely young mistress (“one of those generous, noble souls who come to suffer with a great man, sharing his anguish and his difficulties and doing their utmost to understand his whims, resistant to poverty and strong for love”) whom Frenhofer would like as a model. Presently they are all in Frenhofer’s studio, where Poussin sees some astonishing pictures that Frenhofer dismisses as of no great worth, nothing to compare with his masterpiece: he is unwilling to show this masterpiece, but eventually does so. Poussin can make out nothing in the chaos of colors, “the uncertain graduations, the kind of formless haze” except for “one exquisite, living foot.” He says he can see no woman there at all. Frenhofer weeps, comforts himself for the moment by imagining that they are thieves, but burns his picture that same night and dies.

  At all events, when at last it was printed in 1931, the book contained etchings, together with many of Picasso’s dot-designs and some Cubist drawings that certainly preceded Vollard’s idea, in addition to some etchings certainly made for the purpose—eighty illustrations in all.

  And then apart from his work, Picasso also led a more varied, less fashionable life, seeing something of his older friends and still more of the Surrealists, whose ideas on neolithic, Eskimo, Oceanic, and particularly Easter Island art interested him. There was also death to be reckoned with: death, which always surprised and distressed Picasso, although it was so much part of his culture. Modigliani had died in poverty, alcoholic and consumptive, some years before, at the age of thirty-six. (His dealer, giving him forty francs and a bottle of brandy for each picture, had scarcely prolonged his life.) And now it was the forty-year-old Gris, undermined by earlier privations, whom Picasso followed to the grave.

  That summer, the summer of 1927, he spent at Cannes, and although there are some monstrous women, including the frighteningly malevolent “Femme assise,” it is tempting to see a memory of happier days and of Gris in the quite unexpected and almost pure synthetic Cubism of “L’Atelier,” a big picture, some five feet by eight, of a painter with his brush poised, looking at a fruit-bowl and a white bust on a red-covered table. Formally almost pure: but the spirit is quite different; so is the nature of the legibility, and the whole statement is of another order, as though Picasso were not looking back at all but rather forward to a world dominated by human relationships.

  Sculpture was also in his mind again: his friends’ proposals for a monument to Apollinaire would have brought it back if it had ever been absent, which, when one considers the sculptural nature of much of his work in the twenties, is most unlikely. And now he made several strongly modeled drawings that were in fact studies for figures in the round, one of which he carried out when he returned to Paris.

  The resulting bronze had nothing to do with Apollinaire, however: his monument, the real Picasso monument to Apollinaire, never left the stage of drawings, and the half-hidden object that was eventually set up by the municipality near the abbey-church of Saint-Germain-des-Près after years and years of wrangling is nothing more than a rather unsatisfactory head of Dora Maar, who had not the least connection with the poet apart from the fact that both she and Apollinaire, at a distance of a generation, were deeply attached to Picasso. The 1927/28 figure was another example of Picasso’s metamorphoses of the female body, in which breasts, limbs, heads, and features are not only distorted but redistributed: a passionate metamorphosis with a strong sexual element, often very cruel, as retaliation for cruelty is apt to be.

  Conceivably in an attempt to please, even to placate, his wife, Picasso returned to Dinard for the summer holidays of 1928 and 1929; and naturally enough the sexual element traveled with him. Whoever speaks of sex speaks of symbolism and plunges straight into the deepest, darkest water known to man. I have no intention of floundering where the wisest heads can scarcely keep afloat, and I shall do no more than point out that the women in the many beach-scenes he painted here, like those he drew at Cannes, are preoccupied with keys, with fitting keys into the key-holes of their bathing-cabins. Keys were of a great though perhaps undefined importance to Picasso: he carried a heavy bunch of them and when they wore through his pockets (he never had the good fortune to find a woman who could sew) he attached them to his person with string. “I am very fond of keys,” he said to Antonina Valentin. “It seems to me very important to have one. It is true that keys have often haunted me. In the series of bathing men and women there is always a door which they try to open with a big key.” Clearly, those who are outside and who want to get in will use a key, perhaps the wrong one, just as those who wish to communicate will use a language, sometimes misunderstood, even incomprehensible.

  These little beach-scenes of brightly striped figures playing with a ball strike many people as cheerful, and indeed the colors are gay enough: others find the distorted triangular bodies with their tiny
heads, flat, oarlike limbs, and emphatic sexual organs obscurely menacing and oppressive. Yet Picasso was not more than usually oppressed at Dinard: for one thing his friend the Surrealist poet George Hugnet was staying close at hand, which provided him if not with rational then at least with agreeable company. There is something oddly touching about Picasso’s love for poets and about his way of lumping them all together: so long as they wrote verse it does not appear that he made much distinction between them—Breton, Reverdy, Desnos, Cocteau, Leiris, Eluard, Aragon, Hugnet, Salmon, Apollinaire, Jacob, and many others were all seen and often drawn with the same kindly eye, and for several of them he provided illustrations to help sell their books. Max Jacob, it is true, sometimes tried Picasso’s friendship very hard, not so much by selling Picasso’s presents and not so much by his prolonged retreat to Saint-Benoît as by his convert’s zeal, which made him at times more Catholic than the Pope while at others his obscure loves caused him to labor under a sense of sin—an unrestful companion. Now, in 1928, he was in Paris once more, living in high style at the Hôtel Nollet, with a car-borne friend, selling his gouaches well and dining out continually, and once more Picasso drew his portrait, a bald, plump Max Jacob, crowned with a laurel-wreath that might to a necromancer have signified the Légion d’honneur he was to be given or even the fortune that he was presently to acquire. This fortune was not the reward of his widely-known, little read, and rarely reprinted books, but the result of an accident in his friend’s motor-car: it was pitifully small, but at least it allowed him to buy an annuity of 9,400 francs (then about £100 or $420)—just enough for him to flee temptation, to return to his village and lead a monastic life with his food assured for the first time since he left home.