Picasso: A Biography

  The project interested Picasso to the highest degree, but the final decision had not been taken in May, 1960, when Brassaï brought his wife to see him in Cannes; and although he spoke of the huge sand-blasted concrete panels that he had designed for the College of Architects in Barcelona and mentioned the possibility of the museum, he did not elaborate, perhaps to avert ill-luck, perhaps out of his deeply-rooted sense of secrecy. Otherwise he was as open as the day. Brassaï was one of the many friends who would not join the competing band of courtiers and he had not seen Picasso for thirteen years. He found him unchanged, as full of youthful vitality and physical alertness as ever; and during the afternoon they spent together there was a curious proof of this. Brassaï dropped his cigarette-holder and Picasso caught it before it touched the ground, with the same instant reaction that he had shown in 1944, when the unlucky Brassaï, photographing a group in the studio, plunged into Kazbek’s water-bowl just as the shutter clicked: the developed film showed that of the whole group Picasso and the dog were the only ones to react in that split second.

  Picasso was unchanged, welcoming, affectionate, and attentive; but he would not have been the same Picasso if he had not denounced his fate. And now it was no longer a matter of people wilfully moving his electric torch, attempting to steal his drawing-pins, hiding his valuable rubber, malignantly dusting his mounds: now it was with a far deeper conviction, indeed with real distress, that he could say, “I should not wish my fame on to anyone, not even my worst enemy… it makes me physically ill… I protect myself as well as I can … I am barricaded behind double-locked doors day and night.” And Vauvenargues was even worse; people came in droves to stare; they peered at him through binoculars; he could never go out. As for Cannes, a huge block of flats was about to rise in the next-door garden: it would hide the sea and its inhabitants would look straight down on to him. And what was the good of money, once one had enough? Being rich did not mean that he could eat four luncheons or four dinners; and rich or poor he would never smoke anything but Gauloises, the only cigarettes he liked.

  Nor would he have been the Picasso Brassaï knew if his mood had not suddenly changed. Learning that Madame Brassaï was partly Catalan, he observed, “One always belongs to one’s own country” and spoke to her in that language. The poor lady could remember little apart from the word for black-pudding, but Picasso was not deterred: he whistled a sardana, raised his arms, and stepped the hieratic paces of the dance with a look of enchantment on his face.

  Brassaï spoke of the first time he had ever seen it—the grave expressions of the dancers, the absence of laughter: he might have been at a religious service. “But the sardana is a very serious matter,” said Picasso, “… a communion of hearts and minds. It does away with all class-distinctions. Rich or poor, young and old, all dance it together: the postman and the banker, and the servants hand in hand with their masters.”

  Picasso was not exaggerating when he told Brassaï of the persecution at Vauvenargues: but it was not only the starers nor even Jacqueline’s aversion that destroyed his pleasure in the place—there was some fatal incompatibility between the man and the house, an incompatibility expressed on his side more by uneasiness and ill-humor than by any direct admission. Often, when they were driving there, they would reach Aix or even the gateway of the château itself, and then he would abruptly give the order to turn about and drive right back to Cannes. After the spring of 1961 he never worked there, never stayed more than a night or two: henceforward it was only a store-house and a useful stopping-place when he went to the bull-fights at Arles or Nîmes.

  It would surprise no one at all acquainted with his mind to learn that he never sold Vauvenargues: on the other hand, his closest friends were astonished when they heard that he was to be buried there, in the garden by the house, and to lie forever in a place he had come to hate.

  He did not hate Cannes, far from it, although as Paulo told Brassaï he would have been much happier in the Roussillon, particularly at Collioure; and in his son’s opinion it was indolence alone that kept him on the Cóte d’Azur. Yet La Californie was no longer a lasting refuge, for the developers had carried out their threat, and the grim concrete was mounting just at hand.

  Behind Cannes stands Mougins on its hill, and Vallauris is no great way off: all country that Picasso knew by heart. The winding inland road from Mougins to Vallauris first drops and then turns right-handed under a wooded ridge; and upon this ridge stands a chapel dedicated to Notre-Dame-de-Vie, some way out of Mougins but still belonging to it, a place of local pilgrimage. Not quite so high as the chapel Picasso found a house. It was screened by towering cypresses, it had a fair amount of land round it, and though it was not wholly secluded it could be made more so: he bought it out of hand in early 1961 and by the summer he was installed as thoroughly as ever he was likely to be installed anywhere. La Californie was not sold, of course, any more than Vauvenargues, and many of his possessions were left in both houses, while others, particularly crates of books, still trailed here and there in Paris.

  The house was called the Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie, and it belonged to a Guiness, just as La Californie had belonged to a Moet. In the south of France a mas can be anything with an agricultural flavor from a peasant’s hovel to a pretentious villa with some olde worlde features, usually round tiles on the roof and olive-jars on the terrace. Picasso’s appears to have begun about two hundred and fifty years before as a genuine mas of the more prosperous kind, a substantial, stone-built house with the great rounded arches of Provence: later generations and later owners added to the building, so that when Picasso moved in he already had plenty of room for painting and sculpture studios. Presently he built more, for the fever of work was still on him, as it had been with a few short breaks these last sixty years and more; and it was at Notre-Dame-de-Vie that he finished the “Déjeuners” in the winter of 1961/1962.

  No house could have had a better name: the Notre Dame is less incongruous than it might appear, for although one does not usually associate Picasso and Our Lady, there is no doubt that he had a deep religious sense, however archaic and manichaean; at this very time, for example, when he and Parmelin were wondering what it was that set certain paintings quite apart from the ordinary run, he said, “Something holy, that’s what it is. That’s the kind of word you ought to be able to use, only people would get it wrong, give it a meaning it doesn’t possess. You ought to be able to say that such and such a picture is what it is, with all its latent potentialities, because it has been touched by God. But people would take your words in another sense. Yet that’s what comes nearest to the truth.”

  The second part of the name fitted far more obviously, for at eighty Picasso abounded with life. For most men living and for all under forty he had always been there and he had always been famous. He was in fact a historical monument. Yet it never occurred to anyone to say, “Picasso? Is he still alive?” As I have said before, he now had little immediate influence on the younger painters, for the liberation had been accomplished long ago and both he and they were living in a post-Picassian world; yet while the young followed the successors of his successors (often falling into the academicism of “modern” art with all its tricks), or, like the Americans, struck out on paths of their own, Picasso carried on with his lonely, prolific investigation of reality, or as he often said, of truth, still in a state of permanent, personal revolution. He was a presence of much greater value than any school.

  La Rochefoucauld says that we enter each distinct age as novices, earlier experience being irrelevant to the new situation: that is probably the case with most people, but it was certainly not with Picasso, exceptional in this as in so many other respects. Although he resented the passage of time he seems to have had no difficulty about the various stages, perhaps because he remained entirely himself throughout, untroubled by the changing roles imposed by society. His hypochondria, always pronounced, may have grown a little, but apart from that the only sign of age at this period was a disinclina
tion to see new faces; and even that may have been no more than the effect of experience, since almost all new faces wanted something, and he was deathly tired of solicitation. The fact that he very often spoke of old friends long dead, particularly of Apollinaire and Max Jacob, is neither here nor there, for although aged men do go back to the past it was in no sense a return for Picasso: his past friendships rarely left him, and both Max and Apollinaire were fresh and living in his mind.

  The extreme secrecy of his marriage to Jacqueline, which took place on March 2, 1961, at the mairie of Vallauris* (it was a civil marriage only) and which was attended by almost no one apart from the necessary witnesses, Maître Antébi, a lawyer from Cannes, and his wife, might be taken as a consciousness of age, as though the marriage of a man in his eightieth year to a woman of thirty-five were slightly ridiculous; but the more probable explanation is that they feared persecution by journalists, the incessant click of cameras and the blinding flash, and the congratulations of Picasso’s enormous acquaintance. His reasons for marrying again remained obscure to his friends: yet if his intention was to provide for Jacqueline after his death, then he did so handsomely. French law does not allow a man to dispose of his property as he chooses, and at that time a companion, even one with a certificat de concubinage (to be had for the asking at any mairie) had no rights at all, as the lady who shared Dufy’s life found to her cost; but a wife necessarily inherits a large proportion of the estate, and although Picasso’s prices were still nowhere near their height, in this same year “La Mort d’Arlequin” fetched eighty thousand pounds; and when in fact Picasso died the equivalent of several million fell to his widow.

  More evidence on the side of youth is the fact that Picasso took to watching television (often confusing and even incomprehensible to those who allow themselves to age) and that since he disliked going out and being mobbed he also overcame his aversion to the telephone. He had white ones put into every bedroom in the house, as he proudly told Kahnweiler, and Paris was at the end of the line. So was the Roussillon, where his heart still lingered, and he often spoke to the Lazermes.

  Before finishing the “Déjeuners” at Notre-Dame-de-Vie he had also painted scores and scores of other pictures, many of them based on Jacqueline’s head and closely related to his cut-out sculpture, the planes turning, the features taken apart and reassembled. Several of them also show Kaboul, his second Afghan hound; and here again, however much the woman may be distorted, the dog is left alone. And after he finished the “Déjeuners” the steady flow increased, sometimes reaching three or more canvases a day: it is remarkable how these Notre-Dame-de-Vie pictures differ from those of La Californie even when they deal with the almost obsessive theme of Jacqueline. The difference is more easily apprehended than described, but at least one can say that they are generally graver, more inward-looking; and of course the peculiarly Californian interior landscapes, with the curly windows wide open looking out on to the pigeons, palms, luminous sea and sky are no longer to be found.

  Although he was much given to dosing himself, Picasso was wonderfully fit in his early eighties, so fit that on his eightieth birthday itself he not only stayed up at a kind of variety show in Nice until two in the morning, but attended a ceremony in his honor at Vallauris the next day, before watching Dominguín and Ortega kill their bulls in the arena. He saw quantities of friends, including many Catalans who came to talk about the museum in Barcelona; and although if the children were not there he often spent the blazing summer days in the shelter of Notre-Dame-de-Vie, with innumerable cicadas shrilling in his trees, the autumn would find him swimming placidly about the quieter bays. Illness and death were not far off: Sabartés had a stroke in 1961 and two years later both Braque and Cocteau died; but Sabartés recovered, and in the peace of Notre-Dame-de-Vie the deaths lost their immediacy. Then again Pallarès was strong and well, and Picasso was much younger than Pallarès: above all he was working as steadily as he had ever done, and in fact there were few periods when his production had been so great in volume.

  In this great body of work, and Parmelin counted close on a hundred and sixty Jacquelines for 1963 alone, there were naturally some pictures that did not satisfy Picasso nor please those of his friends who admitted that he might fall short of perfection. Such people were rare; for nearly all the members of his court it was treason to suppose that anything Picasso produced was less than a masterpiece; yet it is noteworthy that two or three of his friends, and not the least beloved, were unmoved by his painting. Indeed there was Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was unmoved by any painting at all, yet that did not prevent Picasso from remaining constant to her, in his own way, until the advent of Jacqueline, when she was sacrificed to domestic peace.

  Of those pictures that excelled the rest the various “Rapes of the Sabines” come first to mind. They had their immediate origin in the suggestion that the exhibitors at the coming Salon de Mai, that of 1963, should think of Delacroix’ bloody “Entrée des croisés à Constantinople.” (The Salon de Mai was and still is an annual show of the works of resistant artists and those they invite to join them: the organizers often propose some central theme.) Picasso began painting warriors’ heads by the score, but presently he moved away from Delacroix and towards Poussin and David, the “Massacre of the Innocents” of the one and the “Sabine Women” of the other.

  He began in October with a big, gray “Rape”: classical buildings in the background, swirling combat in the middle, swords, horses, helmets, Sabines being carried away; and beneath the turmoil, crushed figures, a baby, a woman trampled by a horse. The next day he painted another gray picture of a girl knocked off her bicycle and a sandaled foot about to tread her down. After many other studies she appears again in November under the hoofs of a galloping horse, while a woman, reminiscent of “Guernica,” shrieks from a window above. This girl with the bicycle, one of the rare examples of the specifically modern world in Picasso’s later work, is not to be seen in the two best-known versions, the full “Rape” of November in which women are carried off by horsemen while a towering yellow warrior attacks the enemy with a huge butcher’s knife, and the February, 1963, battle between a rider and a man on foot, both trampling a woman and her child. But she is there, lying in the foreground of a more detailed lithograph of the whole brutal conflict, and she adds an even greater poignancy to the littered mass of more anonymous victims, the babies, the slaughtered women, the severed limbs, particularly as her face is that of Marie-Thérèse, once so passionate a bicyclist.

  Daix, who was then still a member of the Party and who watched the political conflict with the utmost attention, relates this series to the Cuban crisis, which, threatening atomic war, rose to its height in October, 1962: he may be right, but the Delacroix, the Poussin, and the David that Picasso had been considering, all of them connected with the arrogant, sterile, subhuman face of violence, were quite enough to bring his hatred of war and his compassion for its victims into play.

  He worked exceedingly hard on his “Sabines,” pushing himself to the limit during his long night sessions; and, as he told Hélène Parmelin, one of them, the two warriors fighting, “very nearly did him in.” Yet he moved straight on from this sequence to another, perhaps less emotionally expensive but longer in the doing. Some weeks after he had begun it he wrote on the last page of a sketch-book, “Painting is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants.”

  What painting made Picasso do in the first half of 1963 was to embark upon a long discourse on the painter and his model. The forty or fifty resuiting canvases are nothing like the Verve suite of nearly ten years before: here the painter may not be a particularly heroic figure, but he is neither old nor ridiculous; and it seems to me that the series is much less the result of strong present emotion than of prolonged and comparatively objective thought on the subject.

  He is first seen sitting gravely at his easel, holding a palette and painting a rudimentary face: no model is visible, but on a chest-of-drawers stands a bust. Presently
the model appears, a green woman, nude of course, in various attitudes on a couch. She changes color, place, and size, but she is an object throughout; she has taken off her individuality with her clothes, and the dialogue is not between the painter and her as a person, still less as an object of desire, but between the painter and the piece of reality that she represents: her volumes speak, not her mind nor yet her sex. Admittedly this is no more than an assumption, since one rarely sees what the painter is at: most of the time his canvas is sideways-on, and even when it is not, only vague shapes appear, generally at variance with what is visible in his studio.

  He paints on and on with the same steady concentration, wholly given over to his task: his appearance alters somewhat; beards come and go, so does hair, and later in the series furious color suffuses his face; but he remains a thin dark figure of indeterminate age, slightly absurd at times but always respectable in his dogged, unyielding struggle. And throughout he is utterly alone. Picasso liked him, called him le pauvre, and watched him work with a compassionate eye.

  Most of the time he paints in his somewhat cramped, conventional studio (he and the place and the model are clearly signs, not particular remarks) but he can also work out of doors, even by night on occasion, with his model in a deck-chair or under a tree; and wherever he is the colors that surround him say even more than his absorbed, attentive face and his poised hand about the process of creation. The colors speak in their own terms and there is little point in trying to transpose their language; but no one can fail to understand the progression from somber blue-gray to the excitement of green and vermillion (the painter’s form becomes a fine, sharply-defined black at this point, and his hand more decisive), then to the blue and pink that suffuse the picture, then the general fading of the colors, followed by the sudden brilliance of the painter’s face and hair. Picasso emphasized the significance of this last phase by momentarily abandoning his own painter for Rembrandt: he revered the Dutchman, often using him as a point of departure, and the picture he now had in mind was the Dresden self-portrait of the young Rembrandt with Saskia in his lap; for the purpose of his argument Picasso turned him into a splendid double-profiled painter working in a blaze of gold and red, while the blue-haired Saskia and her green bosom are shifted to other planes to conform with the local laws of space. Then he returned to his own painter: the colors darken, lighten again, break into a frenzied corruscation, and so through gradual transitions return to their primitive sobriety. But still he paints on, even though in the last pictures his face is a white blur or an ill-looking gray, bald and beardless: he never wins; he is never beaten.