They have a certain resemblance to the collection published by Vollard many years before, sometimes sharing the same pure line and always the same breath-taking virtuosity, while here too the artist and his model are of the first importance. But whereas the Sculptor of the thirties was a calm, heroic figure, gazing mildly at somnolent young women, the Painter of 1953/1954 is often an old, ludicrous man or woman or even a baboon, and many of the models are full of eager sexuality. They are young, for the most part, with all the insolence of their age; and the suite can be seen as a hymn to youth and beauty, or, from another point of view, as an obsession with the female body; yet Michel Leiris called it the record of a sojourn in Hell, and that is what it amounted to for those who could read Picasso’s private report about old age and its power of making one ugly, even repulsive, often stupid, positive, and absolute, and of abolishing the future—about the inevitable reduction and defeat, the horror of the last.
Many of the plates are full of delight—a lovely girl plays with a cat; a second with cupids who fly about holding old-man masks to their faces; a third offers an apple to an ape—and others, taken separately, are droll—the artist dwindles to a pedantic, myopic little creature surrounded by admirers wondering with a foolish face of praise, as stupid and humorless as Brueghel’s amateur. But the whole series, with its insistence upon the aging painter, sometimes declining from a fine Sculptor-like demigod to a monkey, with each stage drawn, makes one steadily more uneasy. The diminished, impotent, childish old men in hideous contrast with the models may be ridiculous, but they do not raise a smile. Nor does fat aged lechery; nor the withered bawd who had already appeared in many early works as well as in the recent “Ivanhoe” drawings and who was presently to become an important character in Picasso’s cast. And then there are the circus-people from his youth, sometimes as sad and poor as they were fifty years ago; and models who, like the painters, have grown old—drooping female flesh, alas; and again and again those who wear masks, sometimes obviously in play but sometimes with ambiguous motives, men’s masks on women, women’s on men, at times both partners masked—who is deceiving whom?
But the drawings did not take up all those lonely winter days and nights, when work was his only refuge. He also painted what could almost be called self-portraits, pictures in which his shadow at least appears as he stands with his back to the sun, painting a woman on his deserted bed: there were other nudes as well, and more interesting still, several drawings of “La Guerre et la Paix.” Two of the largest are full compositional studies, as though Picasso had intended a new version of the whole: and if he had done so he would perhaps have left a more sanguine as well as a more generally accessible “War and Peace,” for in these the war looks as though it might be won, and peace is full of undistorted neoclassical grace.
Many years before this dismal winter there was a time when Picasso noticed that Sabartés was discouraged, spiritless, and impatient, and he recommended his panacea, work—in Sabartés’ case the writing of a book, no matter what kind of book. The remedy answered, to some degree, for Sabartés, though he never did become a cheerful man; and to some degree it now answered for Picasso too, and although it could scarcely heal his wound, by the spring of 1954 it did lead him to another kind of painting.
This was a series of portraits and studies of Sylvette, some positively academic, others using hard-edged planes, distortion, simultaneity, and many another resource to interpret her fresh young face and form, but all of them remarkably objective and direct. He was pleased with them, and he showed the whole set in a special exhibition in Paris later that year; most people shared his pleasure, but some observed that so little was Picasso himself involved in the pictures that they might almost have been exercises. The same could not be said of two pictures painted early in June, one that Picasso entitled “Portrait de Madame Z” and another of the same woman sitting on the ground with her hands clasped round her drawn-up knees, usually catalogued “Portrait de Jacqueline aux mains croisées.” The model was of course Jacqueline Hutin, whom Picasso used to call Madame Z because of the name of her house, Le Ziquet. They are splendid pictures, full of fine powerful color, and they both show a young woman with a feline head superbly poised on a very long neck, square in section, which by some private miracle Picasso endowed with an extraordinary grace. In both Jacqueline wears a modern dress, and in both her elaborate, vaguely Egyptian coiffure is of great importance. Generally speaking Picasso made as little use of cast shadow as Henri Rousseau, which is no doubt one of the reasons why their people belong to a purer world; but in the case of this seated figure he laid a strong, illogical shade behind her, and its effect, combined with the simple, massive planes and the remote, severe gaze of her enormous eyes, is to give her the monumental quality of a sphinx.
The likeness to a young, proud, high-bred, dangerously beautiful sphinx has often been commented upon, far more often than the likeness to Jacqueline Hutin, which is less evident. But Picasso’s pictured women often ran into one another, for as he ingenuously observed, his hand grew so used to drawing a given set of features that of its own volition it mingled them with those of the successor: there is something of Sylvette in Madame Z, but very much more of Geneviève Laporte, with her fine bone-formation, her cat-like head, her long neck, and her thoroughbred air, none of them qualities for which Jacqueline was remarkable.
Qualities she had, however, including youth and the promise of unlimited devotion, and from these pictures alone it is clear that Picasso was very much aware of them. Yet even so it does not appear that at this time he wanted any deep commitment, perhaps because, as he told Laporte, “1 could not possibly go to bed with a woman who had had a child by another man” and Jacqueline had had a child by another man, a visible child, the little Kathy.
Françoise Gilot had brought the children down for the Easter holidays; she now brought them to spend the summer with their father. Her affair with the Greek had lasted for no more than three months, and at present she and Picasso were on perfectly civil terms—so civil indeed that he asked her to open the bull-fight that was to be held in his honor at Vallauris. This she did, riding a horse into the improvised arena. She says that the compliment caused Jacqueline Hutin great distress: she also says that Picasso asked her to stay and that when she refused he fell into a very deep depression.
It may be so. But when I saw him in the Roussillon a few days later he looked as cheerful as his best friends could have wished, brown, plump, contented. In recent months he had seen much of the Lazermes, in Paris, at Vallauris just after his return from Arbonne, when they found him sadly reduced, at Vallauris again to see the New Year in, and several times in the summer; now he and Maya were staying with them again in Perpignan—Picasso begged that she might be given a bed in his room, for his loneliness had bitten deep and he hated to be alone, especially at night.
They arrived early in August, and very soon the Lazermes brought Picasso back to Collioure. This second visit strengthened all his earlier ideas, and he came back every day, accompanied by various followers, except when the bull-fight or some other occasion called him away to Céret.
He liked the place extremely, and well he might, for even in 1954 the little town was still almost as Matisse had first known it, infinitely less spoiled than the Côte d’Azur: it still had no more than two or three thousand people, and although the streets were crowded at the time of the bull-fights, massive tourism had not set in; no concrete blocks of flats reared up, dwarfing the ancient pink-tiled houses; the people still lived chiefly by fishing and making wine; and even in high summer there was room on the small beach for everybody who chose to bathe. Here Picasso swam almost every day, looking like a benevolent, round-headed turtle; and as he swam out into the sheltered bay he could contemplate first the medieval lighthouse, now domed and serving as a bell-tower for the parish church—a tower often painted by Matisse—then the fishermen’s beach, crowded with brightly-colored boats with high archaic prows, then the vast mass of the
castle, built on a rock jutting out into the sea, its walls rising sheer from the water and dividing the bay into two pure curves: a farther strand beyond, with still more fishing-boats, beyond them a line of houses, washed with faded pink and blue, and the Dominican church, then steep vineyards rising to hills crowned by an El Greco kind of castle, and farther still the Spanish frontier itself, the wild mountains with their remote watch-towers against the Saracens, high up on the edge of virgin forest; and all this in the purest light of the sun, for the summer of 1954 was perfect.
He could also reflect upon the difference between the attitude of the Colliourenques and that of the mongrel inhabitants of the Cête d’Azur, where he could scarcely move a yard without being stared at by a gathering crowd or directly importuned. Here he could walk about the streets, sit in a café, or take his ease by the sea without exciting the least comment; and here, if Paloma, presuming on her status, tried to tyrannize over the other children on the beach, strong Catalan voices would instantly bring her to a better way of thinking.
Only once, as far as I know, was he ever disturbed by anything more serious than a mild wrangle with other parents about the ownership of a rubber ball or a pair of water-wings. The disturber was a literary man then living in Collioure, Jean-Marc Sabatier-Lévêque: he came from the austere, Protestant Cévennes where, as a love-child, he had had an exceedingly hard life, and he had written an ambitious, difficult, talented book about it, modeling the form and progress of his narrative upon Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. No publisher would entertain his manuscript, though one did suggest, by way of a joke, that if it were illustrated by Picasso it might have a chance of being printed. He walked up to Picasso and explained his case: Picasso looked at him with that curiously piercing eye, saw that he was young, poor, and obviously gifted, and that alcohol and distress had already done him no good: he smiled and said, “Come to Perpignan tomorrow.” There in two days he drew fourteen portraits of htee young man and gave them to him. The book was indeed published, and by the respectable firm of Gallimard; it made Sabatier very happy for a while; but in spite of Picasso’s kindness it had no success—it attracted so little attention that I have never seen it mentioned in any of the catalogs of Picasso’s graphic work nor in the lists of the books he illustrated—and presently the author, like so many French writers, was obliged to take to journalism to keep himself alive; and journalism soon killed him.
One of the most marked Catalan qualities is independence, a refusal to be impressed by wealth, rank, fame, or anything else: this un-deference is carried to a point that might seem uncivil to other nations, but Picasso was perfectly used to it, and here at least, when he escaped from his court he also escaped from his role of sacred monster. The people of Collioure liked him for his total lack of airs and for his knowledge of their language and their ways, while he liked them for their proper pride and the directness of their contact with him—a frequent contact, since he frequented the Café des Sports, hung with the mixed offerings of all the painters who had been there from the time of Matisse onwards, and there he often kept it up until very late at night, adding quantities of local people to his already considerable band of friends.
They invited him to preside at the bull-fight, which he did with spectacular success, insisting on the rigid protocol of Spain and reproving one ill-behaved torero with a flood of Catalan invective that is remembered to this day. But his summer in the Roussillon was not all swimming, lying in the sun, and attending every bull-fight in the region: he also had a set of cool bare rooms in a remote part of the house in Perpignan where he could put up his easel and withdraw into total solitude; and here, among other pictures, he painted a portrait of Madame de Lazerme wearing the traditional Catalan white lace cap.
The atmosphere in Perpignan was very favorable for work, and Picasso began to look for a place like the Lazermes’, a vast cool secret house built round a central court with trees. He was happy with them and at peace; and for all his want of domestic qualities he thoroughly enjoyed the quiet civility of a well-run household, the un-restaurant meals, the absence of fuss. Admittedly, he almost destroyed the civilization he admired: the cook never knew whether she was to prepare dinner for ten or for twenty, nor when it would be eaten; and at the height of the invasion by his followers mattresses had to be spread in most of the fifty rooms of the house. But this was later: in the early days there was little in the way of court, and at intervals between looking at houses in Perpignan Picasso sat quietly in a café with his friends, watching the sardana, the dance he loved, returning to dine at a Christian hour.
There were few houses in Perpignan to compare with the Hôtel de Lazerme, however, and in any case the more he saw of Collioure the more he thought he would like to live there rather than in a city. The village had no houses of any considerable size, but high above, where the last of the Pyrenees runs into the sea, stood the Fort Saint-Elme, a splendid piece of Spanish military architecture built by Charles V in the early sixteenth century, dominating the ancient fortifications and the bay. Picasso climbed up with Madame de Lazerme, gazed longingly at the moat, the drawbridge, the great salle d’armes, the vaulted chambers, the enormous cisterns cut into the rock, the windswept round tower: but he gazed in vain; the place was not to be bought.
When his disappointment was known in the village, it was suggested that he should be given the castle, much as he had been given the Grimaldi palace at Antibes but on a more permanent basis, and Picasso was filled with enthusiasm. It was more magnificent than Antibes by far and very much larger, covering several acres. The towering rock had been a stronghold in the days of classical antiquity, and the present fortress contained Visigothic work, the remains of a commandery of the Knights Templars, a splendid hall where Peter the Catholic, Count of Barcelona and King of Aragon, did his utmost to strangle his wife, and the massive constructions of the kings of Majorca, Spain, and France, all given a strange unity by the passage of time and by the unmistakable hand of Vauban, whose disciples did their best to make it impregnable. The castle had suffered from various sieges and even more from the peace-time presence of the French army, which had only recently abandoned it; but it had been spared the hand of the nineteenth-century restorer and it was still a noble pile, a village in itself and one in which Picasso might have been very happy.
Unfortunately many authorities had to have their say, and before the various councils and ministries even began their slow deliberations the situation had changed in Perpignan.
Whenever he visited the Roussillon it was natural that Totote and Rosita should come to see him, all the more natural since they too often stayed with the Lazermes, sometimes for months on end: though there were also occasions on which they did not have to come, since he brought them with him from Vallauris. Picasso had always been very fond of Rosita, but now his fondness had developed into another emotion; it may not have been a passionate love, but it was certainly so ardent a desire for her uninterrupted company that it was apparent to his friends at the rue de 1’Ange that Rosita, by giving him the slightest encouragement, could become Madame Picasso. She did not choose to encourage him: in fact, she withdrew. This led to no violent scenes, no kind of break, and from his portraits it is clear that his affection for her, and for Totote, remained unaltered: yet it was a heavy disappointment to a man in his lonely, bereft condition. Rosita spoke his languages, and she was, in a way, part of his youth. She was also beautiful in an unusual, archaic fashion; and she was young.
At the beginning of his holiday Picasso had arrived with no followers. At about the time when he saw that for the moment at least there was no moving Rosita, some began to appear, among them Jacqueline Hutin and her little daughter Kathy. Madame de Lazerme asked if Madame Hutin should be invited to stay; Picasso said no. Jacqueline went to an hotel, but she came to the house every day and ate her meals with the rapidly-growing company, and presently she put her child out to board at Font Romeu, in the mountains.
As the weeks went by and Picasso’s
enthusiasm for Collioure grew greater still, it became clear to those about him that there was a strong likelihood of his leaving the Côte d’Azur entirely—a likelihood that would be all the stronger if he were to overcome Rosita’s reluctance, since a marriage with her would attach him to Catalonia for good—and some of them looked upon this as a danger to their friendship and their interests. The news spread; other friends and associates came to Perpignan to dissuade him, and presently the house in the rue de 1’Ange was full. Picasso had the greatest esteem and affection for Madame de Lazerme, and as he saw still more tables carrying into the big dining-room it came to him that he might perhaps be giving her trouble—that he was not quite the easiest man for a young hostess to entertain—and it distressed him. He apologized again and again: but still they came, and although he had put Paulo and his wife into an hotel there were some he could not turn away.
Up until this time Jacqueline Hutin had been a minor member of the band, attracting little notice; but now a striking change occurred. Maya left toward the end of August and that same night Jacqueline moved into her empty bed. Two days later, after what had obviously been a violent disagreement, she came down to breakfast much upset, wondering whether she should go or stay. Nobody gave any decisive opinion, and after a long hesitation she drove off homewards at about noon. Shortly afterward Picasso appeared, expressed his satisfaction, and joined the throng for luncheon. During the meal the telephone rang: it was Jacqueline calling from Narbonne. Picasso was reluctant to speak to her, but eventually he did so, very briefly, returning to the table with a harsh remark. An hour later another telephone-call, this time from Béziers; and having answered it Picasso told the company “She threatened to kill herself if she could not come back to Perpignan. She can do whatever she likes, so long as she leaves me in peace.” He was particularly gay that afternoon, but in the evening there was a ring at the front door: it was Jacqueline, who said, “You told me to do whatever I liked; so here I am.” They went upstairs, and not a sound was heard until dinner, when they came down. Picasso was furious and perfectly mute: he would not even eat his pudding. During the next weeks his attitude towards her was embarrassingly disagreeable, while hers was as embarrassingly submissive—she referred to him as her god, spoke to him in the third person, and frequently kissed his hands.