Picasso: A Biography

  That was well before the final settlement with Olga, and Boisgeloup still belonged to Picasso. A great deal more squalor was still to come, but at least for the time Picasso could still retire into the country: Sabartés says that at this period he could still sculpt and paint, but if he did so, little trace remains. On the other hand he did draw, and there was his baby daughter, in whom he took such delight that he would wash her dirty linen, partly to express his affection and partly to change the horrible current of his mind.

  Yet still the writs, the lawyers’ letters came pouring in; the endless arguments and the odious interviews multiplied, growing even more insistent and unbearable. As a creative man he was nearly at his end, and by 1936 he could not paint at all. “He no longer went upstairs to his studio,” says Sabartés, “and the mere sight of his pictures and drawings infuriated him.”

  He could not paint. It was his opium or hashish nightmare come true, and but for poetry it might have been the end of Picasso altogether: even so, Barr reckons that the crisis struck twenty months out of his life as a painter, while Gertrude Stein says two years. (Neither is right according to the letter; but that is the general spirit.)

  The poetry, like so many things to do with Picasso, was a secret; and the equally secretive Sabartés was probably the first person ever to be told about the new, strangely diffident departure—told confidentially, as something not to be repeated. This was in the summer of 1935, when Sabartés was still in Spain; and presently Picasso was sending him pieces such as:

  Today is the fifth of the month of September XXXV the hastened thrust of the sword in the quince’s flesh opens the hand and like a cache-sexe lets out its secret prime the emerald so that it will let itself be eaten dressed up as a watercress salad with pieces of gross good eating whispering in your ear behind the lane damn beforehand happy to go to the stake try to be clever and make a bag of nuts and a shopping-basket of sorrows for every sailor who is irked by the unravelling cotton that scratches his mask length of his yard-stick the tan whose wheat adorns the head of the wounded man gnawed by hope to which … catapun chin chin gori gori gori …

  In November, when Sabartés reached the rue La Boëtie, the poetry was still a most private refuge, and Picasso would write it in a little easily-hidden notebook, sometimes sitting in the privy but more often behind closed doors in the dining-room. Yet the dining-room was not ideal, since the table had to be cleared for meals and there was no more room on the other pieces of furniture for the various heaps: the Renoir on the sideboard was already vanishing behind papers and objects such as a marble piece of gruyère cheese.

  With a falsity that did not deceive Sabartés for a moment, Picasso said it would save a great deal of trouble if they were to eat in the kitchen, where everything was within reach: now he had a free hand in the dining-room, and the heaps grew, covering everything except the small area upon which he wrote. But Picasso had his standards, and in the kitchen he would receive only some particular friends, such as Madame Errazuriz, Braque, and the Leirises; it was not ideal from many points of view, and they tried eating in the Sabartés’ bedroom and then the place where the linen was kept before returning at last, much against Picasso’s will, to the dining-room.

  Picasso had already made four portraits of his friend, the first as long ago as 1899: in December, 1935, he made a fifth. At this period they were still eating in the kitchen: Sabartés was waiting for him to come to lunch, and to pass the time he straightened the cloth on the marble table and fiddled with the crockery, the mineral water, the rusks, making sure that everything was in its invariable place, just as Picasso liked it: at last he heard him coming, preceded by the dog Elft. Picasso stopped in the doorway, waving a piece of paper, and said, “Here’s your portrait.”

  Living coals of friendship

  Clock that always tells the time

  Happy flag flying

  Wafted by the breath of a kiss on one’s hand

  Stroke the heart’s wings

  Which mounting flies from the very top

  Of the tree in the garden heavy with fruit

  it began; and although they often talked Catalan together it was written in Spanish. (Picasso’s Catalan was, I believe, almost entirely a spoken language, though he would lard his letters to Sabartés with Catalan phrases.)

  Encouraged by Sabartés’ praise, Picasso soon began to read other pieces to a few friends, sometimes in French, sometimes in Spanish. Then he let Zervos have some for Les Cahiers d’Art, and the secret was out. The Surrealists were delighted; Breton introduced the poems, while Hugnet, Eluard, and others wrote laudatory pieces welcoming their new colleague.

  Towards the end of February, 1936, Vollard and the Braques came to eat a paella with Picasso: Vollard, in aging, had become a bore, and having told his invariable anecdote about Meissonier once again, he went to sleep. Picasso was very easily vexed at this time and he could only just contain himself: he managed it, however, and when Vollard woke up and went away the party grew more cheerful. Picasso and Braque began to talk about poetry, and Picasso read some of his in French, observing that he did not think highly of what he wrote. The discussion grew animated: Picasso stated that punctuation merely served to hide the private parts of literature—he had begun by using dashes, but even they were improper—and furthermore that for his part he would like to run all the words together. They talked on and on: it must have been something like their early days, with perspective and shattered academic standards flying right and left, and revolution—aesthetic revolution—in the air.

  But here the revolution had already been carried out. For once in his life Picasso was no longer an innovator. Apollinaire had suppressed punctuation more than twenty years before and Mallarmé even earlier: the Surrealists had made it an article of faith: and without Max Jacob and then Breton, Leiris and Eluard, above all Eluard, Picasso would never have written this essentially Surrealist verse with its free association and its background of automatic writing.

  In the portrait of Sabartés these qualities are not particularly evident, perhaps because like many of his visual portraits it was intended to give a certain specific pleasure; but in other pieces the scorn for all conventional form, the wild fantasy of a liberated subconscious, and the obscurity inherent in what is sometimes a private and incommunicable sematology (obscurer still where a foreign language, with its unshared associations, is concerned) is as apparent as it is in many of his predecessors.

  Curiously enough, just as Picasso was entering this phase Eluard was moving on to another. This did not harm their increasing friendship, and early in 1936 Picasso drew Eluard’s portrait, while some months later he illustrated two of Eluard’s books, La Barre d’appui and Les Yeux fertiles, with etchings, one of which is a portrait of Eluard’s frail, exquisite Nusch, his second wife. There were to be three pictures for this book, and Picasso used a single large plate divided into four; at the top there is Nusch; next to her a strange calligraphic drawing of a woman looking at the sun; below Marie-Thérèse asleep on her arms; and in the fourth space Picasso set the imprint of his broad, capable, short-fingered hand. And Eluard, in spite of his comparative poverty and uncertain health, went down to Barcelona to speak at the opening of a traveling exhibition of Picasso’s works organized by the Amics de l’Art nou, Friends of Modern Art, an occasion upon which Dalí uttered the curious statement, “Picasso is a first-class express that has reached Barcelona forty years late.”

  Some, like Eluard and many readers extremely sensitive to poetry, liked Picasso’s verse: others, like Gertrude Stein, did not. She said, “He commenced to write poems but this writing was never his writing. After all the egoism of a poet is not at all the egoism of a writer, there is nothing to say about it, it is not. No.… Picasso, he did not work, it was not for him to decide every moment what he saw, no, poetry for him was something to be made during rather bitter meditations, but agreeably enough, in a café.

  “This was his life for two years, of course he who could write,
write so well with drawings and with colours, knew very well that to write with words was, for him, not to write at all. Of course he understood that but he did not wish to allow himself to be awakened, there are moments in life when one is neither dead nor alive and for two years Picasso was neither dead nor alive, it was not an agreeable period for him, but a period of rest, he, who all his life needed to empty himself and to empty himself, during two years he did not empty himself, that is to say not actively, actually he really emptied himself completely, emptied himself of many things and above all of being subjugated by a vision which was not his own vision.”

  Still others, though in tune with much of Picasso’s visual work, feel uneasy when they are confronted with his verse: insofar as it is Picasso, they say, it cannot fail to have a true poetic content; but the Surrealist process is rather hit-or-miss, rather private, not to say hermetic, and probably, since it is an open invitation to self-indulgence, facility, and enthusiasm, much more fun to write than it is to read. They do not deny that Picasso’s concatenation of earthy, concrete signs, filled with color, can take on a certain magnificence, above all in its original Spanish, but they say that like most poetry it goes on too long and that it lacks the taut discipline of his plastic expression; and sometimes they are embarrassed. Yet how fair is it to judge poetry, above all this kind of poetry, in anything but its original language? Picasso’s portrait of Sabartés, for example, begins Ascua de amistad, and a Spanish ear will instantly, unconsciously, catch the echo of pascua, with its associations with the warmth and happiness of Christmas and Easter, all of which are completely lost in translation.

  Good, bad, or a mixture of the two, poetry was a sheet-anchor for Picasso in late 1935 and early 1936. Sabartés was another; and so was going out at night: Picasso took to haunting Saint-Germain-des-Prés—Lipp, the Deux Magots, the Café de Flore, meeting friends almost lost to sight during Olga’s social reign. But the hold was frail enough, and the storm increased; not only were there all the preparations for the ADLAN show, but two more exhibitions in Paris called for all his attention just at a time when, after a temporary lull, the legal proceedings reached a fresh crisis.

  One was a show of drawings at the Galéries Renou et Colle, the other an important exhibition of paintings at Paul Rosenberg’s. People were in and out of the rue La Boëtie all day long, dealers, friends, unknown well-wishers, lawyers’ clerks and process-servers; and although Sabartés was a great help to him, both as a watch-dog and a secretary, Picasso became entirely overwrought. “I can’t bear it any longer,” he said to Sabartés, day after day. “You can see for yourself that this is no sort of a life.”

  He was not present at the Rosenberg vernissage, which, with Picasso’s new notoriety as a poet as well as with all the gossip about his private life, was one of the events of the Paris year; but he went eventually. He was received with ecstatic applause, congratulations on the many pictures sold (dealers could never understand that he hated selling his pictures, parting with them), and with flatulent praise of a kind harder to bear than any blame.

  This, together with the incessant importunities of friends and strangers, the inveterate malice of the law, and his sterility as a painter, was more than he could stand: harassed by the past, harassed by the present, and appalled by the future, he made his decision: to forget everything he left Paris, determined never to come back. On March 25 Sabartés saw him off at the Gare de Lyon: and he went to Juan-les-Pins, where one would have thought he must meet the memory of Olga at every step. Perhaps that was what he intended. Sabartés explains it by the analogy of the bullfighter who does not run away from the bull. However that may be, in order to avoid meeting her in the flesh he went there under a name very well known to him and to Sabartés but not to many others; and his letters, writs, and processes were forwarded to Pablo Ruiz.

  Chapter XV

  FROM Juan-les-Pins Pablo Ruiz wrote to Sabartés quite often: he was sleeping eleven and twelve hours a day; he was working; he was giving up painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, and poetry to devote himself entirely to singing; the rags Sabartés had sent him to clean his brushes had made him very happy. The letters had a tone of deliberate facetiousness, as though Picasso were withdrawing some part of his unreserved confidence and retreating into his privacy: Sabartés found it difficult to make out what was really going on in his friend’s mind.

  According to Sabartés Picasso was alone at Juan-les-Pins; but Sabartés’ literary discretion is such that he and Picasso appear to move in an entirely male society, where women are mentioned no more than they are in the traditional Moslem world. Other writers say that he had Marie-Thérèse with him. It may be so: no one can possibly tell what rules either or both laid down for their friendship, and although Picasso did not install her in the deserted rue La Boëtie he may well have taken her to the south—he hated to be alone.

  Whether Marie-Thérèse was there or not, the block between Picasso and his canvas was moving at last. Not very much—a great new stimulus would be required for that—but just enough to allow him to paint a little. “Femme à la montre” is dated April 30, 1936: it is a small oil of a woman with a wrist-watch sitting on the ground in a curiously confined space; a comb lies next to her and she is looking into a glass. The reflection is only a blur, and on the wall behind her there is a shadow, something scarcely to be seen in Picasso’s painting since his neo-classical period and not often then. Her forehead is Marie-Thérèse’s, but her curves are not; yet this may be due to her dress, whose pattern of squares with a dot in the middle of each was particularly suitable to the angular planes of long ago. No one would describe the “Femme à la montre” as an outstanding picture; but on the other hand no one but Picasso could have painted it.

  The block against graphic work had never been so strong: when Picasso returned to Paris in the middle of May, and when he could at last be induced to show Sabartés what he had done, he produced a number of drawings, some colored. The minotaur (or rather a minotaur, for they were many), looking pleased, drags a little hand-cart loaded with a dead or dying mare and her new-born foal, carefully roped in, with a lantern hanging from her upright leg. Sabartés says he is moving house, a pretty thought that he probably had straight from Picasso. Another minotaur is doing much the same, a huge grim minotaur with that outstretched arm, carrying a gaunt white horse from a dark cavern with pale hands reaching out of it to a sunlit cavern inhabited by a blond girl with flowers in her hair. Then there are scenes of a faun sitting quietly at a table; something very like a Holy Family; and two horrible old men laughing at themselves in a mirror. Sabartés’ language, symbolic and otherwise, was close to Picasso’s; and reading these drawings as a record far more legible than the letters he had received and taking the absences into account, he saw that the whole sea itself was not enough to wash away all the bitterness in his friend’s spirit.

  Still, work had begun again: and for Picasso work was a sovereign remedy. Long before, he had committed himself to illustrating Buffon’s Histoire naturelle for Vollard: according to his invariable custom he had put it off until tomorrow; but now tomorrow had come at last, and he turned to his animals with the greatest zeal, producing at least one a day. Here there was no constraint, no question of following the text: Buffon named the creature, Picasso drew it. Few techniques were unknown to him, and for this series of thirty-one plates he used that of sugar-aquatint which, though more laborious in its stopping-out and burnishing, can give a wonderful variety and delicacy of tone, like that of a brush-drawing. Forty years before, in Pallarès’ village, he had come by an intimate knowledge of sheep, goats, cattle, the farmyard in general, and long before that he had been drawing bulls, horses, and dogs. Now all this came to the surface again, fresh and clear, in a delightful sequence of naturalistic prints: he worked on them high up near the Sacré-Coeur, without the slightest need for a model to produce the ftuffed-out broody hen, ready to step from the page in indignation; and his ram, a half-bred merino, might have come straig
ht from the Horta sketchbook that had lain unopened all this time at his mother’s house in Barcelona. He spent his days in Lacourière’s ramshackle workshop, and when the craftsman, the best in Paris, was treating the plates or printing them off on his archaic press, Picasso and Sabartés walked about Montmartre: there had been important changes, but the village of those early years was still essentially the same; the Bateau-Lavoir had neither yet collapsed nor burned, and Frédé was still sitting there outside the Lapin Agile, a little way down the hill from one of the remaining vineyards.

  These were better days. The legal settlement was moving towards its costly end; and if Picasso’s work was not of the very first importance it was still work in which he took great pleasure. The Eluards were in Paris, and their friendship increased; Paul was writing exquisite lines about Picasso in his Les Yeux fertiles, and Nusch enchanted him with her fragile beauty and her full jolly laugh. Except that she had more style, and of course more merriment, she might have come straight from some family of his saltimbanques. She had a small round head on a long graceful neck; she was lithe and willowy, as well she might be, since like her father before her she had been a tumbler. It is said that Eluard saw her performing in the street, fell deep in love with her, and married her directly.

  Picasso, the Eluards, and many other friends often met at the Deux Magots, and one evening Picasso was there with Sabartés—the Eluards were elsewhere that day—when he saw a young woman take off her elegant embroidered gloves, lay her hand on the table with its fingers spread, and stab between them with a pointed knife: her aim was imperfect, and every miss was marked with blood.