Picasso was grieved at the reception of the “Massacre,” the cold silence of the Party, and the comparative indifference of the Right; he was puzzled too, since his statement was as clear as he could make it; but he was not discouraged, nor prevented from going straight on with his work, although in addition to this life with Françoise was growing still more difficult.
As for work, it may have been the armor that he used to give his firing-squad their dreadful, modern, science-fiction impersonality which moved him to carry on with a number of drawings, pictures, and lithographs to do with medieval characters—knights, pages, and armored horses, the last closely allied to the gaunt padded creatures of the bull-ring, still his delight and joy, even in the indifferent French performances. These knights and pages, apparently so anodyne (and influenced, in Kahnweiler’s opinion, by the kind of comic-strip Ivanhoe that was coming out in L’Humanité), were related to the most ambitious of his works, “La Guerre et la Paix”; but that was still a year away, as yet unformed in its creator’s mind.
As for the difficulties in his own home—as far as Picasso can ever be said to have had a home—it can only be said that war was more evident than peace, and that Picasso was growing very restive. Yet it is clear from his work that there were tolerable moments: it is even clearer that he was very deeply attached to Claude and Paloma, particularly to the little girl. And then Picasso was not only very much averse to losing what he possessed and to changing his habits, but he also hated giving pain. At all events he and Françoise were together in June, 1951, when they acted as witnesses at Paul Eluard’s marriage at Saint-Tropez to Dominique Laure, whom he had met in a Vallauris pottery-shop.
But almost immediately afterwards Picasso was back in Paris, and he and Geneviève Laporte drove slowly down through France. When they were within easy reach of Saint-Tropez he telephoned the Eluards, asking them to lunch: they came, but they were dismal guests, cold, almost silent, severe, and even moral. It was only after some time that they came to understand that the presence of Geneviève Laporte, the obvious relationship, was not a mere whim, a gross insult to Françoise. Eluard was Picasso’s closest friend, an exceedingly percipient, intuitive man, but it took him twenty-four hours to grasp what Inés had understood in five minutes. However, once he had been brought to see into Picasso’s mind after lunch at Saint-Tropez the next day, he spoke as wisely and as kindly as he could. To Geneviève Laporte he said, “We’ve been talking a great deal about you. There’s no answer to this problem of Françoise that is worrying Picasso, because the problem does not exist. Carpe diem.” And to Picasso he said, “Even if you were entirely free to choose, there is no answer that would make you entirely happy.” Then later, in reply to Picasso’s “I was ready to kill myself. She made me laugh. Laugh, you understand me? Laugh …”he said, “And even if she had made you weep, she would still have saved you.”
To help Picasso carpere diem the Eluards found him the little house I have mentioned, and there at least for a while he was entirely happy. So happy that when Paul asked him to illustrate Le Rendez-vous allemand he would not: as he explained to Geneviève Laporte, “The Rendez-vouz, don’t you see, is a book that was written at a time of the deepest misery. Now for the first time in my life I’m entirely happy. How can I possibly draw wretchedness?” They nagged gently and persistently, the only way to make him move; but although he cherished them so, all he could be brought to draw on the block that Dominique Eluard put before him was a series of portraits to do with love: and those which show his own face are, according to one eminent authority, the first to do so since the death of Apollinaire.
August saw the end of these happy days ; Picasso wanted to buy the house in which he had spent them as a present for Geneviève Laporte, but she would not allow it. From the earliest days of their friendship he had always found it difficult to make her take anything; even as a schoolgirl she refused a print of a lamp until he said, “You bring me the sun. It’s only fair that I too should give you light.”
She went back to Paris, and the next month he was there as well, partly to attend to the distribution and housing of his treasures from the rue La Boëtie and partly “to see what could be done about Françoise.” One of the things he did was to buy two floors of a house in the rue Gay-Lussac, near the Sorbonne. And although this was nothing to do with Françoise, who could not drive, he also bought a new car to replace the white Oldsmobile that the American dealer Kootz had given him just after the war: Marcel Boudin had taken it on a private jaunt to Deauville, had utterly destroyed it in an accident, and had been dismissed. Geneviève Laporte tried to intercede for him, but Picasso was in one of his cold, implacable rages and it was no use, and from that time onward Paulo, Olga’s son, who had no other occupation, acted as his father’s chauffeur, sometimes driving the new Hotchkiss, sometimes the huge old Hispano-Suiza. Boudin had been a well-known character at the rue des Grands-Augustins, where he acted in many capacities, and Picasso’s friends discussed his dismissal after some twenty-five years of service, as friends will: some said that the destruction of the car justified it, others that the chauffeur had overplayed his role of confidential servant and had talked far too much, others that this was one more mark of Picasso’s hardness.
That he was capable of hardness, and of extreme hardness, cannot be denied; but whether hardness was an important, often-seen part of his character is another question. As far as Geneviève Laporte was concerned, of course it was not. Although he went back to Vallauris for his seventieth birthday, which fell in October of this year—a widely-celebrated occasion, with Les Lettres françaises devoting the best part of an issue to him—he found time on that very busy day to send her too a present, so that she should not be left out, with a pretty note in his strangely unformed hand. The feast at Vallauris itself was a strenuous, long-lasting event, with the municipality and the Party joining in, to say nothing of innumerable friends.
His iron constitution and his tireless conviviality withstood it very well, just as his power of work had withstood the distractions of this year, which also included another peace congress, this time in Rome. Some of his pleasantest landscapes, such as that of Vallauris with its smoking kilns at work, belong to 1951; and there are pictures of his children, lithographs, ceramics and sculpture, with owls in both, and a particularly interesting goat’s skull and bottle cast in bronze, which he painted—a technique unseen for centuries.
Feasts, sociability, late nights, bull-fights whenever they were within reach, and traveling, to say nothing of emotional stress, left him comparatively untouched as far as work was concerned. But depression was always lying in wait under his gaiety, and since he was extremely sensitive to atmosphere the one thing he could not cope with was domestic gloom.
He spent the whole dark winter of 1951/1952 with Françoise in the rue Gay-Lussac, for scarcely had he bought the flats before the authorities tried to requisition them on the grounds that they were not occupied and he had to hurry back from Vallauris to retain possession. There he and the children caught colds; the children carried on with measles; Françoise Gilot was deeply concerned with her own painting, getting enough pictures ready for her forthcoming show with Kahnweiler; and for the first time since his parting with Olga sadness so overcame Picasso that his production dwindled, almost ceased entirely.
Nineteen fifty-two began more happily, with an early return to Vallauris and the sun. Picasso’s spirit revived: he went back to his ceramics, his painting—some enchanting pictures of the children, enigmatic variations on the theme of a goat’s skull and bottle, landscapes—and his sculpture. This was the year of his disconcerting, highly successful “Guenon et son petit,” a she-monkey whose face is made of a model car taken from young Claude, while jug-handles form her ears. She stands up on her bent hind-legs, and her child clings to her bosom with all its limbs: although they belong to no particular species, the two are as simian as they can possibly be; and here again the difference of texture between the clay and the metal to
y gives the resulting bronze an extraordinarily satisfying quality.
But the great work of 1952 was “La Guerre et la Paix”; and although its beginning lies farther back in time, its execution may well be due in some degree to the presence of another factor in Picasso’s daily life, Edouard and Helene Pignon. I do not mean that they had anything whatever to do with the painting, even to the extent of holding a brush at a distance—indeed they never saw the panels until they were finished—but Pignon’s company was a joy to him at a time when joy was rare. Circumstances separated him from Geneviève Laporte at this point, and there was little delight in the lachrymose Françoise.
Pignon was quite a young man then, a painter more appreciated by other painters than by the general public. He was a Communist, a big tough man from the coal-mining northern parts of France—he had been down the pit as a boy. Picasso had known and liked him for several years, and before this he had invited him and his wife, Hélène Parmelin, also a Communist, to share the old scent-factory, where there was a painting-studio free. Now, early in 1952, the invitation was accepted, to the dismay of both sides: both Pignon and Picasso, outwardly so strong, had a secret fund of shyness, and both were afraid that this proximity would not answer. In the event mutual respect and affection did away with all difficulties: the Pignons lived happily in their stark factory room (two primitive beds, a minute chest of drawers, one stool, a piece of string to hang their clothes on, a thin table, a music-stand) and in the spare studio Pignon painted with steady zeal, remarkably uninfluenced by his formidable colleague immediately below, while at regular intervals Picasso, always a creature of habit, brought out the pictures he was working on and the two painters discussed them. Among the pictures were two portraits of Hélène Parmelin, who observed Picasso as attentively as he observed her, though with less penetration: she was—she is—a writer, and her record of these years show still another Picasso in many ways as youthful as Fernande’s. She did not know him as Geneviève Laporte knew him, and she saw him with the eyes of a grateful, respectful guest for whom the sun shines all the time, of a happy young woman with an admired husband who was working hard, enjoying the south and the close contact with his friend: Parmelin’s Picasso is gay, wildly gay at times, a very sociable, more public Picasso; but in his way he is as authentic as Laporte’s or Brassaï’s, and here again one sees his quite outstanding spontaneous kindness, his total lack of pomp, his rejection of the role of Grand Old Man, his natural fellowship with people of other generations, and his enormous industry. Her books are written in an intimate, highly personal, somewhat ecstatic style that does not translate very happily, but she has a gift for dialogue and it is generally admitted by his friends that she catches the tone of Picasso’s voice better than most.
Pignon worked hard, but Picasso worked harder still. He had promised to embellish the deconsecrated castle chapel of Vallauris, in which “L’Homme au mouton” had been kept before being set up in the square—a medieval building with a perfectly simple barrel-vaulted nave and a somewhat later chancel. The summer before, Matisse had finished his Chapel of the Rosary for the Dominican nuns at Vence, an entirely-Christian building, of course, in spite of his unorthodoxy ; Picasso’s idea, however, was not to restore the Vallauris chapel to its original purpose, but to turn it into a Temple of Peace, and he had been accumulating drawings for the purpose ever since the time of his promise. By summer there were close on two hundred and fifty of them; yet curiously enough not one was a compositional study in any way comparable to those for “Guernica,” and in fact when he came to the actual painting he worked with such spontaneity that he might almost have made no notes at all.
He began in August, 1952, and he worked in the strictest privacy, deeply settled in his steady and valuable routine. He would get up quite late, come down to the studio at about eleven or twelve, go off to swim at Golfe-Juan, return at two or three in the afternoon, and then work for nine or ten hours at a stretch by strong electric light in a silence broken only by the owls. Nobody, and that included Françoise Gilot, was allowed into the studio: whether she was in any way affected by her exclusion is doubtful; by this time her interest in Picasso’s painting was so slight that she scarcely mentions the Antibes pictures, while she passes over “La Guerre et la Paix” in complete silence. The only exception was Paulo, who came to drive his father back to La Galloise. Nor did Picasso ever speak about his work, even to the Pignons. This went on week after week until October, when the two panels were finished. Two panels, each measuring thirty-three and a half by fifteen and a half feet so as to cover the side walls and the vault of the chapel entirely, and each made up of several rectangles of flexible hardboard: there was to be a third to fill the west end of the nave when the door should be walled up, but that was not yet begun.
They were designed to follow the rise and the steady curve of the chapel walls and vault, meeting in the middle, and except in their proper place they were difficult to see as a whole: the friends who were allowed in were pleased, excited, and somewhat at a loss. A powerful effort of the imagination was required to see the plane surfaces as curves meeting overhead and entirely filling a given vaulted space; an infinitely more powerful effort to supply the missing third piece that was to bind the far ends together. These friends, particularly Pignon, were better qualified than most to make the effort, better qualified in any event than the critics who looked at the panels when they were first shown to the public at the Picasso retrospective in Milan and Rome next year and who pronounced them to be failures, poor in line and garish in color, bad Picassos that attempted a fatal compromise between the Party’s aesthetics and his own form of expression. A great many ordinary people were disappointed too, and as this came at a time when Picasso’s heart was cruelly wounded he felt both the criticism and the disappointment far more keenly than usual—so much so that even when the two main panels were installed early in 1954 he did not carry on with the third; and as a result of his vexation of spirit and of a quarrel with the authorities he shut the pictures away for years on end.
There would have been far less adverse criticism if others had possessed Picasso’s eye, enabling them to see “La Guerre et la Paix” as it can now be seen, completed, in its own place, and lit by one uniform light from below. The visitor walks into the chapel by the south door and finds himself in a rather large square chancel with a lovely apse on his right hand and a counter with postcards and reproductions on his left. Beyond the counter the westward chancel wall is pierced by an arch some six feet wide leading into the primitive little nave: walking through this arch he finds himself inside a long low narrow space, a tunnel or cave filled with a diffused light of its own coming from behind two low brick walls. He is also inside a picture that fuses over his head in a cloud of brown at the farther end. Yet although he is inside the picture he can scarcely take in more than one aspect of it at once, since he has to back away the full width of the nave to see either War on his left hand or Peace on his right; though to be sure the brilliant third panel at the west end that links the two and closes the tunnel, making it a world of its own, is visible all the time.
War is a naked figure with small curved horns standing in a clumsy black chariot (Picasso had a provincial hearse in mind) drawn over the blood-red ground by three lean black horses that are now trampling a blazing book and that are about to trample green standing corn. He has a bloody sword in one hand, a basket scattering evil things—germs or the like—in the other, and on his back a net or basket full of skulls. In the background dark silhouettes of men hack and thrust with axes, swords, and spears. The chariot is almost over a black hole from which two green hands reach up, but it seems that the horses have balked at the sight of a statuesque figure in front of them, standing against a fine blue on the extreme left of the picture. He is holding a spear and the scales of justice in his right hand, a shield in his left; and on the shield, overlying a dim head, perhaps that of Athena, is the blue outline of a dove with upraised wings, very like that whic
h stands for the Holy Ghost.
Peace, on the other long wall, lies in several planes: on deep blue a faun plays his double pipe, two girls dance ecstatically, a boy with an owl on his head balances a cage of fish and a bowl of birds, a heavy horse with iridescent wings draws a plough guided by a child: on a green field under a vine and a glowing orange-tree a man sets a dish on a hearth of stones; close by another is writing, while a woman lies with her head on her hand, suckling a baby and reading a book over it: and the whole is dominated by a many-colored faceted sun with rays like palm-fronds.
The third panel, at the far end, which fixes one’s attention from the moment one steps into the chapel, is strikingly simple, with purer color than the rest. In the horseshoe arch four men, black, yellow, red, and white, hold up a large pale round with a white dove outlined upon it: here again the bird’s wings are raised, and this time its beak holds up an olive-branch. The figures, symmetrically arranged against pale blue and a lower green, hold the disk with their upstretched left arms, and their right arms join at waist-height in the middle: they are as simplified as can be, and although they are entirely Picasso they have something of the look of Matisse’s late collages. They are not in fact pasted paper, but when one moves close one sees why them seem to be: Picasso has very carefully taken the paint away from their outlines, scraping right down to the bare board, isolating each of the forms. They are called, upon what authority I do not know, “Les quatre parties du monde.” And the dove they hold up in the high point of the arch gives the key to the whole picture; it is even more important than the sun or the blazing tree and without it “La Guerre et la Paix” would lose a great deal of its significance.