Although the patient was cured, the hypochondriac reasserted his rights, and Picasso went straight back to bed, explaining that it would be imprudent to expose himself to the weather at this stage, and staying there for much of the time until his show at Rosenberg’s gallery in January, 1939, an important exhibition that included many of the still-lives painted at Le Tremblay.
By this time the long agony of the Spanish civil war was nearing its end. After furious battles in the wild Maestrazgo country, where Picasso and Pallarès had painted in their cave, the Republicans were driven back across the Ebro with the loss of seventy thousand men. The road into Catalonia was open, and by Christmas, 1938, the main attack was under way. The Republicans, outnumbered, short of weapons and ammunition, almost devoid of armor and aircraft, were thrust north with ever-increasing speed; the retreat became a rout; and just before the fall of Barcelona on January 26, 1939, the government fled to Gerona, then to Figueras. The Prado pictures were there, in lorries, and they crossed into France a few days before Franco’s armies reached the frontier to thrust half a million refugees, soldiers and civilians, into neutral territory, where they were interned in desolate naked camps. And at the end of the war Picasso’s mother died, still in Barcelona: she was eighty-three.
Although none of this is directly apparent in Picasso’s work of the time, a great deal of his mind was taken up with the tragedy. From the very beginning of the war he had supported the Republic with his painting, his public statements, and his money: early in 1939 a government publication stated that he had given three hundred thousand francs, while Juan Larrea, an official engaged in distributing relief, put the figure at four hundred thousand. Exchange rates do not mean a great deal, because life was still unbelievably cheap in Europe in those days, and one could live quite well in Paris and run a car on three thousand francs a month: Picasso, it is true, lived better than most, but he was an abstemious man, and this sum probably represented at least three years of his expenditure. But the three or four hundred thousand francs was only the amount given to official agencies. In December, 1938, he set up two centers for feeding children (food was terribly short in the Republic), the one in Barcelona, the other in Madrid, and he started them off with two hundred thousand francs. Although he had been prosperous for the last twenty years and although his work sold well when he could bring himself to part with it, the sums he then received were small in comparison with those paid in the fifties and minute compared with those of today; he also had to provide Olga’s handsome allowance, and to look after his son and daughter and some discreet pensioners. He did not find this money easy to raise, and he forced himself to sell some pictures, such as the “Jeune fille avec un coq,” that he had always intended to keep. Then as the refugees poured into France many of them turned to him, and I have not heard of a single case where they wrote or called in vain. A typical example is to be found in Palau i Fabre’s Picasso i els seus amies Catalans: in February, 1939, the time of the exodus, a group of Catalan writers escaped from their concentration camp at Le Boulou, just on the French side of the border, and reached Perpignan, some thirteen miles further on, but still in Catalan-speaking country. There they found a restaurant that gave them credit for a few days: they slept in the station waiting-room. After these few days the restaurant-keeper presented his bill: Republican money was so much waste-paper and they had not been able to find any other; they could not tell what to do. None of them knew Picasso, but one had written some articles on him: the restaurant-keeper advanced enough to pay for a telegram asking for help—a message with little hope, there being no acquaintance whatever, no proof of identity, and none of good faith. The next day, also by telegram, the help arrived, enough to pay the bill, to buy shoes and clothes for all six men, and to take them to Toulouse with some money to spare. Then there was Joan Rebull, the sculptor: Picasso bought two of his pieces and arranged an exhibition for him in his own house. And there were many, many more, some, like Rebull and Ennc Casanovas, known, but others, the greater number, total strangers.
During these harrowing months Picasso was also preoccupied with his own mundane daily problems, one of which was moving house, always a matter of grave concern, endless indecision, and great nervous expenditure; he abominated the upheaval as an interruption to his work and his set habits; he disliked leaving what he had once possessed; and there was always the possibility that some removal-man or some person charged with receiving or giving at either end might disturb a heap or throw something away. Eventually he worked out a compromise: he would live at the rue des Grands-Augustins, taking everything he needed, but he would also keep on the flat in the rue La Boëtie, leaving some of his accumulations there, and using it if he chose. The move was complicated by the fact that the flat in the rue des Grands-Augustins had to be transformed; it had to have central-heating and many alterations and an engraver’s press had to be installed; and the workmen neither came when they were expected nor finished by the time they had agreed.
Then there was the business side of a successful painter’s life: quite apart from the Rosenberg show in January, which could be dealt with by word of mouth or by the hated telephone, Picasso had no less than twelve exhibitions in the United States during 1939, including the very important retrospective, Picasso: Forty Years of his Art, at the New York Museum of Modern Art (where “Guernica” came to rest, for the time being on the typically noncommittal Picasso terms of “extended loan” which meant that he did not relinquish possession of it), and two in London; and at least until the return of Sabartés he had no filing-system but his heaps.
But now Sabartés was back, and although his business methods were those of the middle ages they were more efficient than Picasso’s, and it is no doubt thanks to his presence that we have a surprising amount of work dating from this year.
In January, 1939, Picasso painted a “Femme couchée lisant,” a particularly engaging, quiet, rounded picture related to Marie-Thérèse: she is lying sideways on a divan, dressed, her head on a cushion and her feet tucked up, and beneath her clasped hands lies a book; but she is nearly asleep. The same day he painted another, of exactly the same size, “Femme couchée sur un canapé,” and here there is no quietness at all: the figure is made up of strong, mostly triangular, planes, and the distortion of her features is rendered the more extreme by the comparatively naturalistic treatment of the trees seen through the window, the same window that is in the other picture. An obvious but not necessarily mistaken explanation of the violent difference between the two is that it is the result of a mind deeply disturbed finding peace for a few hours and then shattering it immediately afterwards.
During these early months of 1939 he also went regularly to Lacourière’s workshop in Montmartre, where he made a number of colored etchings, experimenting with the various techniques and inventing new ones. A little earlier he had produced an ambitious, unusually large aquatint of a woman with a tambourine: she is dancing and both the front and the back of her body as well as the two sides of her face are visible, the simultaneity of the early Cubist pictures and of much later work here serving a double purpose, for she is clearly in the frenzied motion of the Charleston or the black-bottom. But now he had an idea of working on his own poems, perhaps as he and Eluard had collaborated on the Grand Air in 1936, or at least of printing them on pages adorned by himself. Vollard was very eager to bring out the book, and had Picasso’s interest lasted it might have been one of his most remarkable publications; but Picasso grew bored as the newness faded, as the problems were solved one by one, and as the details of production dragged on in tedious length. Besides, there were other things upon his mind: his painting among them. At the end of March, almost on the very day that Madrid fell at last, he painted still another portrait of Dora Maar.
There is no connection with the end of the war—all hope had gone even before Barcelona fell—and there is no kind of protest: for although in some ways Picasso was extraordinarily open, discussing his mistresses’ problems with h
is chauffeur, for example, and doing so in their presence, in others he was as secret as the tomb. What he considered his private affairs (and this included bereavement) remained completely hidden; and although “Guernica” is of course a furious protest, it is essentially impersonal, the outcry of light against darkness rather than the direct attack of one man against another body of men who have injured him. Yet the portrait of Dora Maar is one of the few pictures to which the term Expressionist, for what it is worth, can be usefully applied; and even when all allowances for hindsight are made it can still be said that the portrait is the expression of a mind that has acquired a greater intensity of perception through suffering: although it is not an unhappy picture it has a gravity of a kind scarcely to be seen before, an even fuller maturity. The face is indeed distorted in what was by now his usual manner and the features redistributed, with a hint of a double-faced nose on one side and the mouth on the other; but the two huge full-face eyes staring out and beyond the spectator and the wealth of color give the picture a singularly commanding power.
In the quietness of Le Tremblay a month later, after some more heads of Dora Maar, he painted a shocking cat with a bird in its mouth: this has been interpreted as a statement about cruelty, as a prevision of the coming war and its senseless destruction, and even as a reference to Mussolini’s attack upon Albania of the Good Friday of 1939. Picasso himself said that the theme had been in his mind for a long while, but he did not go farther: if he had been pressed he might well have said that the cat was a cat and the bird was a bird. The nature of cats is after all to catch birds, and Picasso, though kind, had no more sentimentality than can survive a childhood familiar with the bull-ring.
Even builders go at last, and in June, 1939, Picasso’s momentous move took place. By July it was over: both places were now more or less habitable, and one was at least for the moment spick and span. Although his dwellings have often been called slums, and although they looked very like vague depositories, they were not really dirty, as Picasso understood the term. He did not mind dust in his working quarters, nor cigarette-ends, crushed paint-tubes or the mess of birds, but he was very particular about cleanliness elsewhere; he would never, for example, allow Inès to scour the bath with an abrasive powder that might make its surface dirt-absorbent in the course of time: she was always to use old-fashioned household soap, and nothing else. It may not be impertinent to add that ever since he had been able to afford a place with a bathroom he also used a great deal of it on himself. It is true that in the twenties he said to Cocteau, who wanted to bring a miracle on the stage, “A miracle? There’s nothing surprising about a miracle. Why, it’s a miracle every morning that I don’t melt in my bath,” and that Derain, hearing of this, observed, “A few years ago it would have been a greater miracle if Picasso had taken a bath at any hour of the day.” But Derain was voicing the general dissatisfaction at Picasso’s prosperity rather than stating an acknowledged truth, for a tin hip-bath had been one of Picasso’s very earliest acquisitions when he came to live in Paris.
Early in July he and Dora Maar set off for Antibes, where Sabartés was to join them in a few weeks time; they went by train, with Marcel Boudin following by road; and this was, I believe, because Dora Maar tended to be car-sick. There would be no difficulty about finding a lodging, even at the height of this glorious, menacing summer, since Man Ray was about to leave a flat with a room big enough for a studio; they could walk straight into it, and in all likelihood Picasso would be at work within a few days.
But before the month was out there was Picasso knocking on Sabartés’ door at dawn: Vollard had died suddenly, and in spite of Picasso’s dread and hatred of everything to do with death he had driven all night to be present at his old friend’s funeral. He lingered a few days in the discomfort of the empty rue La Boëtie and then traveled south again with Sabartés, lured by the prospect of a bull-fight at Saint-Raphael. Sabartés was an idolater, but not a blind idolater, and it is fascinating to read his account of Picasso suggesting the bull-fight, imposing his wishes, morally obliging Sabartés to agree, and then by a subtle, totally unscrupulous twist reversing the roles, so that it was the importunate Sabartés who longed to go, Picasso who kindly acquiesced, and Sabartés who would bear all the responsibility if the performance were disappointing—fascinating because it is a circumstantial, detailed, kindly, and entirely convincing account of a pattern of behavior, very closely allied to Picasso’s strong inclination to transfer the blame for a disagreeable situation to any shoulders weak enough to accept it, that repeats itself throughout the course of his recorded life. There are many instances in Françoise Gilot’s book, for example, described with a rancor absent from Sabartés; and they sadden those admirers who like a great man to be great for twenty-four hours a day. It is as though Picasso paid for retaining the creative genius of a child by being obliged to keep some of the less amiable qualities of a little Spanish boy as well, combining them with the oppressive strength of a most formidable adult personality.
Back in Antibes, where he had not yet been able to settle down to work, he spent several days showing Sabartés the country; for Picasso very often made up for his fits of bad temper or domineering by acts of an instinctive, almost feminine kindness. He was also distracted from work by the presence of his nephews, Fin and Javier Vilato, Lola’s sons, who had crossed into France after the fail of Catalonia and who had escaped internment: they brought him real pleasure, a certain sense of family, and news of Barcelona; their home at least had not been destroyed in the month-long bombing of the city, and their parents were well. But eventually, growing desperate at the thought of continued idleness, he went to Nice and bought a whole bolt of canvas: he and Sabartés pinned the cloth to the walls of the studio; Picasso primed it, and there he was ready to paint whatever came into his head without having to trouble about fitting his subject to any given size.
Almost at once he began working with concentrated energy on the largest panel. His first notion of painting what he chose and then cutting the pictures out and mounting them separately went to the winds, because this new theme was of such importance that it called for all the space he had. The idea had come to him as he and Dora Maar and another young woman were strolling about Antibes one warm night after dinner: they went down to the harbor and ate ices as they watched the fishermen floating over the dark surface in boats with brilliant acetylene lamps and peering down into the luminous water with their four-pronged fizgigs poised to spear the dazzled fish.
This, in the baldest terms, is what he painted during these last weeks of peace—the fishermen, the dark town behind, two girls on a jetty, one with a bicycle and an ice-cream cornet, the moon, and the flares lighting the men and the bright fish, making darkness visible. But of course a literal description takes no account of Picasso’s own language, nor of his transpositions—the girl licking her ice, for example, has a blue tongue, as pointed as a sting, and the green-flecked moon, with its orange spiral, blazes from a square of light—nor even of the night-blue sky, the unnatural lamp-lit mauve and green, nor of the way the moon presses down on this confined piece of night, making it almost claustrophobic in spite of the great spread of canvas—seventy-five square feet, no less.
In spite of the mounting tension, the strident, bellicose Fascist voices in Germany and Italy, he fell into something like his good summer working rhythm, bathing in the morning, working in the afternoon until the light faded, and then after dinner meeting his friends in a café. But even in his studio he could not entirely escape from the world; he worked fitfully, sometimes without satisfaction; and as August wore on the news grew steadily worse. Once Hitler had devoured Czechoslovakia it was clear that he would turn on Poland next: appeasement had been meaningless and war was now as inevitable as death; but just as most people hope that they may still live for some indefinite number of years, so many hoped that Hitler would be deterred for a while by his fear of Russia, if not by the formidable armies that France had already mobilized. Then,
on August 23, to the horror and amazement of the West, the Germans and Russians signed their non-aggression pact and all restraint was gone.
The group of Picasso’s friends who met every evening at the café had been dwindling as further mobilization notices appeared: now the few who remained were convinced that the invasion of Poland was only a few days away, that those who stayed on the coast would be cut off—the trains were already crowded—and that Paris was likely to suffer from appalling air-raids in the first hours of the war.
Picasso was deeply disturbed: he was also very angry. “Just as I was beginning to work!” he cried, going back to his great picture.
Then all the lights went out: the black-out had come. Troops filled the roads, moving into positions on the Italian frontier just at hand. There was a strong likelihood that Mussolini would attack, and the atmosphere grew even more intolerably tense. Roland Penrose came to say goodbye—farewell for the duration of the war. Most of Picasso’s friends had already gone: the concierge of his building was called up at a few hours’ notice and the house, like the beaches and the cafés, was empty and dead.
But the picture was finished, that is to say as finished as Picasso would ever allow it to be, and he could go. Leaving Marcel to roll it up and follow in the car, Picasso and Dora Maar and Sabartés and Kazbek took the packed train for Paris. Four days later the Germans attacked the Poles, and on September 3 France and England declared war.
Even before the inevitable declaration a very great many Parisians determined to leave the city as quickly as they could: Brassaï puts the number at two-thirds of the population, and although this is certainly too high there is no doubt that thousands and thousands of people lost their heads entirely. He met a distracted Picasso in Saint-German-des-Près hurrying about in search of packing-cases, trying to assemble his scattered possessions at Boisgeloup, Le Tremblay, and his Paris studios so as to leave them in some kind of order and in safety. But it was a task beyond human strength, and after a period of feverish activity, of listening to contradictory rumors and of wretched indecision, Picasso suddenly decided to abandon everything and to follow the general example. As usual he imposed his will upon those around him, and at about midnight on September 1 he and Dora Maar, the Sabartés, Kazbek, and Marcel got into the car and drove south, Picasso not having had time for dinner. By dawn they were at Saintes, where the waiters in the café where they breakfasted were all in uniform; and at seven in the morning they reached Roy an, where they stopped.