These he drew in February 1933, and as spring came on he turned his mind in a completely different direction, settling down to a series of classical etchings of the sculptor in his studio that were to form part of the great suite commissioned by Vollard some years earlier. The bearded sculptor is much the same man as before, but now the model is unmistakably Marie-Thérèse. Sometimes they lie naked and relaxed in one another’s arms, gazing at some piece that he has made, often another Marie-Thérèse, exaggerated; sometimes at plump horses playing, or bulls; his gaze is mild and thoughtful, the somewhat absent look of a man gently revolving some problem of surface and volume, solved or to be solved. The general feeling in most of these forty-odd plates is one of calm, light-filled happiness, even when the sculptor is present only as a gigantic bust and a minotaur is having a quiet orgy with one model while two more look on, amused. The minotaur is a companionable monster: at times he lies on a couch drinking champagne with a wreathed classical beauty; at others he carouses with the sculptor, somewhat the worse for drink, amidst the voluptuous curves of two women, sex-objects from head to toe. But one of the last plates in the series, drawn at the end of May, shows him in a bull-ring, diminished, down on his knees, about to receive the puntilla, the final dagger-stroke, from a beautiful youth, while crowded along the barrier, leaning low over it like the spectators in some of his very earliest works, several women and a hairy man watch closely, interested but unmoved. The strangely quiet, immobile, poignant scene has received many different explanations, most based on the simple equation minotaur equals Picasso, with further speculation on Mithras, sacrifice, and so on; but Picasso’s own mythology and symbolism were highly personal; they followed a logic peculiar to himself; and I will only venture to observe that he was now past fifty, a time when most men become aware of the looming tragedy of old age with all its mutilations; and that the minotaur, the only member of his race, is the very type of the outsider; but this does not necessarily mean a total identification by any means.
These etchings coincide with what was probably Picasso’s happiest time, precariously poised between Olga and Marie-Thérèse; and curiously enough although they show some very lovely statues they mark the end of Picasso as a sculptor himself until 1941.
The quiet and productive beginning of the year soon came to an end. After June at Boisgeloup, where he drew a standing minotaur making love to an ecstatic young woman, the summer of 1933 found the Picassos at Cannes; and in a photograph Olga is to be seen, looking glum, on what appears to be the terrace of an expensive restaurant. Picasso’s painting fell off both in quality and quantity, and almost the only memorable things he produced during this holiday were some directly Surrealist drawings of furniture with limbs. He was now closer to the Surrealists than he had ever been before, partly because of his growing friendship with Eluard; and apart from the “Anatomie” there is, among the springtime etchings, a perfectly classical girl looking at a Surrealist hermaphrodite made of a chair with arms, a variety of sexual attributes, and a fetish head.
It is scarcely surprising that his work suffered, for in addition to his obvious difficulties, a totally unexpected voice from the past came to destroy what peace he had left. This was Fernande Olivier’s: she now made her living by teaching French to foreigners, and either some one of them or the Devil himself had prompted her to write her memoirs. Parts began to appear in Le Soir and Mercure, and they ripped his jealously-guarded privacy wide open. Then the memoirs came out in book-form. Fernande Olivier’s Picasso et ses amis is not a grossly offensive book: it is indeed an exceedingly interesting and fairly accurate picture of the Montmartre of a quarter of a century before; but it does present him in an unheroic light at times, particularly in connection with Guillaume Apollinaire and the Iberian figures, and there is a certain hint of physical as well as moral cowardice on his part; while Fernande is of course pure white and blameless throughout. He was exceedingly distressed; he tried in vain to stop the publication of the extracts and it is said that he negotiated more successfully to prevent the appearance of even more wounding incidents in the book. But even if it was toned down, the book was a cruel blow to him: he had not looked into a mirror nor drawn more than a faint shadow of himself for ten years and more; and it was more painful for him than for most men to have this reflection forced upon him.
Olga’s reactions are not recorded, but they can scarcely have added to his tranquillity: she was and always had been violently jealous, especially of Fernande, and only a few months before she had given proof of it. Gertrude Stein was reading to the Picassos out of her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, translating as she went: “So I began at the beginning with the description of the room and the description of our servant Helen. You made one mistake said Pablo you left out something there were three swords that hung on that wall one underneath the other and he said it was very exciting. Then I went on and Fernande came in.
“I was reading he was listening and his eyes were wide open and then his wife Olga Picasso got up and said she would not listen she would go away she said. What’s the matter, we said, I do not know that woman she said and left. Pablo said go on reading. I said no you must go after your wife, he said oh, I said oh, and he left …” She did not see him again for another two years.
Half way through August, 1933, Picasso could not bear Cannes any longer: he got into the Hispano-Suiza, picked up Marie-Thérèse somewhere on the road, and driven by the discreet Marcel Boudin went to Barcelona. This was his first visit to the Peninsula since the Republic had been proclaimed in 1931, yet strangely enough there is no evidence of his having been particularly moved either by the fall of the king or the advent of a president, although the upheaval meant that Catalonia now had some measure of independence at last, including the official use of its own language. Politics, except in the broadest lines, never meant much to him once he was grown up; and at this juncture he had plenty to occupy his mind.
Some of this plenty was very agreeable. He cannot have failed to be affected, however indirectly, by the feeling of hope and joy in the new Republic—it must have been reflected from his friends. He saw Manolo again, amnestied and allowed back into his own country, and many other old companions, such as the Soto and Junyer-Vidal brothers, and his own nephews and nieces, Lola’s children. He went to Sitges, and of course he went to the bull-fight. But in spite of his discretion the journalists found him out: he refused to give an interview, muttering that “he had only come to see his mother,” and a few days later he left.
Back in Paris and Boisgeloup he painted a number of pictures based on the bull-fight, savage pictures in which the bull, the horses, and sometimes a woman bullfighter suffer and die horribly, often in a wild confusion of distorted limbs, horns, swords, and bodies; and these carried well on into 1934, that unhappy year for him.
The unhappiness is to be seen in his drawing and engraving as well as in his pictures; and there was no sculpture worth speaking of. At Boisgeloup that summer he made the drawing sometimes called “The Death of Marat,” from David’s picture of Charlotte Corday killing him, and sometimes just “Le Meurtre”; it shows an utterly hideous toothed female monster rushing upon the fainting Marie-Thérèse to stab her again with a huge kitchen knife, and as she stabs so she sticks out her great pointed tongue. And a day or two later there is Marie-Thérèse once more, mingled with a bullring horse and ripped up by the bull, itself already pierced with a sword.
As warnings, moral examples, these and many others like them could not be improved: nevertheless in the high summer of 1934 Picasso set off again with Marie-Thérèse, and he showed her a great deal of northern Spain, from Irún to San Sebastián, Burgos, Madrid, el Escorial, Toledo, and Zaragoza, and then through Aragón home to Barcelona. Again he almost entirely evaded the journalists, and the only article that appeared was one about his visit, accompanied by the curator and several friends, to the museum of Catalan art, where he saw more pure Romanesque than he had ever seen in his life before, since in the boundless
enthusiasm of those early Republican days the new authorities had gathered the imperiled frescoes from the remote, sometimes deserted and half-ruined Pyrenean churches, making apses to fit them and forming a splendid collection that is still unrivaled in the world.
Another man—Gauguin comes to mind—might have stayed in Barcelona or indeed anywhere else where he was at peace. But Picasso was a creature of habit; a fixed routine, however unpleasant, was necessary to his work; and although Paris meant scenes, bitter wrangling, unhappiness—all the more so now that concealment was no longer possible—to Paris he returned.
Spain and Barcelona, obviously, were breaks in this steady unhappiness: and there were others—the illustrations for Gilbert Seldes’ translation of the Lysistrata are in Picasso’s most cheerful neo-classic tradition; and far more important, far more apparently serene, are the pictures of girls reading or writing or drawing. Yet there is a strange tension too in many of these, and on one of them, the deceptively casual “Jeune fille dessinant dans un intérieur,” Picasso worked for months, piling up the preliminary studies and then painting out the whole composition before he fixed the one girl drawing and the other sleeping with her arms on the table just as he wanted them. These particular girls are nubile, but some of the others are children, and towards the end of the year the little girl, the girl child, became his particular concern: the fact that Marie-Thérèse was pregnant may conceivably have had something to do with this.
The child—she is about the age of Alice when she passed through the looking-glass—makes her appearance in the autumn of 1934 in some terrible yet comforting engravings in which she is leading a gigantic minotaur, a blind minotaur, with his lamentable great head pointing up into the sky and a blind man’s stick in his hand.
These prints carry on naturally, perhaps inevitably, to Picasso’s most important work of 1935, the “Minotauromachie.” It is an uncommonly large etching, more than two feet across, and the vertical line of a house divides it down the middle: in the right half, filling almost all of it with his bulk, the huge minotaur advances from the sea, no longer the sculptor’s cheerful friend, nor the pitiful blind monster, but a different minotaur entirely, far more savage brute than man; his powerful arm stretches out over a disemboweled horse across whose back lies a dead or unconscious woman bullfighter, her bosom bare, her hand still holding a sword. She and the horse fill the lower middle of the plate. On the left there is the darker house, and at its high window two young women stand; but they are concerned only with the doves upon their windowsill. Still farther to the left, on the edge of the picture, a ladder rears up with an almost naked bearded man climbing it; and he is looking fixedly at the monster. In the foreground at the ladder’s foot stands the little girl, wearing a hat, an old-fashioned frock, holding a bunch of flowers in one hand and a lighted candle in the other. She holds it high, and the flame almost touches the horse’s agonizing head and the minotaur’s outstretched hand, lighting up its half-seen palm. She is quite fearless.
The general impression is one of darkness, appalling menace, suffering, and hope. Here again there are analyses and explanations by the score: the ladder is connected with the Crucifixion, the candle with truth and light, the doves with innocence. Picasso had been intimately familiar with doves and pigeons from his earliest childhood; he liked to have the libidinous, promiscuous birds around; but his own opinion of them was that they were among the cruelest creatures living; and although he could sometimes use them as a conventional sign it seems to me that pinning down his symbols in so personal a work as this, attaching the usual labels to them and explaining the whole upon that basis is a rash if not a presumptuous undertaking.
The “Minotauromachie” is immensely impressive, and even in a prolific year it would stand out as a most striking achievement; but 1935 was not a prolific year; in fact by Picasso’s standards it was almost barren.
Just when in late 1934 or early 1935 his relations with Olga reached the breaking-point cannot be told, but presently he was talking of divorce. Any man who talks of divorce, meaning what he says, steps straight into a squalor that far exceeds anything that has gone before. Picasso found this to be the case, and it very nearly destroyed him. He had had no experience of divorce; it did not exist in Spain until the Republic, and in Montmartre and Montparnasse people troubled even less with legal dissolution than with legal marriage. It was generally known to be difficult, slow, and expensive, but possible on adequate grounds. For reasons that do not appear it seems that Picasso supposed that he had these grounds (his knowledge of the law was negligible) and that he attempted to begin a suit. That at least is the common report; though how even he could imagine that any court would regard him as the innocent party is difficult to conceive, and perhaps in fact he tried to induce Olga to initiate proceedings.
However, after he had been taking legal advice for some time it became clear to him that his position was hopelessly complicated. Since he could not have been divorced in his own country until very recently it appeared that he could not be divorced in France either, at least not until the new situation in Spain had been digested by the French courts—a very slow process—and that it would be useless to attempt it even if Olga were willing, which she was not: she was bitterly opposed to the whole thing, although divorces were common enough in Russia and were fully recognized by her church. So when at last he came to understand that full divorce was impossible at this point, there arose the question of a legal separation: but this, the lawyers told him, involved the separation not only of their persons but also of their goods; and now the contest reached a new pitch of bitterness. Olga does not seem to have been a money-grubber; in that respect she was comparatively disinterested, her chief aims being revenge and the retention of a hold rather than spoliation; but translated into legal terms it came to much the same thing.
Roughly speaking, marriages in France are of two kinds, those in which there is a contract specifying the degree of separate ownership and those in which there is none. In the second case, the communauté légale, the spouses share all they possessed before the ceremony and all they acquire after it; this is the regime preferred by women with no dowry or private fortune, and this was the regime under which the Picassos married.
In the event of a separation, a breaking of the communaute legale, the acquisitions as well as the original property have to be divided according to the directions of the court; and in the course of the last seventeen years Picasso had acquired a great deal—a very great deal indeed, if the pictures he painted were to be regarded as acquisitions. Olga or her lawyers certainly looked upon them in that light, or at least as valid security, and in their eagerness they had official seals put on the door of his studio so that he could not get at them while they were being wrangled over.
Quite early in the proceedings it became apparent to him that getting rid of Olga would be expensive, and it was: but he cannot have foreseen the full expense of spirit that it cost him—the tireless shrieking scenes until she broke off direct negotiations and left him in July, 1935, and both before that and for long after the busy prying of the lawyers into his possessions and his private life.
In the end the pictures were not seized; but the action bit deep. Picasso had to pay very heavily to retain them: Olga obtained a thumping allowance, Boisgeloup (which she hated) and the custody of Paulo, while Picasso was left with the flat in the rue La Boëtie and his pictures. Although he had a strong personality, although he was much attached to his possessions and furiously opposed to parting with them on compulsion, he was no match for Olga and her lawyers. For one thing, he had not a legal leg to stand on: and for another, he could not devote his entire being to the battle: she could: and in a way she won.
In all this wretched period of prolonged and distracting unhappiness there were a few events that comforted him. One was the birth of his daughter María Conceptión, whom he called Maya and whom he loved dearly—she was the prettiest little girl—and the other was the coming of his old friend J
aime Sabartés.
After a quarter of a century and more as a journalist in Latin America Sabartés had returned to Spain: he was there when Picasso wrote to him on July 13, 1935, “I am alone in the house. You can imagine what has happened and what is still in store for me,” and he was still there in the autumn when Picasso, having gone through some part of what had been in store, wrote again, asking him and his wife to come and live with him in the desolate rue La Boëtie.
In his Picasso, retratos y recuerdos, which describes their long friendship, Sabartés jumps straight from the Barcelona of 1904, when they parted, to the Paris of 1935, when they met again, as though the intervening years did not count: and perhaps for Sabartés they scarcely did; Picasso was by far the most important factor in his life.
“November 12, 1935,” he wrote, “I came back to Paris, this time at Picasso’s request, meaning to live at his fiat in the rue La Boëtie.
“He was waiting for me behind the barrier at the Gare d’Orsay. This was the fifth time that I had arrived from a great way off and that he had come to fetch me. The other two I had not told him I was coming.
“From that day on my life has followed in the track of his without my ever wondering how long this dream would last, since we intended that it should be forever.”
Señora Sabartés supervised the household, though from her husband’s book one would never know that she existed. What she made of it there is no telling, but her task cannot have been very restful: Picasso was at no time an easy man to live with, and now he was more than usually difficult. He had his own ideas about how a house should be run; he liked some things to be cleaned, but as he could never bring himself to give a direct order, those who did not make out his wishes by intuition were liable to be frowned at for days or even savagely rebuked when it was all too late. Furthermore, now that Olga was gone, her trim bourgeois order was rapidly overwhelmed by Picasso’s slum, which flowed downstairs and all over her domain. He had respected her frightful strength; he respected it still, although it no longer restrained him; and absurdly enough he missed her. He turned to Sabartés for human contact, talking incessantly of their old days together and keeping him up until very late at night: this suited Sabartés perfectly, and he became Picasso’s companion, secretary and, most fortunately, his historian, idiosyncratic, snipe-like in his flight, but invaluable.