Picasso: A Biography

  Almost universal. UNESCO gave a dinner for those who had adorned the building: Picasso did not attend, but Brassaï, who had also contributed a panel, did, and here I quote him. “During dessert Evans, the director of UNESCO, stood up to propose a toast. Much heated by whiskey and good wine, he thumped the table and cried, ‘There we are! The place exists! And it’s we who brought it into being!’ Then with a sly look he went on, ‘And now our friend Georges Salles will give us his candid, unvarnished opinion of Picasso’s mural.’ Rather startled, Salles was getting up, but Le Corbusier cut in before him. ‘All I can say—and you can rely on my judgment and experience—is that this mural of Picasso’s is a masterpiece.... Never mind what people think of it now. In ten or say twenty years its beauty will be obvious.’ ”

  The twenty years have nearly passed, and soon perhaps the voice of authority, speaking through Le Corbusier, will be heard: but so far the UNESCO picture is not looked upon as one of Picasso’s successes.

  That summer at Cannes was very wearing at times. Every highly-publicized exhibition increased the number of people who wanted to see Picasso and who were not always very delicate about the way they did so; and recently there had been several, including another great retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jacqueline protected him as well as she could, sometimes perhaps without much discernment; but lion-hunting is a trait combined with extraordinary pertinacity, and the prey, Picasso reduced to the status of an object, was sometimes hunted down; although, on the other hand, he was often separated from friends he would have liked to see.

  It was not only lion-hunters. Scores and even hundreds of people from all over the world wanted help, advice, introductions, encouragement; many of them were interesting or pathetic creatures, and Picasso’s kindness was assailed on every side. There were also those who wanted him to collaborate on an article that would explain his painting, to write a preface, to illustrate a book, or to support a movement against poverty, war, and injustice, to say nothing of those whose eager search would be satisfied with a free picture, a comfortable sum of money, or even an autograph. Even after all these years of paying for his notoriety Picasso still often tried to see each member of the horde as an individual; but the numbers made it impossible; and the distraction of his mind, the waste of time and energy, the unpleasantness of refusing, the even worse consequences of feigned compliance (his frequent line of retreat), and the insistent servile graspingness with which he was surrounded tended to sour his temper. Above all he hated the incessant attempts at manipulation by those who looked upon him as a milch-cow.

  Then again 1958 was the year that very nearly saw the subversion of the Republic. In May some of the generals in Algeria, displeased with the conduct of the elected government of France, took authority into their own hands, and for some days it seemed that there might be open war between part of the army, particularly the parachute-troops, on the one hand, and the supporters of the Republic, particularly the Communists, on the other. General de Gaulle, called out of his retirement, dealt with the situation; but while he was doing so French democracy hung in the balance. During this tense period Picasso painted one of the few pictures that is a direct reflection of his political ideas. It is a large still-life of a table in front of an open window and a balcony: on the table stands a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley and a black, desiccated bull’s head. The bloody sun is reflected in the panes, and the red, strengthened by the black window-bars, is full of menace. The political or ethical content is by no means obvious, but it was clear enough to Picasso, and later he told Pierre Daix that he “painted the picture with curses.”

  Apart from this he painted some enchanting pictures such as “La Baie de Cannes” as it was seen from the villa, and “La Californie la nuit,” and he made some pots and sheet-metal sculptures; but his output diminished; there are almost no studies of the children; and it is noticeable that he spent far more time than usual over his paintings and drawings—there is one of a woman from Aries with the dates of no less than twenty sittings written down the left-hand side like an inscription in Chinese.

  When this tiring, crowded, and not very fruitful summer was over, the Picassos and the Pignons went to Arles for a bull-fight. They dined with Douglas Cooper, who then lived at the Château de Castille, not far away. Picasso, tired of the noise and fuss of the Côte d’Azur, asked if he might buy the house: Cooper said that he might not, but observed that the Château de Vauvenargues was for sale, adding that it was a splendid place, the very thing for Picasso.

  The next day they found it, a great square seventeenth-century house with two round towers in a lonely valley under the Montagne Sainte-Victoire: it came suddenly into sight as the road turned to the village, a few hundred yards from the château and slightly above it. In that severe, silent, and largely uninhabited landscape the pink and ocher building, all of a piece, was extraordinarily beautiful. It also made the strongest contrast with the villa-crowded hills of Cannes: what is more, the mountain could not be built upon (there were threats of development in front of La Californie) since it all belonged to the house. The house in its turn had belonged to the Clapiers, a great Provençal family which took the title of Marquis de Vauvenargues from this estate; and their arms were still to be seen over the noble doorway. Indeed, it is said that the famous Vauvenargues wrote his Maximes there, which might possibly have added to Picasso’s mounting enthusiasm, though it is difficult to imagine him feeling much sympathy for that prim young moralist’s writings apart from some odd remarks such as “Prosperity makes few friends,” “Subjects pay their court with more pleasure than princes receive it,” and “Genius cannot be feigned.”

  Picasso gazed eagerly down on the château from the village, looking right into its court, and his enthusiasm blinded him to the fact that from the same vantage-point others could stare just as well and even better if they were equipped with binoculars and telephoto lenses. Then although it was Cézanne’s Montagne Sainte-Victoire that reared up behind the house, Vauvenargues lay on the northern, the far less sunlit side. The stark landscape was very fine, and most congenial to a Spaniard; but in fact the place was awkwardly situated even as a refuge from the crowds, since although it had all the disadvantages of remoteness it lay within the easy range of cars from Aix. These drawbacks did not appear at first sight, nor even when he had explored the enormous rooms, so capital for working in: he did see that the house lacked running water, drains, and central-heating, but he did not see that it possessed a strong, antagonistic personality of its own. Vauvenargues had been lived in for generations by people whose civilization was quite unlike Picasso’s and even inimical to his; it was not a mere shelter, not a more or less derelict rue des Grands-Augustins nor the costly bower of a champagne-merchant but a still-living entity, one that summed up many values for which he had little use but which nevertheless impressed him: it was a house that could not be ignored.

  Chapter XXI

  IT was months and even years before Vauvenargues overcame Picasso, and in the first spring of his enthusiasm he spent some very happy days there. He had bought the house within forty-eight hours of first seeing it, and with equal (and characteristic) precipitation he had radiators and the necessary pipes installed, piercing the splendid plaster-work in every direction. All this cost a great deal of money; but money in itself no longer meant anything to him. He had lost track of the changing currency somewhere in the thirties, and by now he had no idea of what things cost: when he reckoned at all he did so obscurely, in the archaic sous of his youth or even in reales. In restaurants Jacqueline always dealt with the bill, and when by some unusual chance he had to pay for anything himself he would take a large note from the wad he carried in his pocket, still fastened with a safety-pin, after all these years, and sweep up the change.

  He also sent for his pictures stored in Paris—Matisse, Derain, Rousseau, Le Nain, Cézanne, Corot, van Dongen, Degas, Chardin, Braque, Miró, Modigliani, Renoir, and many more, together with early works of
his own that he had bought back—and he brought much of his sculpture from La Californie, as though he meant to settle at the château for good.

  With these familiar objects round him he at once began to paint. He was influenced and even impressed by his surroundings, the great hall, the chapel in one of the towers, the sinful magnificence of the chimney-pieces, and one of his earliest pictures was the “Buffet de Vauvenargues,” in which the lowering mass of the ancient sideboard is made as cheerful as can be by a green light on its carving, a stroke of singing blue, and the presence of a green-pinafored child and a fine plum-pudding dog, a recent addition to Picasso’s menagerie. He had already made one version of this at Cannes while he was waiting for the central heating to be put in, and now without finishing it he turned to a series of still-lives, the jugs and bottles of so many years ago and even a mandolin, painted with as much grave sobriety as ever, though without the same rigid discipline. Then, after a number of other Jacquelines, a portrait of her in a medieval kind of hat, lettered large and clear across the top JACQUELINE DE VAUVENARGUES: and there were several more, including Jacqueline as a queen, as though he were trying to make her fit into the house—a form of magic that did not work. She remained ill at ease; for her Vauvenargues was lonely, sinister, even perhaps haunted. For his part Picasso looked more out of doors than in during these early days, and he found himself very much at home in this stark, arid, melancholy limestone country, so like that of Horta, while the village was almost as Cubist as Gósol. He painted it, though in an eager, dashing manner far removed from the pure, ascetic Cubism of the early days; and at about the same time, his mind never being far from Spain, he also drew bull-fights: bull-fights in which the figure of Christ appears. None of the memoirs I have read accounts for the resurgence of this uncommon theme. Parmelin was a far more thorough-paced Communist than Picasso, and although she never despised the capitalist fleshpots she had little use for immaterialist superstition; and no other literate person was in constant attendance at the time. But it may be that Picasso, with something very like Spain outside his window, wished to add the Spanish dimension to the ordinary bull-fights he could see in France—the element of ritual sacrifice, the omnipresent background of Catholicism.

  The drawings—wash for the most part—appear in a book upon which he and the bull-fighter Luis Miguel Dominguín collaborated, if collaboration is quite the word to describe the strange haphazard way they set about producing Toros y toreros for Gili of Barcelona. Long before, Picasso had spoken about a book on an unspecified subject that he was going to publish some time and he had said that he would like his friend to contribute to it. Then he suddenly telephoned from Cannes. During their conversation Dominguín still could not find out the nature of the book nor what he was expected to do. Should he write a preface, a text, a commentary? Should he speak about painting or bulls or the pole star? Any of these would answer, said Picasso; or if Dominguín merely chose to write until he was tired Picasso knew that the work would be well done. And Dominguín would write it that very night, would he not? The book was ready and Dominguín’s piece was all it was waiting for.

  Dominguín made a last effort. “Pablo,” he said, “I don’t understand painting and I don’t know how to write: I should at least like to see the book so as to have some notion…” “There’s no connection at all,” replied Picasso. “The book is about the kind of thing I do: all you have to do is write.” Dominguín abandoned the hopeless attempt and took up his pen. He wrote about the nature of the Spanish bull-fight, the Spanish bullfighter’s deeper motives, and the affinities between him and the artist; again and again he stressed how totally a Spaniard Picasso was, and spoke also of his great capacity for friendship, his simplicity, and his ageless character—the painter and the bullfighter were generations apart in years, but they treated one another as contemporaries without any loss of respect on either side. And he too dwelt on that inexplicable radiation that emanated from Picasso, that quality which made people realize that he possessed a power unlike that of other men, unlike not in degree but kind; and Dominguín did so with such directness that his words have no hint of silly adulation. Directness was at the heart of their relationship: once he said to Picasso, “Why don’t you tell me something about painting, some explanation that would help me to find out which way round I am?” Picasso said, “Some day, without anybody having told you anything at all, you will realize that it has come to you. In the meantime nothing I can say would be of the least use to you.”

  Picasso’s part of Toros y toreros turned out to be the reproduction of three of his sketchbooks, together with sixteen additional sepia drawings; and all the plates apart from some Jacquelines on horseback and some heads drawn upside-down, are to do with bullfighting. The Christ figures are in the second book, filled between March 2 and 12, 1959; in the very first of these drawings a bullfighter, his arms held out horizontally, is wafting his cape to draw the bull away from a fallen picador: and on the same day one of the outstretched hands is pierced, while the torso is bare. Still on March 2 Picasso drew Our Lady, crowned and weeping, her heart pierced with the seven sorrows, figured by what I take to be bullfighter’s swords. The thought develops through fifteen more drawings in which Christ is present without the least ambiguity, nailed to the Cross but with one hand free so that with His loincloth He can lure the bull from the man and the gored, dying horse. That day ends with Christ’s head, young, bearded, and crowned with thorns. The next begins with studies of the arm: then comes another head, slighter than the last, still crowned but now turned to the right, the mouth open as though following the success of the pass; then the whole scene in shorthand, very small, with the addition of a man falling to his knees in the arena; and lastly, with the fallen picador, the horse, the bull moving away from them beneath the crucified feet, the theme vanishes, never to reappear.

  These grave drawings have excited a great deal of comment and a great many interpretations: almost anything can be read into them except blasphemy or, as Geneviève Laporte put it in a poem about the dying Harlequin, “the kitchen-knife of ridicule.”

  It is tempting to attribute much of the difference between the pictures painted at Vauvenargues and those painted at Cannes to the Spanish landscape and the darker sky, and indeed the far more sober colors, deep red and ocher, point in that direction. He also took to using a dark green, quite unusual in his palette and allied to the evergreen forest and the maquis of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire and to that of Horta, and it overflowed from his occasional landscapes into his still-lives and his Jacquelines just as the northern green had invaded much of his painting at La Rue-des-Bois.

  Yet on the other hand it was at Vauvenargues that he began his variations on Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe”; and although much of the classical world appears in some of his versions and of the archaic in others, it is probably true to say that in all the hundred and fifty-odd drawings and the twenty-seven paintings of the full suite there is little that is specifically Spanish. He did not work on them continuously but in sudden bursts of intense activity separated by intervals, sometimes of several months; yet it is clear that they filled part of his mind for the rest of 1959, all though 1960 and 1961 and even into the beginning of 1962: he never dwelt so long upon any other undertaking. The visible evidence for his preoccupation is all dated, and it provides not only a fascinating though of course incomplete view of the process of creation but also an exact account of Picasso’s use of his time as he reached the age of eighty. It is for this rather than for analysis or detailed comment that I think it useful to speak of the “Déjeuners” at some length.

  The first drawings were made on August 10, 1959, a fairly straightforward, simplified version of the original composition, which was itself a restatement of Giorgione’s “Concert Champêtre” in the Louvre. (Art historians say that it also owed much to an engraving of Raphael’s lost “Judgment of Paris.”) Manet had set four figures in a woodland clearing with a stream winding through it: in the foregrou
nd on the left of the picture is the remains of their picnic, rolls and cherries scattered around a green-lined basket; then comes a fine lively plump girl, sitting on her discarded blue dress, her elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand. She is Victorine Maurend, who posed for the lovely “Olympia” that caused such a scandal in 1863 and for the soldier-boy in red trousers playing a fife, and who finished her days as a little dim old woman selling violets in the streets of Paris. She sits there with nothing on, perfectly unconcerned and looking straight out of the picture as though at the eye of a camera. Close to her and in the same diagonal is Manet’s younger brother Eugène, bearded and wearing a snuff-colored coat. Some way beyond him but in the same line, another young woman, holding up her shift, paddles in the stream, which carries the diagonal up and away through the trees. Opposite Eugène reclines the painter’s brother-in-law, the sculptor Ferdinand Leenhoff, in a black coat, gray trousers, black boots, black beard, and a strange voluminous kind of black smoking-cap with a tassel whose rabbinical appearance is increased by a hint of side-locks at his ear. His pale left hand holds a walking-stick and his right is held out towards his two companions in the gesture of one who is making a point in argument or exposition. But be makes it in vain: although his companions in the foreground cannot have failed to hear him—they are so close together that their legs overlap—they are quite unmoved. Eugène gazes dreamily out into the void; Victorine looks brightly at the spectator; while the young woman in the water is too busy and perhaps too far away to pay attention. A bullfinch flies overhead, and a small boat lies against the bank a little way up the stream. The boat, the bullfinch, the trees, and perhaps the girl paddling belong to one reality, that of a landscape observed: the three central figures belong to another, that of an immediate contact, a strong Spanish realism reminiscent of Zurbarán. (Manet loved the Spaniards.) They are strangers in this clearing, far more so than Giorgione’s idealized classical nymphs in their Trentine vale; and it was this contrast, this particular truthfulness of flesh, that caused the violent outcry when the picture was first exhibited.