Picasso: A Biography

  The essence of their friendship was unchanged, but they now lived in worlds that rarely overlapped. Picasso’s was not the happiest he had known: far from it. He was probably the best-known painter in Europe; he was working hard; yet already he looked back to the Bateau-Lavoir with longing. Art is often said to be the result of conflict—no call for art in Eden—and on the simple-minded basis of equating conflict and output it could be asserted that Picasso’s life, and particularly these years of it, was spectacularly unhappy, for his production was enormous. On the other hand no man connected with the arts will deny that there are immense compensations—that when the tension is not too great and that when his work runs well he finds a peace entirely of his own.

  Work was not only a necessity for Picasso: it was also his surest refuge; and his mind turning more and more to sculpture, for which his flat in the rue La Boëtie was not suitable, he went to Juii González’ workshop when he came back from Dinard in the autumn of 1928.

  Picasso had known the González brothers since the time of the Quatre Gats and his earliest days in Paris, for in spite of their name they were Barcelona Catalans and they had migrated to France in 1899. Their father had had a forge, working mostly in wrought iron, and the brothers were accustomed to metal from their childhood. Juli had first to be a painter, but his gift did not lie that way, and by the time Picasso came to work at his place he had not yet discovered that his true vocation was that of a sculptor, although he was now in his fifties. He was a modest, retiring man, somewhat lost since the death of his elder brother, and he looked upon himself as a craftsman, no more: and a fine craftsman he was, the kind that Picasso loved, with a deep understanding of the nature of his material and a complete mastery of his techniques: among others he was perfectly familiar with that of oxyacetylene welding, which he had learned at the Renault factory during the war.

  It was in González’s workshop that Picasso said, “I feel as happy again as I was in 1908”—when Cubism was in its first flood and before Fernande plagued him with her “little ways”—and with Juli’s help he made a fascinating sculpture or openwork construction of slim iron rods. The welded points of junction give it something of the appearance of his dot drawings; the severity is allied to the Cubist “Atelier” of early 1928, and the triangles to the Dinard women on the beach; but this cage full of light is something quite new, new in Picasso and almost entirely new in sculpture, although in another spirit Lipchitz was already using strips of metal and wire to make his figures transparent. Most of the lines are straight, but towards one end there is a large oval traversed by a long rod with a small disk on top of it, and this oval is connected to a pair of upright curves by two double triangles. The composition is certainly not abstract, but it is not clearly legible either and it has been read in many ways, one being that the oval form with a pin head is a woman and that the curves are a fleeing man, held back by the triangular arms.

  He probably made several of his other constructions with González in 1928 and early 1929, though the dating is obscure; but he did not carry out the plans he had made at Dinard for some monumental figures. It is difficult to say how big they were meant to be from the drawings, but they would surely have been immense: he had had the notion of setting them along the Croisette, and if the municipality had not been so appalled by the news from America—in October, 1929, the New York stock-market crashed, and it was obvious that the great depression must reach Europe very soon—Cannes might conceivably now possess the most striking sea-front in the world. The great figures seem to be made of smooth bone, and some people speak of a “bone period” starting at about this time in both his painting and his sculpture. The two were indeed more closely related now than at any other time, partly because the huge figures could not be realized by a private man, not even by one so well-to-do as Picasso, and the sculpture therefore overflowed into the other medium. One monument, for example, is a terrible woman’s head thirty feet high: two fixed, stupid eyes surmount it; there is a hint of nostrils to the left, while sparse strands of hair appear to the right and a toothed sideways mouth in the middle, the whole poised on or against what must be a great block of masonry, if not a house.

  But most of the projected “bone” sculptures are as calm as the word monument, and so are the earlier paintings into which the sculptural feeling moved: there is one of a woman in an armchair, one of the several works of this period called “Métamorphose,” that is as smooth and serene as the moon. Yet at the same time, in the vast and even bewildering quantity of work that Picasso poured out, we also see the return of the minotaur, once in the shape of an immense papier collé; the last picture of his son; the seven-foot iron sculpture called “La Femme au jardin”; a number of metamorphic heads; and still another “Femme dans un fauteuil,” a savage one this time, like the 1927 picture but even more extreme.

  Then as the summer of 1929 approached, the monsters and the bone figures came together in one of the most horrifying and the most moving of his paintings, the “Femme assise au bord de la mer.” The pale wood of which she is made is as smooth as bone, and the articulations of her spine are clearly to be seen. She sits sideways in the sand with her back to the sea and the paler sky, her hands linked on her upraised knee, one taut arm parallel with the horizon, the wrinkled elbow being the only hint of flesh; her other leg is tucked under her: she has no trunk properly speaking, and her bosom, a single slanting plane, stands out against the sea with no belly to interrupt the blue. From her collarbone rises a process that joins her head to her dissected but coherent body, and this head, a little sharp triangle of nose with two colorless insect eyes in it, is almost entirely jaws, jaws with a backward mane of hair. But these jaws move sideways, as an insect’s do; and one is reminded of the mantis, that deadly carnivore.

  Picasso knew the praying mantis well, and he knew what was said about her ways. The females are powerful creatures some three inches long, and they are to be found, green or straw-colored, all round the Mediterranean in late summer: although they can both walk and fly they usually stand motionless on four legs, with the other two, like long toothed arms, hanging in front of them, waiting for some grasshopper or cricket to come within their reach. When this happens the pendant arms fly out and seize their prey, gripping it in a serrated trap; then the little triangular head comes down, the jaws open sideways and deliberately tear a piece off the jerking body. From time to time the mantis pauses to look about—hers is one of the few insect heads that can turn—and in the evening light her eyes glow purple. But this is in the common course of nature, and what has struck men from remote antiquity is the report that she also serves her mate in the same way. Whether she ordinarily does so is another matter, but in captivity she certainly will, and the fact has been observed again and again. The smaller male approaches cautiously, for she is sexually phlegmatic and until he is on her back, stimulating her, he is in danger; he mounts safely; the long copulation begins; then without warning her head pivots sharply and she decapitates him. He goes on copulating, and with greater energy, his inhibitions having been removed with his head. She eats his thorax: still he persists, his lower legs gripping tight. Eventually he is spent, and she finishes her meal.

  That is the report, held to be universally true by those who live in mantis-country, and by the Surrealists; and that, I am convinced, is the significance of the monster’s head.

  And the picture is far more than this head, however significant: it is not only a picture of a monster nor even principally a picture of a monster any more than Rembrandt’s side of beef is primarily the representation of a large piece of raw meat; it is a great deal more besides, including a statement about an almost lunar stillness and silence, a certain kind of transcendence, heightened by the imminent danger and arising from the great sheets of color and the subtle interplay of the planes that form the sitting figure. But no attempt to account for the moving quality of this Picasso, or of the Rembrandt, could succeed unless one were capable of identifying and unraveling t
he countless strands that go to make up the aesthetic emotion. I cannot do so: it seems to me that the essence escapes all rationalization and that Braque was right in saying, “The only thing that matters about a painting is what cannot be explained.” Assertions that the picture is moving accomplish nothing, and the only hope of conveying some ghost of the feeling lies in description.

  There the monster sits with a strange awkward grace against the pure sea and the sky; the facets of her anatomized body are delicately shaded with their blue and with the colors from the sand and their smooth relaxed surfaces have a calmness of their own that is in no way disturbed by the menace of the jaws above. She is not wicked; she is only insatiably voracious by nature. The picture is both tranquil and extremely intense: tranquil in its sunlit planes of color, tense with the crossing arm and the implicit threat.

  As a painter Picasso must have been deeply satisfied with his work: as a man he must have seen that the jaws were opening wide and that it was time to flee.

  Chapter XIV

  IF man’s oppressor is wicked, there is some hope that she may be reclaimed by kindness, submission, brute force, or another pregnancy; but if she is a cannibal by nature then there is none at all, and the man must run away. But where to flee, and how? For one as incapable of making up his mind as Picasso this was a grave question, and its solution was made no easier by his natural indolence and endless procrastination in common affairs, by his love for what he was used to, however unpleasant, by the fatal results of disturbance on his work, by a lingering respect for his wife, the former vraie jeune fille, whose social status he never seems to have questioned, by a desire to keep his son, and even perhaps by a sense of duty, or at least of tradition: in his Spain men “deceived” their wives; they did not leave them.

  Just when he eventually found his refuge cannot be told. Picasso was intensely secretive about his private life, and some of his closest friends knew nothing about Marie-Thérèse Walter for years; while her discretion and her sense of what was due to herself and her friend were such that to the best of my knowledge she never, even at the times of greatest publicity, yielded to the importunities of the gutter-press. One sees no photographs of Mademoiselle Walter looking soulful, understanding, winsome, bereft, intelligent, motherly, artistic: one reads no interviews, no ghosted articles on how to preserve or destroy an old master.

  She seems to have been a most admirable young woman; but in speaking of her I must observe that I do not do so from any personal knowledge: with Picasso’s other companions I have either some acquaintance through common friends or I have read their works, for no less than three burst into print. Marie-Thérèse I have seen only through Picasso’s eyes or in published reminiscences: these nearly all agree in stating that she was tall, Swiss, young, fair-haired, fine-skinned, healthy, devoted to sport, good company, calm and gay. One of the rare dissentient voices is that of Penrose, who calls her coarse, aloof, and inconsequential, “as though controlled by the influence of the moon or by some even less calculable force.” It is also apparent, from the writings of others, that she was totally disinterested, undemanding, and affectionate, and that she naturally and genuinely despised convention; while from Picasso’s paintings of her it is even more apparent that she was beautiful.

  It was probably in 1931, when she was twenty or less and he in his fiftieth year, though boyish still, that coincidence brought them, each from a different part of Paris, to a given point in the neighborhood of the Galéries Lafayette, where they fell into conversation. The season and even the year of their meeting is uncertain, but at all events, and whatever the progress of their friendship, it took place after the “Femme au bord de la mer” and before the. “Fauteuil rouge” of late 1931, where she certainly appears in his work though perhaps not for the first time.

  Yet between these dates what a mass of pictures, drawings, sculpture, constructions, engravings, and works without a name! One of these was the glove he stuffed and glued to the back of a canvas next to a head made of felt with coarse teased-out cloth for hair, the whole covered with more glue to hold a sprinkling of sand, its parts overflowing the frame formed by the wooden stretcher. The hand, perfectly realistic or indeed real at one remove, combined with the almost abstract sign for a head, has a marked Surrealist flavor—a flavor that was growing stronger in his work and that is most obvious in his use of objects picked up, carried home, and made part of his reliefs or paintings.

  Among the etchings of 1930 is the suite he produced for Skira’s edition of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. From Françoise Gilot’s account it seems that Albert Skira, then a young moneyed Swiss with vague ambitions in the publishing line, asked Picasso to illustrate a book about someone—about Napoleon, for instance. Picasso had nothing whatsoever to say to Napoleon. During the summer Skira’s mother waylaid Picasso on the beach at Juan-les-Pins, pleaded her young man’s cause with gentle persistence, and gradually wore down Picasso’s resistance: he hated to see a disappointed face. To give pleasure he would make an amiable but insincere reply; and well-conducted importunity could then extort marvels from his unwilling hand. This time he said that her son should think of “a classical author—perhaps something mythological.”

  By great good luck Skira chanced upon Ovid, and the Metamorphoses: Picasso had come by a nodding acquaintance with the poet in the remote La Coruña; he had recently designed a number of works actually called “Metamorphoses”; and at that moment he was living on the shore of the classical sea, in a landscape inhabited for him by fauns, satyrs, minotaurs, and even nymphs. He agreed.

  Back in Paris Picasso withdrew into this ageless retreat and turned out plate after plate with great zeal; and after each plate was done he would reach for a trumpet that he happened to possess, open the window, and blow a blast. Skira, who had taken an office next door, so that now Picasso had his dealer on one side and his publisher on the other, would come running.

  All these plates were neo-classical outline-drawings that kept closer to Ovid than ever his earlier work did to Balzac, both in the letter and the spirit; and they illustrated the death of Orpheus, the fall of Phaeton, and many other powerful myths with compositions that from a lesser hand would have been a welter of tight-packed limbs but that he imbued with a fine flowing harmony. They are exquisite, and when they were published the next year they were received with great applause. Yet as he said himself, “You can’t be a witch-doctor all day long,” and the feeling remains that Ovid was little more than a refuge for Picasso, that these illustrations, delightful though they are, were of no essential importance to him.

  This cannot be said for his painting. The year 1930 saw one of his most significant pictures, a Crucifixion. For many observers it marks the most desperate point of his extreme unhappiness in what might be called the period between Olga and Marie-Thérèse, and I agree with them entirely; yet at the same time some can find no religious content whatever, which seems to me astonishing. Obviously there is no right or wrong about these subjective judgments, and obviously a great deal depends on the concept of religion, which is no doubt different for Protestants or Communists on the one hand and Catholics, however lapsed, on the other. And if to the traditional Catholic’s earliest notions of mysticism and intercession, so close to magic for a child, one adds Picasso’s own ideas of mediation and exorcism, then the difference becomes greater by far. Picasso, after all, was brought up in a country where mysticism, ethics, and morality are rarely confounded, where the Mother of God is often seen as a fierce, squat black figure, devoid of apparent tenderness, and where Catholicism, with all that it had absorbed from ancient days, was part of the daily air. Then again, much also depends on one’s definition of religious painting: for one who is continually surrounded by another world, good or evil, the distinction between sacred and profane hardly exists. Picasso himself said in Penrose’s hearing, “What do they mean by religious art? It’s an absurdity. How can you make religious art one day and another kind the next?”

  The picture has
been explained by critics and art-historians and its symbolism analysed, often with great learning: I shall attempt no such thing, and apart from saying that for me Picasso’s Crucifixion is a passionate, savage outcry of an essentially religious nature and a statement about death, agony, and sacrifice, I shall offer no more than a brief description.

  It is quite a small picture, twenty inches high, twenty-six across, and it is painted on a wooden panel. The colors are brilliant, a strong yellow predominating, with a great deal of red on the right-hand side and more blue and blue-green on the left; but in the middle, lit by another light entirely, the small Christ, the Cross and the draped “bone” figure standing open-jawed against His bosom, are a deathly, insubstantial white, more deathly still from their black outline and black background. On the right two huge arms, their hands clasped in anguish, rise from a confusion of forms, green, blue, and parti-colored, and far away against the red stands the empty tau cross of one of the thieves, while with their customary indifference the soldiers throw dice on a drum for the seamless robe. In the foreground on the left hand lie the two thieves, naked and dead: from one stiff and livid body a ladder runs up to the arm of the cross, where a little red figure is driving home a nail. An even smaller horseman, almost over-whelmed by a shrieking head, thrusts his lance into Christ’s side: and high on the left, turquoise-blue, ringed and mottled with blood-red, there is the sponge of the Passion, enormously enlarged. All the figures in this composition have been subjected to various kinds of distortion, often extreme and often related to different periods of Picasso’s work, so that they can be seen as a summary of his metaphors; but in spite of the different idioms that are present, the picture is very much a whole, and this wholeness arises, I believe, from its passionate intensity.