Yet upon the whole, in spite of the sea, the sun, the gaiety, and a kind of extra holiday in the form of an autumn journey to Switzerland, where he saw Paul Klee, stress and anxiety predominate in these later pictures of 1937. It could hardly have been otherwise, insofar as Picasso was a Spaniard through and through, a Republican and, though not committed to any party, one who swam in the left-wing atmosphere of his time: for in Spain the whole of the north was gone, and although Madrid still held out, two-thirds of the country, together with the Basque industrial towns and the Asturian mines, was in Franco’s hands. And Klee, one of the few painters Picasso liked and respected, was a living example of what Fascism had in store for the rest of the world—living only because he had escaped from Germany, where the Bauhaus had been liquidated, where much of Klee’s work had been confiscated, and where some particularly fine examples were now being shown in the official Nazi exhibition of Degenerate Art at Munich.
On the same basis 1938 might have been expected to be a barren year: it was nothing of the kind. In January he made some portraits of Maya, now between two and three years old, a squat child at this time, though later, when her legs grew, she became far prettier. These have little in common with the early portraits of her half-brother, though there is the same childish delicacy of color: in one the lumpish little girl in a check pinafore sits grasping a wooden horse and a brutish doll; both Maya and the doll are double-faced, in that they each have both a profile and a three-quarter-face nose, and their eyes are on what would conventionally be the same side of their head; her ash-fair hair, inherited from her mother or perhaps from her paternal grandfather, Don José, is green, and green also invades her complexion. But in both this and the companion portrait where the doll is a more comely object in a sailor hat, she is entirely Maya. Sometimes Picasso’s women tend to merge in a general moonfaced type, but his friends and children never, however much he might redistribute their features for simultaneity or other reasons: nor do his dogs.
Then early in the year he rediscovered cocks. He had already modeled one at Boisgeloup and he had etched another for Buffon and of course he had drawn them at Horta, but these were even prouder birds, spurred, crowing, full of male aggression. It is all the more shocking therefore to find one upside-down and helpless on a woman’s lap, its legs tied, its bosom already half-plucked, its furious head straining up: the woman is horrible, almost bald and entirely indifferent; one hand grasps a wing as she gazes into the distance; and there is a kitchen knife on the floor beside her. The bright colors, the silence, the woman’s lunatic composure, are indescribably shocking. In a way she is allied to another woman painted the summer before, a strange figure with mad eyes and a mad knowing smile (said by Penrose to be Paul Eluard) suckling a cat: or rather a stiff-legged tiger-striped kitten that is also upside-down on her lap. The identification seems curious, but Penrose was at Mougins when the picture was painted; he was intimately acquainted with the people concerned; and he can scarcely be wrong. He speaks of Picasso’s “diabolical playfulness” that summer, and it is not impossible that this Tiresias Eluard is connected with a circumstance that Penrose, his hands tied by decency and respect for his friends, could hardly have mentioned, but what Picasso did not mind relating—it was in fact fairly common knowledge. “Nusch was wonderful,” he said to Geneviève Laporte. “Exactly what Paul needed. You know Paul would have liked me to go to bed with her, and I didn’t want to. I was very fond of Nusch, but not in that way. Paul was furious. He said that if I refused I was not a real friend. Sometimes he used to take a whore to an hotel. Nusch and I would wait for him, gossiping in the café downstairs.” Picasso had a great tenderness for Madame Eluard, and he was very much her friend: one of his portraits of her is inscribed Poor Nusch, poor Nusch, for he knew, in reverse, something of the trials of being married to a creative man—Eluard was as temperamental as Picasso, though in another way.
The picture may therefore contain a private reference to Eluard’s notion of friendship, a reference important only in that it would show Picasso’s cheerful acceptance in those he loved of ways so very unlike his own; but on the other hand the woman with a cat, which was preceded by a likeness of Eluard dressed as an Arlésienne, may simply be part of Picasso’s delight in dressing up, wearing masks and false noses, a taste that grew on him with the years and that may in its turn give some support to the suggestion that the woman with the cock is in fact a self-portrait. Her lock of hair certainly resembles Picasso’s; and had one no fear of wandering in the jungle of hypotheses the cock, the knife, and the transvestite man might be made to take on a startling symbolic significance.
This spring also saw the beginning of a new manner, and whenever it is mentioned the name of Arcimboldo comes up, since Picasso took to painting figures with the texture and the appearance of more or less natural substances, such as matting or woven straw, while some four hundred years before the sixteenth-century Lombard Arcimboldo had used exquisitely painted fruit, vegetables, wheatsheaves, and so on, according to the character and the season, to build up his ingenious, amusing, somewhat uneasy people—pieces of virtuoso, slightly Surrealist decoration. There the likeness ends; and citing Arcimboldo as Picasso’s predecessor, inspiration, and model is as valid as pointing out that two poets, belonging to widely different civilizations and saying entirely different things, both used something like the same meter.
A little while after Hitler swallowed Austria, which he did in March, 1938, Picasso met Sabartés in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and took him back to the studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins. Picasso was obviously at his most agreeable, and he could be wonderfully charming on occasion: Sabartés was completely reconquered, and they saw one another several times before July, when Picasso and Dora Maar went down to Mougins again, suddenly darting off by night with the Eluards at an hour’s notice.
Here he carried on with his basket-work pictures, with portraits of Dora Maar, sometimes combined with the matting texture and carried to the extremity of distortion, and of Nusch Eluard, in much the same cheerful company as the year before. There are photographs of him sitting by the sea, as brown as an Indian and gleaming with health: he is fifty-six, but there is no sign of age in his trim, well-made body, very little in his still boyish face, and only a streak or two of gray in his thick black hair.
Yet presently the sun was overcast. In September the dispute between Germany and Czechoslovakia suddenly rose to a horrifying crisis, and after some days of feverish, fruitless negotiation by the Western politicians everybody thought that a general war was inevitable and imminent—Armageddon in a few days time. All Europe was in arms: the French began to mobilize their enormous armies; men vanished from the beaches, and the endless columns of troops moved into position, while in England the air-raid sirens howled by way of trial and eager volunteers dug shelters from the bombs. Picasso was very deeply disturbed: as the news grew even worse he packed everything into the car and drove north through the night to the seclusion of Le Tremblay. Then on the very last day of the month, against all hope, the Munich agreement was signed: it betrayed ten million Czechs and Slovaks, gave the Nazis another highly efficient armament industry, and made the war inevitable. Daladier flew back to cheering crowds in Paris, Chamberlain to cheering crowds in London. He told them that he had brought back peace with honor, peace for our time.
Did Picasso share in the general sigh of ignoble relief? Perhaps not: war would have withdrawn the Axis forces from Spain, and once they had gone the Republicans might well have beaten Franco. It is true that by this time the position was very grave, the Nationalists’ drive having reached the Mediterranean coast between Valencia and Tortosa, so that they occupied a belt a hundred miles in depth, cutting off Madrid from Barcelona; but they had been held and counter-attacked on the Ebro. The war was still in the balance, and the removal of foreign troops, above all of foreign aircraft, would probably have been decisive, while a French invasion would have made victory certain.
In the precarious,
guilty euphoria that followed the betrayal of Czechoslovakia Picasso returned to Paris; and there he met Sabartés again. They talked about Munich, about the friends they shared, about Picasso’s poems, old and new; Picasso took him to Le Tremblay, where he saw the recent works that moved him so; and presently they came to a discreet agreement that bound Sabartés to Picasso’s service (but not to the same house) for the rest of his life.
It was at this time that Picasso painted the menacing still-lives with bulls’ heads, heavy with reference to “Guernica,” and probably the curious picture, related to the Mayas of January, in which an equally dwarvish child in a sailor-suit, the ribbon of the hat reading PICASSO, holds a butterfly-net while a red butterfly flies between the net and his nose. As well as “Guernica,” one of these still-lives and the child caught the ingenuous American soldier’s eye at the Liberation Salon, and he explained them to Picasso. The child: “I said I thought it to be a self-portrait—the sailor’s suit, the net, the red butterfly showing Picasso as a person seeking a solution to the problem of the times, trying to find a better world. He listened intently and finally said, ‘Yes, it’s me, but I did not mean it to have any political significance at all.’ I asked why he painted himself as a sailor. ‘Because,’ he answered, ‘I always wear a sailor shirt. See?’ He opened up his shirt and pulled at his underwear—it was white with blue stripes! ‘But what of the red butterfly?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t you deliberately make it red because of its political significance?’ ‘Not particularly,’ he replied. ‘If it was, it was in my subconscious!’ ‘But,’ I insisted, ‘it must have a definite meaning for you whether you say so or not. What’s in your subconscious is a result of your conscious thinking. There is no escape from reality.’”
Whatever the state of his subconscious mind may have been, at this stage Picasso was certainly not a Communist, in spite of the passionate commitment of many of his friends. In Spain the Communists, under the direct control of Moscow, were fighting the Trotskyists and the anarchists with almost as much ferocity as they fought the Fascists, thus weakening the already divided Left to a catastrophic degree; and many of Picasso’s friends were anarchists. Furthermore, the Communists had made a partly successful attempt at importing Stalin’s great Russian purges into Spain. It took an even more obvious, even more immediate tyranny, together with the Communist share in the French resistance, the influence of his friends, and the enormous exaltation of the Liberation to make him a card-carrying member of the Party, perhaps the most apolitical Communist in France.
The young man then turned to the still-life with the bull. There were two of these pictures, both with a candle on the left, a palette and brushes on an open book in the middle, and the bull’s head on a little plinth, lowering away on the right: in one the candle has a green shade and the bull is red; in the other a candle burns unshaded and it is accompanied by another source of light, perhaps the sun, while the bull is black. It was the black bull that was shown in the Liberation Salon, and it was the black bull that the American soldier explained. “The bull, I said, must represent Fascism, the lamp, by its powerful glow, the palette and the book all represented culture and freedom—the things we’re fighting for—the painting showing the fierce struggle going on between the two. ‘No,’ said Picasso, ‘the bull is not Fascism, but it is brutality and darkness.’”
Then at a later interview, when Seckler told him that the political significance of those things was there whether he consciously thought of it or not, “Yes,” he answered, “what you say is very true, but I don’t know why I used those particular objects. They don’t represent anything in particular. The bull is a bull, the palette a palette, amd the lamp is a lamp. That’s all. But there is definitely no political connection there for me. Darkness and brutality, yes, but not Fascism.”
Whether the train of thought that is evident in these bulls’ heads would have continued through the rest of 1938 cannot be told, for in that cruel winter he was struck down with sciatica. It is one of the most painful maladies known to man; in no position can the suffering body find lasting rest, and the nights stretch out for centuries; and it is made even worse, if possible, by being somewhat ridiculous. Like many hypochondriacs Picasso was more alarmed by the prospect of illness than by disease itself: he was not the best of patients, but he did put up with the excruciating pain surprisingly well.
Fortunately, since the doctor had said the sciatica would lay him up for at least three months, Sabartés was back, and every day Sabartés came through the vile weather to keep him company in the evenings and late into the night, Picasso keeping him as long as ever he could, sitting there by the fire in the crowded, inconvenient main bedroom of the rue La Boëtie. It had been the heart of Picasso’s one sad attempt at an orderly life, and the two brass beds were still there; Picasso lay in one, amid a heap of papers; Olga’s, of course, was empty. But since her time the room had gradually taken on the appearance of a doss-house: the closely-packed chairs were covered with further heaps that had to be removed for the stream of visitors; some fair-sized tables had been brought in to take up what little space was left, and all but one were hidden under papers, books, portfolios, and a confusion of objects such as dead electric bulbs, empty match-boxes, and packets that had once held cigarettes. Upon the one exception stood the boot of some defunct motor-car, probably salvaged from a rubbish-dump. Between Picasso’s groans they had long, desultory conversations about painting, truth in painting, portraiture: to fill a gap Sabartés observed that he would like to see himself as a Spanish gentleman of the sixteenth century, with a plumed bonnet to cover his bald pate. In an offhand tone Picasso said he would do it, but at this point he was interrupted by another bout of agony, and his voice changed to a howl, a howl mingled with a description of the picture—a life-sized Sabartés accompanied by a naked woman and a very lean dog, like Kazbek.
The next day was Christmas: the sciatica had been going on for a week. Sabartés had virtually dismissed the idea of the portrait, not only because of the pain but even more because Picasso had already thought the picture out, and once that was done, its freshness gone, he lost interest. While they talked about painting that day Picasso said as much as he explained the process of his thought: he also said a number of other things—that he had never had a guitar in his hands before he took to painting them, that he bought one with the first money he received, and had never painted a guitar since (this was not literally true nor anything like it; but Picasso often spoke somewhat at random); that it was a mistake to suppose that when young he went to the bull-fight and then painted what he had seen—not at all, he did the painting first to earn the entrance money; and that a picture was never finished. At midday Sabartés went home in compliment to his wife’s Christmas dinner, but in the afternoon he noticed that Picasso was somewhat absent, gazing at him fixedly from time to time: he was in fact drawing, and among the drawings he had made was one of Sabartés in a ruff, wearing a velvet hat with a feather in it.
The next day Picasso’s present was an immensely accomplished portrait of his friend as a monk, together with all the designs for the costumes and settings of the Tricorne, done up in a perfect imitation of a Barcelona schoolboy’s satchel; and the day after that Sabartés in a ruff again, but without a hat.
Each of the many visitors had prescribed remedies for sciatica, and by this time the most active and convincing of them all, a picture-dealer, had persuaded Picasso to see his uncle, a medical man with a way of treating the disease by remote cautery. The first day the doctor blew all the fuses in the rue La Boëtie, but the next he brought a transformer, assembled his apparatus with the help of the chauffeur, peered at Picasso’s nose, thrust an instrument into it, and immediately cauterized a nerve. There was a smell of roasting meat. “There,” said the doctor. “That’s all.” With disarming candor he added, “If the pain goes within twenty-four hours, it’s my treatment. If it only goes later, then I have nothing to do with it.”
In fact the pain had gone already.
Picasso moved in his bed, stirred more and more briskly, got up, stood on one leg and then the other: he was cured. To call the treatment quackery would not only be unkind but absurd, if only because the legitimate bounds of psychosomatic medicine are so very wide: but perhaps they were even wider than usual for Picasso, since Picasso, more than any painter in Europe since neolithic times, was susceptible to magic in every form.