Picasso: A Biography

  The Crucifixion was a most important picture to Picasso, and he never parted with it. From sketches made as far back as 1927 it is clear that the idea had been in his mind long before it reached paint, and in the years that followed he made several further drawings, particularly in relation to Grünewaid’s masterpiece. The preliminary studies include some naked Magdalens allied to the frenzied left-hand figure in “La Danse” but arched back in an even stronger convulsion and with their sexual characteristics, literal and symbolic, more pronounced by far. There are people to whom any association of sexuality and religion (and there are other examples in these drawings) is directly blasphemous, and that may account for some of the reactions to the picture.

  The Crucifixion marked the trough of his unhappiness, but Picasso painted many other pictures in 1930 and 1931 that also show a mind in much the same condition: tormented and almost desperate, but never beaten, always savagely protesting. His better days were recorded by still-lives full of curving forms enclosed by broad black lines in his stained-glass manner; and these big pictures could be described as the latest manifestation of curvilinear Cubism. They have a certain resemblance to the work of Matisse, particularly in their fine free coloring, as though Picasso, by going through some of the same motions, hoped to capture the serenity he so much envied in his friend.

  However that may be, full happiness does not reappear in Picasso’s painting until well after his meeting with Marie-Thérèse. Forerunners are to be seen towards the end of 1931, when, in something of the same curvilinear style as his recent still-lives, he painted a sculptor sitting and contemplating a bust that because of the characteristic nose and forehead can only be Marie-Thérèse, while a little picture on the wall behind may conceivably be Picasso himself: he was now dating his work exactly, and on the back of this is written 7 Décembre M. CM. XXXI. Some weeks later there she is again, quite unmistakable, asleep in a red armchair, wearing a dress with a fine blue sash; her heart-shaped head is divided to show full-face and profile; and the stretcher has the words fait dans I’apres-midi de Dimanche 24 Janvier M. CM. XXXII. Then during the spring of 1932 happiness came flooding in: with even more than his usual demonic energy he suddenly produced a series of large canvases, mostly nudes, and all of the same woman, often distorted but always kindly so—a big, firm body, flowing in great sensuous curves, often fast asleep. And these, as one can see from the dates, followed one another at intervals of a couple of days or so. Their style, which has been labeled curved graphism, is quite new, and so is the nature of their relaxed happiness, itself no usual quality in Picasso’s work.

  A wife with more understanding of her husband’s work, or one who took more interest in it, would at once have known what was afoot; and she might have tried to be less disagreeable. Judging by the monsters that continued to appear from time to time, Olga Picasso did no such thing.

  To begin with Picasso made a typically indecisive attempt at living a double life, and for a while it seemed to answer tolerably well, possibly because theirs was less a full-throated passion than an amitié amoureuse.

  A curious thing about Marie-Thérèse is that Picasso had already imagined her: he had already drawn girls with bodies and faces like hers. Now he painted her tirelessly; but it was above all as sculpture that he saw Marie-Thérèse—he was fascinated by her head, particularly by the way her classical forehead ran into her well-marked nose.

  But this was not yet a time for sculpture. Quite apart from Marie-Thérèse, 1932 was one of the busiest years away from his studio that Picasso had ever known, for apart from having to see to a great deal of business he also became a landed proprietor.

  It was a cruelly hard year for many painters, since the depression, which had taken its time to reach Paris, was now so firmly installed that for most people it was already a way of life; and naturally the artists suffered first. Soup-kitchens were opened in Montmartre and Montparnasse, and Kahnweiler worked out a system of allowances to keep his painters alive. No publishers seem to have followed his example: Robert Desnos and Alejo Carpentier for example were reduced to a single pair of shoes between them, and those they lined with cardboard; and even Gertrude Stein was obliged to sell many of her pictures. None of this affected Picasso: in his frugal way he had put by a great deal of money; people still bought a certain amount of his work; and he and his dealers so carefully dosed the market that there was never a glut of Picassos.

  On this whole question of money, Picasso’s attitude had evolved: he had long since lost his pauper’s wondering, delighted avidity, and by the thirties he had already reached something like his final state of mind, which was not one of indifference—far from it—because where selling his work was concerned he was a ferocious bargainer, full of deep-laid stratagems, while in daily life he could be parsimonious, if not mean: yet in the first case money was part of a game he was determined to win, and in the second his native frugality came into play. Perhaps absence is the better word, for although when the subject of money came up he was intensely interested, there were long periods when it never crossed his mind: it never, never affected his painting in the least degree, not even when money was still wholly real and of vital relevance to the next day’s living; and he did, after all, spend most of his life in his studio. It is as though once the days of his pressing need were past he no longer believed whole-heartedly in the stuff, any more than he believed in the enormous sums his pictures fetched in later years; as though he used it as a toy or a weapon, as a not particularly convincing symbol of his domination and success, and as a .standard of comparison in which he did not really believe either but which flattered him. His attitude was complex and often contradictory: yet this notion of absence is supported by the fact that he did not trouble with investment. A man to whose life the subject is deeply relevant will make his money breed: but Picasso, in some passing fit of financial concern, would buy gold coins and then forget them; Françoise Gilot saw a boxful, covered with dust, in the rue La Boëtie, and after his death bundles of bank-notes, some no longer current, were found stuffed into drawers and cupboards.

  In 1932, however, he used some of this weaith to buy the seventeenth or eighteenth-century Château de Boisgeloup, some forty miles from Paris, on the edge of a hamlet in the Vexin. Compared with some châteaux it was nothing very extraordinary, and what the French so touchingly call its park amounted to no more than half a dozen acres; but it was a fair-sized country house with perhaps twenty rooms, a much earlier chapel, and a great round dovecot. At the depth of the depression it would have been a bargain, and far more important than that, it possessed a great range of out-buildings, stables, loose-boxes, a coach-house, capable of being transformed into sculptor’s studios, to be inhabited by splendid figures still in Picasso’s mind; or, from a different point of view, into a slum unparalleled even in the experience of Picasso’s victims, filled with objects that accumulated dust.

  And in addition to this important purchase, which was not only to provide the vast ground-space needed for ambitious sculpture but also to do away with the need for carrying easels, canvases, luggage, women, children, dogs (a St. Bernard now, and a smelly Airedale) far away for the summer holidays and then back again, a task for which even the stately Hispano-Suiza was inadequate—in addition to this Picasso had to make the arrangements for his first great retrospective exhibitions, which were to take place during this summer of 1932 at the Galérie Georges Petit in Paris and at the Kunsthaus in Zurich; and his zeal was stimulated by the fact that the year before Matisse had had a most successful retrospective in both these places and at the New York Museum of Modern Art as well. He was also much engaged with Christian Zervos, the editor of Les Cahiers d’Art, who was beginning his monumental catalog of Picasso’s works, an undertaking worthy of a conventful of Benedictines that has now passed its twenty-fifth volume. And he had to see to the preparations for installing his family at Boisgeloup. This, however, he did in a summary fashion: two small upper rooms were fitted up, the huge inconveni
ent kitchen, and little else. Picasso was no longer the neat and biddable husband of the early twenties; he was rapidly returning to the Gypsy state natural to him, and the good wool suits were now the prey of moths; the bow tie, the handkerchief in his breast-pocket were rarely to be seen, and soon they were to vanish altogether. Picasso’s dandyism was of a kind peculiar to himself: he had seen the great world, and on reflection he did not think much of it, nor of its taste in clothes. His considered opinion was that he had never seen any man better dressed than Modigliani; and Modi-gliani wore a corduroy jacket, none too clean, corduroy trousers, and checked workman’s shirts.

  In spite of all these pressing occupations, Picasso found the time and the energy to paint some of his most famous Marie-Thérèse pictures and to begin peopling the stables at Boisgeloup. In his paintings he made what amounts to a total statement about her, using all the techniques of Cubism and of symbol to show not only her golden superficies, but her serene, uncomplicated sexuality and even her inward composition—her anatomy. But in sculpture he was primarily concerned with her head. One of the first inhabitants of the converted stable was a more-than-life-size plaster bust, classical in its simplicity and restraint, like the 1905 terra-cotta of Fernande. This head was soon joined by others, and almost at once Picasso began to vary the part that fascinated him most, the junction or rather the continuity of her forehead and her nose, which he turned into a protuberance not unlike that which is to be seen on a high-bred merino sheep. He carried this and other distortions very far indeed, molding her head into disturbing archaic forms and redistributing her features: he could do so without disturbing her tranquillity or affecting her cheerful good nature in any way at all. She was not interested in painting or sculpture, nor did she pretend to be: she just liked Picasso, and she liked being with him.

  Picasso took a very great deal of trouble over the retrospective exhibition: he had had other shows these recent years, including half a dozen in America, while London had seen, and praised, thirty-seven of his pictures at Reid and Lefevre’s in 1931. But this was to be far more important, a true and representative view of his achievement that would fix his standing for the better or for the worse. Hitherto Paris had seen Picasso in bits and pieces; and although he was now fifty his reputation, unlike Matisse’s, was founded more on talk, partial information, and general notoriety than on a firm, widely-based appreciation. From a variety of sources and particularly from his own collection he assembled over two hundred pictures ranging from Casagemas in his coffin to Marie-Thérèse in her looking-glass and embracing the Blue, Rose, Negro, proto-Cubist, high Cubist, synthetic Cubist, rococo Cubist, classical, and later Cubist periods, together with some monsters, the Crucifixion, and these latest canvases—a singular diary for those who could read it. He saw to the hanging of them himself; he set the sculptures in the proper light. He stated the case for his children to the best of his ability; he could do no more; and the verdict was to be given by others.

  The vernissage on June 15, 1932, the day before the common herd was allowed in, was the high point of the Paris season: Picasso was there, neat and brushed, with his bow tie making one of its last appearances; he rarely attended his own shows, but this was no ordinary exhibition, and this time he received everybody who counted in the town. He had, as it were, put his cards on the table; and he won. The public, the social success was immense; the intellectual success greater still. Les Cahiers d’Art devoted a special number to Picasso, with a list of contributors including André Salmon, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Reverdy, Maurice Raynal, Breton, Paul Eluard, Vicente Huidobro, Georges Hugnet, and many of his early admirers.

  The retrospective, which continued until July 30, confirmed his reputation as one of the most important painters of the century, if not the most important. Some might say that Matisse, whose fame was perhaps more widely spread, particularly in America, led by a neck; but Braque, though going well, had fallen behind; and Derain was scarcely in the running.

  Braque and Picasso were friends again by now. It could not be the old intimacy, amounting to something near identity of mind, but there could be strong liking short of that; and apart from anything else Picasso’s great respect for his friend was increased by the way Braque had survived and was surviving the depression; for Picasso despised weakness, failure, and want of fortitude or courage, sometimes to the point of brutality. The Braques therefore came to Boisgeloup, and they saw the stables, with more heads now and many other pieces, more beautiful perhaps in their original plaster than in their later bronze, with a whiteness into which the light can sink, so that it is not so much a surface as a dreamlike presence.

  Later in the year Brassaï made the same journey, to photograph the sculptures. They had increased in number by the winter, and in his Conversations avec Picasso he describes how Picasso opened the door of one of the stalls “and in all their brilliant whiteness we beheld a nation of sculptured figures.” And he goes on to speak of one of the consequences of his visit, which by its implications says more about the state of Picasso’s marriage than any day-by-day account of domestic misery. In spite of the painter’s reputation for unapproachability, at this first meeting Brassaï found that he was “direct, unaffected, devoid of arrogance or pose … kind and natural.” Picasso was equally pleased with Brassaï, and suggested that they should all go to the circus together, to his old love the Médrano, which he had not seen for years. So they did, and it had not changed: still the same clowns, fat horses, lean acrobats, wild beasts, the same smells. It was not an outstanding performance, but Picasso enjoyed himself immensely, laughing at the clowns and having a splendid time; while all the evening his son, aged eleven, sat bootfaced, determined to show no sign of pleasure, and his wife said not a word but sat equally glum, taking no notice of the common people’s fun at all.

  The purpose of Brassaï’s labors was to provide the newly-founded Minotaure with illustrations for its first number. Minotaure was a luxurious review, financed by Skira, edited by Tériade, and largely devoted to what might be called Surrealism in the wider sense: by now the Surrealists of the strict obedience were a meager body; Artaud and Soupault had long since been expelled for heresy, and the excommunications had multiplied with the years, striking Desnos, Jacques Prévert, André Masson, Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Bataille, and Queneau among others, and in 1931 even Aragon himself, guilty of deliberate Communism. A magazine confined to the true believers would scarcely have sold a hundred copies. But Picasso remained on good terms with most of the outcasts as well as with Breton and Eluard, which says a great deal about their reverence for him; and Minotaure had some contributors, such as Picasso’s old friend Raynal, who were not Surrealist at all, others who were unorthodox, and still others who never belonged formally to the group. The first number contained some thirty pages of Brassaï’s photographs; and apart from the few pieces included in the Georges Petit retrospective this was the first the public had ever seen of Picasso’s recent sculpture, which was made without much idea of show and even less of sale. It also had an essay by Breton called “Picasso dans son élément.” And Picasso himself provided the cover. It was a collage: one of his etchings of the minotaur stuck onto corrugated cardboard fastened with drawing-pins and the whole adorned with ribbon, lace, and some rather worn flowers from one of Olga’s discarded hats; and when one sees what an extraordinarily successful jacket it made on being reproduced one wonders less at Picasso’s lifelong refusal to throw anything away.

  Minotaure came out in May, 1933, and subsequent numbers had covers by Derain and Matisse as well as by the Surrealists Miró, Magritte, and Dalí, the new star of the movement. Dali had taken part in an important exhibition at the Dalmau gallery in Barcelona at the time of Picasso’s visit in 1926 and the two were introduced. Picasso liked some of the young man’s work (Dalí was then twenty-two); and with his usual generosity he told Paul Rosenberg and Pierre Loeb of his merits. Although it led to no agreement, the dealers traveled south to see him. Then three years later P
icasso received Dali very kindly when he came to Paris at Miryó’s invitation. First and last Picasso must have been called upon by some hundreds of young Catalan painters, and there is no recorded instance that I know of his ever having turned a single one away; but this was an exceptional visit, for Dalï possessed not only great technical ability but also a most dynamic companion who until recently had been married to Paul Eluard. (A band of Surrealists, including the Eluards, Buñuel and Magritte, had gone to see Dalí at Cadaqués; and there Madame Eluard remained.) This time Picasso was more than usually kind: he introduced Dalï to people who might be useful to him, such as Gertrude Stein, and some time later he lent him the money he needed to go to America. The outcome was banal in the extreme, for as Brassaï says—and these are the only harsh words in the whole of his good-natured book—“after this Dali continually spoke evil of him, running him down and even, once the Spanish civil war had begun, insulting him.”

  Picasso also provided Minotaure with nourishment in the form of little drawings of an almost entirely Surrealist nature, sculptural drawings of basically female forms closely allied to the “bone” compositions of 1928 and called “Anatomie”: yet these assemblies of chairs, bowls, balls, cogs, and arbitrary shapes are much more cheerful than their bony cousins; and their sexuality, though quite as evident, has not the same brooding, obsessive quality.