Picasso: A Biography

  It may also have been one of the reasons why Picasso chose it as his starting-point. Another is that almost any restatement of Manet’s “Déjeuner” would require Picasso to paint a landscape with figures, to deal with an unenclosed space and with the relationships of his people within that space, something he had rarely done. Certainly he had painted dozens of landscapes in the last few years, and his beach-scenes are unenclosed space filled with people; but the uninhabited countryside seen from the window of his studios, even when it is as lively as his recent “Baie de Cannes,” is a subject presented rather than chosen and might more properly be called a view, while his beach can be looked upon as a vast flat stage: in any case neither presents anything like the problems of a woodland setting with the light filtering through the trees and all the spatial autonomies which that implies. Then again here was the relation between the artist and his model once more, and Picasso had by no means exhausted all he had to say upon the subject. And lastly, although Picasso spoke disparagingly of the “Execution of Maximilian,” he had a great admiration for Manet, particularly for his “Lola de Valence.”

  Picasso’s first drawings, therefore, placed the figures more or less as Manet had set them, though in one Picasso already dismissed the younger brother. The next day he made five more sketches, three of the woman at the back and two, in color, of the whole composition; and from these it was quite evident that Picasso had not the least notion of following Manet’s light, nor his color.

  At this point he left Vauvenargues for Cannes, and he seemed to have abandoned Manet as well; but although he spent much of his time at La Californie on a splendid series of bull-fight drawings (nearly a hundred of them, in wash) and on linocuts, he also made a number of studies of a woman bending forwards, often washing her feet. At Vauvenargues she had appeared in the place of Manet’s paddler, and now she was certainly connected with the “Déjeuners”; but her origin was far earlier. She was an important member of Picasso’s personal and obscure mythology and many examples of her are to be seen: sometimes she is old, as in the drawing of May, 1944, sometimes young, as she is in these; sometimes naked, sometimes wearing a smock; but she is always leaning forward, generally with her breasts strangely high, and nearly always the open cleft of her sex is sharply defined.

  In February, 1960, Picasso was back at Vauvenargues, and here he worked with an energy surprising even in him, committing to paint the ideas that had been maturing through the winter. In these compositional sketches, some of which are very large (51 x 76 inches), Eugène Manet comes and goes, so do the trees and the boat; but the paddler is always of great significance, almost as great as that of the man with the walking-stick, the mild but tenacious prophet who continually harangues his audience, now attentive, now indifferent. Then in March he began his first definitive variation, the most famous of the sequence, a big green picture, almost flat except for a blue hole in the middle where the atomized paddler wades at a certain distance: the brother has dwindled to a faint hint, but Victorine has become a fine pyramidal Picasso nude raised high upon the base of her massive thighs and terminating in a two-eyed profile turned towards the prophet, who talks on and on as they sit there under a dense, formally-patterned canopy of trees.

  He broke off half-way through to start another study, far lighter, in which the brother returns with a mauve robe and a tobacco-pipe, and the nude is almost oval; the paddler still washes, however, and the sculptor still prophesies, his tireless didactic right hand raised high. Picasso set both of these aside until the end of July; but in the interval, which he spent at La Californie, he painted some variations on Manet’s “Le Vieux Musicien,” and as soon as he returned to Vauvenargues he finished the pictures. But that was by no means the end of his project, and very shortly after he made several drawings of a woman attending to her foot; she is one of the paddler’s sisters, if not the paddler herself.

  Now came the longest pause, while Picasso devoted himself to folded metal sculpture and other pursuits, and it was not until April, 1961, that more evidence appeared to prove how the “Déjeuners” had been evolving in his mind. Without any preliminary sketches he suddenly painted two clean, cheerful little pictures in which the characters form a loose wreath in the middle of the picture and the surrounding wood is reduced to a few signs for trees. The paddler stands in a bright blue pool; in one case the pink Victorine is as curved as a serpent, while Eugène is no more than a shadowy form, and in both the prophet, dressed in cherry or a darker red, talks away with the same calm persistence.

  In early June Picasso made twenty-two drawings of a pair of nudes, most of them in his purest line: Douglas Cooper associates these closely with the “Déjeuners,” and apart from several of the attitudes he also points to a curious straw hat, which certainly reappears in some of the later paintings. Picasso included this hat in one of his many drawings of a lovely young woman tying the ribbon of a Catalan sandal on her raised foot—drawings that he made just before he moved from La Californie to Notre-Dame-de-Vie—and on June 16, 1961, after the move, he repeated it, with adornments and the inscription “For Jacqueline, first drawing made at the Mas Notre Dame de Vie.”

  Meanwhile he had sent for everything he had done at Vauvenargues, and from now on, all through the summer of 1961, he worked steadily at his “Déjeuners,” in spite of visitors, children, bull-fights, and intruders. First came two somber, night-lit pictures, in one of which the prophet has turned green and Victorine dull blue, then thirty drawings, some of all the characters, others of the women alone or in pairs, others of the paddler and the prophet together. On July 8 he made up his mind that the men too would be better without clothes, and another score or so of drawings followed his decision: at first the effect on the prophet was lamentable; he sits as bald and naked as a worm, deprived of his hat, which had grown even more hieratic, and sometimes even of his stick; but still he talks, his right hand in the air. Eugène does better, however: having been absent for some time he reappears, lying on his belly in the grass and reading a book while Victorine listens to the prophet and the paddler paddles, sometimes picking a flower.

  As July wore on the figures became smaller; they moved farther apart and the trees grew enormously, so that now the “Déjeuner” was taking place in a deep forest clearing. But Picasso’s mind had also been moving along another, surprisingly different path, and within a few days of the later drawings he painted a large green picture that quite contradicts their tendency: here the people might be in an underwater cave with green stalactites, opening on to blue; the prophet talks, Victorine listens, the brother lies on his stomach (an attitude he was rarely to abandon), and the paddler picks her flower; and they are all palely naked. The boat has come back, but on the left of the picture: its hull and the crossed oars catch the pallid light, and its presence, apart from altering and broadening the whole composition, has a strange portentous significance: one might say that Charon was just at hand but for the fact that the picture has no literature in it at all; it exists, splendidly and entirely, in terms of paint.

  This was quickly followed by three other pictures, all smaller but of much the same general tone. In the first place Picasso suppressed the boat and strengthened the trees and the prophet; in the second, bluer, he brought the pool into the middle and set his people round it, the brother receding even farther than the paddler; and in the third, where Eugène is no longer to be seen, Victorine’s head soars to the top of the canvas, bending a double profile not unlike Dora Maar’s towards the shrunken prophet, while far from their green shade the paddler wades in a blue pool of her own, wholly divorced from the rest.

  Then after a short pause in which he made several quick compositional sketches in crayon, Picasso plunged into a perfect debauch of painting. On July 27, dismissing Eugène, who appears in none of these pictures, he placed his three figures in their green cave again, the prophet now wearing a yellow robe with a green stripe. The tree-trunks or stalactite pillars are violently modeled, and this or the strong bru
sh-strokes of the bearded prophet’s dark hair and body or the striking play of the light gives the picture a particular oneiric tension. On July 30, without any warning, he abandoned his broad, horizontal canvas and with it all the earlier forms of composition; in the following pictures the figures are generally arranged in a pyramid, the paddler at the apex. In all of them (and there were two on the thirtieth, three on the thirty-first) the menacing, dream-like quality grows. They are all predominantly green, and in all of them the talker increases in intensity, so that he is no longer a prating bore but a major prophet; at one point indeed he is a terrible figure with a black head and what I take to be a brown, bearded mask—the colors of archaic Greece—a living magic idol very, very far removed from Manet.

  In August Picasso returned to his horizontal pictures with two afterthoughts in which the nightmare tension falls: the second is dated August 19, and one might have supposed that it was the end of the series. But not at all. Three days later he burst out in a completely new direction: seven drawings transport the “Déjeuners” to the Golden Age, and they are a joy to see, for Picasso was the draughtsman of the world, and the first is as lovely as anything in his long career. The picnic (grapes and peaches now, and a jug of wine) and the paddler and the clearing are still there, but the trees are wide apart, there is no claustrophobia in the light-filled air, and the talker, wearing only a wreath of flowers, is a handsome youth who holds out his eternal hand not to predict any kind of woe but to say a poem to the exquisite long nude lying over against him while the brother, bearded, classical, sits listening with pleased attention, his chin on his hand. In the other drawings (which did not, alas, produce a picture) the talker changes, sometimes classically beautiful, sometimes older, snub-nosed and unshaved; but he always has his stick, and everybody, including the usually unconcerned paddler, listens to him with approval.

  Seven more drawings followed on August 28. They are still idyllic, and here the brother, lying on his belly with his head held up, seems to have strayed from Antipolis; but now the talker has talked too much; the girl has gone to sleep, the paddler has returned to picking flowers, and the brother’s smile is quite derisive. In the end the talker’s hand sinks, never to rise again until the very end of the year, when Picasso made another set of drawings of the clothed, hatted, early prophet haranguing the nude, while occasionally the paddler appears far away, between them. And so the “Déjeuners,” carrying on into 1962 in the form of brilliant linocuts, come to their end at last.

  In following them through from beginning to end I have necessarily thrown my narrative out of line, and now I must bring it back to 1959, all the more so since I may have given the impression that this was all Picasso did. That would be absurdly incorrect: he also made a great many ceramics—pots and painted tiles—and he spent much of his time on sculpture. The period was rich in metal cut-outs, constructions, flat and folded forms, some of which were reproduced, perhaps unfortunately, on a gigantic scale in sand-blasted concrete. And as well as his great suite of bull-fight drawings he also painted still more pictures of Jacqueline and still more pigeon-filled views from the open windows of La Californie. Furthermore, apart from his still active social life, he had to undergo the turmoil and the trials of moving house once more.

  As it will have been seen from the account of the “Déjeuners,” he did not settle at Vauvenargues. The place was a disappointment to him. As his enthusiasm waned he often came back to Cannes, and it was here, rather than to the château, that Pallarès came for his regular summer visit.

  His presence was good for Picasso: in the first place there was the pleasure of his company, and in the second Picasso could always be not only himself but his best and easiest self with Pallarès. The early prestige of the gifted Horta countryman who had helped Picasso “learn everything he knew” still held; the extra five or six years still counted; and Picasso would never presume to let himself go in front of Pallarès. Then again, while many of the members of Picasso’s court looked indignantly upon the rest as intruders who devoured the master’s time, hangers-on and parasites, so that there was often a wearisome current of animosity as well as a servile vying for favor that stimulated the tyrant in Picasso, Pallarès had not the least notion of competing. Nor had he the least notion of worshiping his old friend, young Pau, and he beheld their extreme complaisance, not to say their cringing, with a detached curiosity. The seniority of his friendship gave him a standing that no living man could rival, and he and Picasso exchanged their minds with the ease and freedom of sixty years before.

  It was a respite, and one with a delightful flavor of nineteenth-century Catalonia; but it could not last, and soon Picasso was back in the present again, moving between La Californie, from whose doomed windows he painted the builders’ cranes, and Vauvenargues, disagreeable to himself and oppressive to his wife. He was busy not only with his “Déjeuners” but also with almost every other form of plastic expression known to man, including linocuts. This was one of the few techniques he had not mastered long ago: his first posters are no earlier than 1948, and they can scarcely be called masterpieces, but now, having proved by his brilliant version of the younger Cranach’s “Bust of a Woman” that neither the process nor the material necessarily produced the heavy, slab-sided things that are usually to be seen and that the current practice of cutting into a separate piece of linoleum for every color was nonsense, he went on to make a number of remarkable prints, some of the “Déjeuners” and others having an obvious connection with his sequence.

  The “Déjeuners” themselves might have proceeded at a brisker rate if he had been shut up in a lighthouse or even if he had been at Gósol: as it was there were countless interruptions, arising not only from those who broke through his defenses but also from his need for company, even second-rate company, and from the necessary business of his life. The general run of exhibitions could be left to Sabartés, who still attended daily at the rue des Grands-Augustins, coming down to Cannes or Vauvenargues from time to time although he was now far, far older than his friend; but the great retrospectives, such as that in New York in 1957, in London in 1960 or in Tokyo some years later, required Picasso’s own attention. Arranging such a show with him was a harrrowing experience; he regarded letters as something to be received, read with intense curiosity, and then put silently away in some heap, rarely or never to be answered; cables had little more effect; and he was difficult to reach by telephone. Yet when the patient organizer did surmount all the barriers he usually found Picasso helpful, kind, prodigal of his time, and solicitous for the success of the exhibition. He did not paint in an ivory tower: communication was of great importance to him, and now with his fame reaching almost as far as his silly notoriety the potential range of communication was immense. Four hundred and fifty thousand people, for example, saw the London show at the Tate gallery, which included the Russian pictures.

  He had a liking for London, but Barcelona was infinitely nearer to his heart, and in 1960 the city’s incomparable Museo Picasso took shape. Some years before he had asked Sabartés what he meant to do with his collection: the words “after his death” were understood, but it is a moral certainty that they were never uttered. Sabartés said that he intended to found a Picasso museum and that in compliment to his friend’s birthplace it was to be at Málaga. Picasso said, “Why not Barcelona? I have so few ties with Málaga,” and Sabartés fell in with the idea directly. Since Picasso was a Communist, a Republican, a supporter of Catalan autonomy, and a most determined and public opponent of the regime, the negotiations took some time; but by 1960 they bore fruit, the city responding nobly with the offer of either of two fourteenth-century palaces. Picasso chose the Palacio Aguilar in the narrow, ancient Calle Montcada, familiar to his boyhood and only a few minutes from the Calle de la Merced: here Sabartés’ gift was to be housed, together with everything Picasso had already given to the town, everything that the Barcelona museum of modern art had acquired, and many capital pictures given by friends and collec
tors.

  Sabartés was a poor man all his life, and when one considers that by 1960 an early Picasso drawing was worth a great deal of money, while a portrait represented a fortune (that of Lola fetched£32,000 a little later), and when one considers that nearly all Picasso’s friends sold his presents, although many of them had possibilities of making money that Sabartés did not possess, then the extent of his donation will give some measure of his magnanimity, and incidentally of Picasso’s generosity to his friend. Sabartés presented the museum with no less than five hundred and seventy-four items, ranging from his portraits to unique canceled proofs of engravings, often inscribed in the most affectionate terms.