In Dora Maar’s case the defeat was, at least apparently, more spectacular than in Picasso’s. Hers was a better mind in some respects; her education and her general culture far superior. But quite apart from the fact that he was a creator rather than a consumer of culture, and quite apart from his elemental strength, he had at least twenty years more of experience and far less scruple in dispute. It is also said, though by a hostile witness, that he was incapable of love—certainly a steady course of conquest and egoism must diminish that capacity—and if that was so in his case but not in hers, then in any conflict she would have been totally disarmed. Hypotheses aside, her relationship with Picasso eventually brought her to what may be termed a nervous breakdown, and to the brink of something worse; while the effect on his happiness, though less evident, was perhaps deeper and longer-lasting still.
But all that was years away. In 1937 everything seemed well enough: Olga, though always present on the edge of his field of vision—she wrote to him continually, and she had the custody of Paulo—belonged chiefly to the past; he was pleased with Marie-Thérèse and Maya, and delighted with Dora Maar.
She did not live with him, but she found him a magnificent studio so that he could work in Paris, and presently she moved into a flat of her own, just round the corner in the rue de Savoie.
The studio, or rather the set of studios and other rooms, consisted of the top floors and the attics of a noble though now decrepit town-house that had been built for the Savoie-Carignan family in the seventeenth century: absurdly enough it stood in the rue des Grands-Augustins, where Balzac had situated the beginning of the Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu; and from the description of the winding staircase Picasso’s number seven may have been the very house. It lies back from the narrow ancient street, with a walled courtyard in front of it, and until a little while ago it looked as though Poussin or Watteau or Balzac himself might have walked out of the door at any moment. Now it has been done up: white, trim, severe, uninviting, and somehow false, the very opposite of what it was in Picasso’s time when, to his delight, he found that his part of it strongly resembled the Bateau-Lavoir.
Even before moving in he had done a great deal of work. Under the stimulus of Dora Maar and the Spanish war the flow had begun again: yet a little disconcertingly the earliest picture of 1937 is a curved, brightly-colored Marie-Thérèse sitting in a small armchair, set in that same confined space with barely head-room for her cheerful hat. She is wearing a garment whose many colors are traversed by close-set black lines, so that the different surfaces resemble the corrugated cardboard he liked to use for his cast-plaster figures: she is perfectly serene, with her mild eyes both on the same side of her face—an economical device which allowed Picasso to retain the profile-line and which created an uproar at the time, though it is now so easily accepted.
But the war in Spain was not going well: although the direct assault on Madrid had been thrust back after terrible hand-to-hand fighting in the streets and the university, it was becoming even more clear that non-intervention by the great powers was an ugly farce; France and England may have acted in a muddled good faith, but they lost themselves in a cloud of words while Hitler and Mussolini poured in their forces on the Fascist side. By this stage there were some ten thousand Germans and four times as many Italians with Franco’s armies, to say nothing of the Moors, while Hugh Thomas puts the number of Russians at any given time at about five hundred, though of course they also sent planes, guns, and tanks, some of which were used by the International Brigade of foreign volunteers. The German and Italian troops, moreover, were highly trained regulars; and among the Germans there were many Luftwaffe commanders and pilots, eager to improve their skill and to try out their methods and their weapons on living targets in preparation for the coming even greater war.
With passionate energy Picasso wrote a poem, “The Dream and Lie of Franco,” a Surrealist poem with the furious words tumbling upon one another in something near the delirium that Eluard once thought the expression of reason at its purest: “fandango de lechuzas escabeche de espadas de pulpos de mal aguero estropajo depelos de coronillas de pié en medio de la sartén en pelotas—puesto sobre el cucurucho del sorbete de bacalao frito en la sarna de su corazón de cabestro—la boca llena de la jalea de chinches de sus palabras. A literal translation of this fragment—“mad dance of screech-owls sharp pricking sauce of swords of ill-omened squids swab of tonsure-hair standing stark-naked in the middle of the frying-pan—set on the cornet of fried stockfish in the itch of his bell-ox heart—his mouth crammed with the bed-bug jelly of his words”—gives little of the sonorous violence of the Spanish and nothing of its associations: but it was meant for a Spanish audience, and it was illustrated in the traditional Spanish and Catalan way, as an aleluya or an auca, with a series of little pictures, each self-contained but all connected. They are etchings, some showing the horrors of war—women killed, houses burning, innocence destroyed—others describing Franco, who is represented as a loathsome amorphous thing, a kind of sea-squirt, with short, sparsely bristled protuberances, yet sufficiently man-shaped to be recognized as human: he destroys a classical bust with a mattock; he is a jackbooted phallus walking a tight-rope with a holy banner; encircled by barbed wire he prays before a monstrance labeled / duro (five pesetas—the word for money in general); he kills Pegasus; he is a kind of vile centaur ripped up by a bull: the bull appears three times, twice attacking the Caudillo and once merely terrifying him. At first there were fourteen of these scenes; then in June Picasso added four more of shrieking women, slaughtered babies, a murdered girl.
The sequence is not clear, but sequence is not necessary: the whole set of prints and their integrated poem express the hideous chaos, unreason, and meaningless cruelty of the war, and Picasso’s utter rejection and loathing not only of war but of the right-wing values. It is perhaps significant that the Cross does not appear.
The “Sueño y mentira de Franco” was the clearest statement of Picasso’s attitude at a time when there were rumors of his being not entirely in favor of the Republic: it deliberately committed him to a position from which there was no possibility of retreat. And since 1937 was to be the year of another great international exhibition in Paris, the Spanish government asked him to contribute, to undertake a whole wall in their pavilion.
Picasso said yes, certainly; but in Spain yes, certainly very often means no, and even if the officials who made the request did not already know that Picasso hated anything like an order or a commission that would bind him, they must have gone away in a state of gloomy doubt.
In fact he turned straight to another calm Marie-Thérèse with a garland of flowers on her pretty head; to some more still-lives; to Marie-Thérèse sitting with her legs tucked under her on the floor, her back turned to a partly-opened window with a balcony beyond it, a partly-opened mirror by her side, and she facing a plant in a pot. The slashing portrait of Dora Maar probably belongs to the same period, though its month is not known for sure: here the color is more violent by far and the feeling is wholly different; yet here again there are the double eyes (one white, one orange) of the full-face and the profile, and here again she is sitting in a small armchair in the same confined and carefully described space or cell.
Some more still-lives, for now, after his long unnatural rest, he was working with enormous speed; and then he turned to a very curious group of pictures. The most frequently reproduced of the four or five is the “Baignade,” and at first glance it looks as though it might have been painted at the same time as the terrible mantis-headed bather of 1929. The vast space of sea and sky is the same, and the great figures made of smooth wood or even bone have an obvious kinship with the monster; but the whole spirit has changed, and the figures, in this case two architectural girls with minute faces, egg-like bellies, and pointed oval breasts, playing with a boat on the edge of the water, are mild, no more poisonous than milk; and even the prodigious head that rears up over the horizon towards them has only a look of pleased c
uriosity on its face. The calmness is in no way menacing: there is no nightmare at all.
Yet at this very time Picasso’s own Málaga was undergoing the worst nightmare in its long history of siege, storming, fire, and massacre. Since the early days of the war Málaga and the country round it had been a Republican peninsula in Fascist territory, connected with the rest of Republican Spain by the coast road and little more. In mid-January, 1937, the attack began: by early February the Fascists, including nine battalions of Italians with armored cars and tanks, entered the shelled, bombed, and ruined city. A most savage proscription began at once, and death reached out along the Almería road, where the armor and the planes caught up with the countless refugees.
The fall of Málaga almost exactly coincides with one of the calmest new “bone” pictures, a woman sitting on a beach, taking a sea-urchin prickle out of her foot, and with the Marie-Thérèse by her looking-glass. There is no doubt that the news reached Paris slowly, incomplete and unreliable; but even so it came in time. At one point it seemed to me that the absence of an immediate reaction on Picasso’s part was significant of his detachment from his native town and of his greater identification with Catalonia: on reflection I think the fury was there, mounting steadily as the reports came in but not finding its expression for some weeks, when another hideous tragedy acted as a catalyst, releasing all his pent-up emotion in an outburst that embraced not only its immediate cause but the whole of the Spanish war.
About March or April Picasso moved into the rue des Grands-Augustins. Although he did not mean to live there—he retained the flat in the rue La Boëtie—moving his easels, canvases, tools, and all the objects he needed about him was a serious upheaval. Yet his output scarcely faltered: almost at once the big studios took on the familiar smell of paint and turpentine, and the pictures began to line up along the walls.
Now at last he had almost as much space as he could want, at least for several years. The house does not look very large from the street, but inside the scale is altered and Picasso’s two top floors had studios like low cathedrals, all the more impressive since they were approached by a dark winding staircase. In the course of centuries the building had been cut up in a haphazard sort of way, so that there were also quantities of little additional rooms, together with more and unexpected stairs, but it was the studios that remained in the visitor’s memory—vast dusty spaces with huge beams and bare rafters, old red hexagonal tiles on the floor, tall windows giving on to the courtyard. They opened to the west, but Picasso never worried much about the light: as a boy he had used a candle or a lamp when the day would not serve, and now he turned on the electricity when the Paris sky was dark or when, as it often happened, he chose to work through the night.
On the second floor of the house a great room opened off the little antechamber, and it was here that Picasso received his less familiar visitors; another, lying beyond it, which had been a weaver’s workshop, came to be known as the sculpture-studio, and that on the floor above, where once Jean-Louis Barrault had rehearsed, as the painting-studio: its walls sloped inwards, and through the boards of the low ceiling a thin rain of dust floated down from the loft above. A little booth opened off it, with running water, for his engraving, and all this gave him room and to spare: but to begin with he worked entirely in the lower studio.
It was here, in May, 1937, that he painted one of his most important pictures, perhaps the greatest of his life.
On April 26 German planes under Franco’s orders attacked the open town of Guernica: wave after wave of Heinkels and Junkers dropped incendiary and high-explosive bombs and machine-gunned the streets from half-past four until nightfall. Of the 7,000 inhabitants they killed 1,654 and wounded 889: and the town was virtually destroyed.
After the second world-war, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to say nothing of London, Dresden, and the Ruhr, 2,000 casualties in an evening does not sound remarkable: in 1937 it shocked the whole world as the first cold-blooded, systematic destruction of civilians, as a new pitch of inhuman savagery and as a victory of darkness over light. Independent war-correspondents and photographers were there, and in spite of Nationalist claims that the people of Guernica had themselves blown up their town with dynamite in the sewers nobody had the least doubt of what had happened: the news came almost at once, authentic and utterly convincing. It reached Paris on April 28.
Picasso now reacted instantly, with his whole being; and his response was of course in terms of paint. On May 1 he made five sketches, three of separate figures and two of the whole composition as he then conceived it; and from the very first the three essential forms were present: the dying horse, the bull, and the woman holding a lamp from a window. From then until mid-June he worked feverishly: indeed, Zervos says that, “the first stage of the picture was conceived in a state of extreme emotional stress.” Yet he also found time to write a considered statement, which began, “The Spanish conflict is reaction’s fight against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing but one unceasing war against reaction and against the death of art. How could it be thought, even for a moment, that I was in agreement with reaction and evil?… In the picture I am now working on and which I shall call ‘Guernica’ and in all my recent work I clearly express my loathing for the military caste that has plunged Spain into a sea of suffering and death.”
In spite of his boiling fury and distress he worked with the utmost care. “Guernica” was not thrown on to its huge canvas in the excitement of a day: it was the result of weeks of sustained tension, and like his other very great works it was preceded by scores of preliminary studies that brought all his emotion, all his power of original thought, all his vast experience to a focus. This was to be his indictment of evil, and if it was to succeed he must use his weapons perfectly: there was no room for hasty improvisation.
The studies have been preserved—many are to be seen in the New York Museum of Modern Art, together with the great mural itself—and thanks to them, to their careful dating, and to the presence of Dora Maar, who took brilliant photographs of Picasso at work, the development of “Guernica” can be followed from the first pencil sketch to the finished canvas: they give a fascinating, unparallelled view of the processes of Picasso’s mind brought to its highest pitch of creativity.
Before touching on these successive stages, one should perhaps attempt some description of the picture itself, of the final version as we now see it. It is immense, twenty feet across and nearly twelve high; yet it is not the size that strikes one first but rather the shock of being in the presence of a world in which the emotion itself is vast. Nor does one notice the total lack of color: black, gray, and white are natural to this silent world, silent in spite of the screams—the stunned silence of extreme grief, of disaster, and of the moments after the explosion of a bomb.
High in the middle of the picture an electric-light bulb blazes from the darkness in a shade that is like an eye, the all-seeing eye of many an early fresco; beneath it staggers a gaunt shrieking horse with the stump of a lance through its back, the point emerging from its side; under the hoofs lies the body of a man, shattered as a statue is shattered, with clean breaks, one arm stretching to the left-hand edge of the picture, the other grasping a broken sword: it touches a little growing flower. To the right of the horse a woman’s horrified head stretches from a window and her long arm holds out an oil-lamp, reaching almost to the horse’s head and lighting up not the house from which she leans but a single sharply-defined area, the horse’s chest and the upper part of another woman, partly naked and moving painfully, as it were dazed, towards the center: her trailing leg with its huge knee and foot reaches the right-hand lower edge of the picture. From the darkness to the left of the horse, but on another plane, the dangerous head, shoulders, and one leg of a great bull emerge into the light, while below the bull and to the left a screaming woman squats, holding a dead child between her feet. Far to the right her shriek is answered by another, by a woman trapped in burni
ng wreckage with her white arms stretched up and her white head flung back in the same atrocious agony. The small lit square window above her, with pale flames over it, corresponds to the white tail of the bull, which rises from the brute’s hindquarters against a gray rectangular plane, the connection between its lit head and its dark body being obscure. And dimly, behind that menacing head, a bird—dove, chicken, goose: certainly domestic—shrieks upwards in the darkness from its ledge.
All these figures are treated with a high degree of distortion—in every case except for that of the dead baby (whose nose most shockingly hangs over the forehead of its inverted face, like some of those in his Crucifixion studies) their eyes, for example, are both on the same side of their heads—and their surfaces are flat, without the least modeling. There are hints of depth in the perspective of the little window and the lines of the dimly-seen houses, in the foreshortening of the horse’s mouth, and of the broken sword, but otherwise the space about the figures is organized in superimposed angular planes.
After the first shock one sees that order underlies the apparent chaos and that although at a casual glance the picture might seem to be a polyptych made up of panels containing the bull, then the horse, then the woman with the lamp, and lastly the woman trapped, the whole is in fact bound together not only by the interpenetrating planes and the almost continuous sequence of limbs at the bottom but also and even more powerfully by a broad-based triangle formed by drawn lines and the superimposition of planes and reaching its apex just above the central lamp, with less obvious answering diagonals rising from near the base to the outer edges.