It was disappointing, but I was consoled by the knowledge that I should find the sacristy unencumbered: it was here that the drawings were shown, and like most people who have seen a great deal of Picasso’s work I had the highest possible respect and admiration for him as a draughtsman, sharing the common opinion that he was one of the greatest the world had ever seen, certainly the greatest of this century.
Row after row they stretched away, cold black and white for the most part, colder than the stone walls of the sacristy, a continual reiteration of themes stated long ago—the whore and the ancient procuress, the goatish elder, the lewd girl sprawling with her legs wide open, many variations on loveless sex. Even in earlier years there had been a harshness in the brothel scenes of whores and bullfighters, though far more often desire was expressed with pagan gaiety and even tenderness: but now the icy brothel squalor invaded everything, and everywhere there was a continual nagging insistence upon women’s hairy genitalia and even more upon their anuses. Many of the same subjects had appeared in the 1968 etchings, a series into which he introduced his father on occasion, sometimes as a voyeur, sometimes as a more active participant; but then the insistence was far less marked, the scenes less exclusively ruttish; the vitality of the drawing raised the prints to another plane entirely; and if they were bawdy, they were also cheerful. Now it seemed to me that wit and invention had flagged, though not alas the artist’s perseverence: the incessant fingering depressed me; the copulation appeared joyless and brutal. Everyone knows that desire often outlives ability, but it was sad to see the fact exemplified at such length, above all in a place that retained so much of its austere reserve. The superlative technique was still there—never a tremor in the sure, perfect line—yet the formal beauty that I could not but acknowledge did nothing to lift my depression: the drawings struck me as frigid, sterile, and obsessive. I reflected upon the mutilating effect of the surgeon’s knife and of physical old age on a man whose virility was so important a part of his essence: could it geld his spirit—such a spirit? Must it necessarily reach the core?
Writing about this same exhibition Rafael Alberti spoke of the embracing couples with rapture, and one paragraph ends “Antique kisses. Bald kisses. Ancient kisses with the spittle and slaver of centuries,” while a little later he said, “to paint or draw love as it is done today by the Grae-co-Latin-Malagueño Pablo Picasso is absolutely the contrary of pornography. It is health.” Alberti is a noble poet, a sweet Spanish swan, and I should like to share his enthusiasm; but surely a brothel, for all its archaic charms, is hardly the place where one expects to find health, physical or metaphysical, to say nothing of love?
And one of his poems about Picasso begins (in the translation of Anthony Kerrigan),
For you every day begins
like a powerful erection, an ardent
lance pointing against the rising sun.
Priapus is still the one who swells
the invention of youf grace and your monsters.
Priapus is a potent god, there is no kind of doubt: but just what does a maimed Priapus swell? It occurred to me that Alberti might have let his friendship run away with his judgment: but on the other hand was my notion of normal sexual behavior necessarily right? In supposing that amorous busyness in the ancient was grotesque and that vicarious satisfaction was repellent, was I not merely accepting the conventional role that society allots to the aged—the role of the half-dead sage whose sun has gone out and who is to live, resigned, free from all desire, in the pale moonlight of accumulated wisdom? Did I dislike the drawings because they offended my possibly false idea of what was becoming in the old? I could not tell; but in any case I left the sacristy disturbed and sad, and I did not return to Avignon until 1972. And even then,as I stood looking up at the fortified palace, I hesitated for a while.
During the last few years the friends we had in common had heard little of Picasso, and that little was not good. Almost every contact appeared to have been broken: even Kahnweiler might be turned away from Notre-Dame-de-Vie; and when, in an attempt at seeing his grandfather, Pablito climbed the defenses, guard-dogs—creatures very different from the Lump and Yan of former days—were let loose upon him: the police took the young man away. And when the papers spoke of Picasso, which they usually did to give the news of some enormous price paid for his works (£98,000 for “Ma Jolie et bouteille de Bass,” $430,000 for a “Paysage de Gósol”) they referred to him as the hermit of Mougins. There were ugly rumors of sequestration, and indeed it is probably easier to confine a very famous, very wealthy, very closely guarded man than a common mortal. Some maintained that the group financially interested in Picasso’s production cut him off from his friends and kept him at work, encouraging him to produce, produce and produce, even if it meant spreading his invention thin: quantity alone was what mattered, since any canvas daubed with paint and signed Picasso was worth a purse of gold. This rumor was repeated by those who could not speak too much evil of Jacqueline: certainly she had a great deal of power—the fulsome official praise made that clear enough—but the accusations did not take into account the fact that some old friends or their children were admitted. Ana Reventós, for example, the daughter of the second Dr. Cinto and the great niece of Ramon Reventós, came to see him in 1971 about a charitable foundation in memory of the first Dr. Cinto Reventós (a foundation to which Picasso gave the magnificent Blue Period “Femme morte à I’hôpital”), while Maurizio Torra-Balari was at Notre-Dame-de-Vie just before Picasso’s death, and Sir Roland and Lady Penrose in 1970, not to mention several others. Kinder acquaintances said that she sacrificed her whole life to looking after Picasso, and that if she had a fault it was in taking him too literally when he fulminated against his friends for eating up his time—that perhaps she went far beyond his real wishes in isolating him to the extent that he seemed to demand.
I did not really believe the stories of sequestration, but belief is an odd cat and although it is rejected some smell remains—a depressing smell. Yet I was far more concerned with another, less melodramatic but even uglier possibility. Picasso was of course a mass of contradictions and there had always been some sides of his character that guaranteed unhappiness quite apart from that arising from his built-in melancholy and his status as a wholly exceptional man—an outsider: he could be overbearing, selfish, tyrannical, self-indulgent, and on occasion brutally hard. He was now surrounded by a small circle of his inferiors and dependents; no one could keep him in order, as once Eluard had done; those he respected most were long since dead, and he could let himself go just as he pleased. He was, as he said himself, a man “who could say shit to anyone on earth.” He was enormously rich; and riches expose a man to pride and luxury, and a foolish elation of heart. As for pride, Lucifer could never have held a candle to Picasso at any time, riches or not; but it did occur to me that in his case luxury might, after so many years of discipline, emerge as facility, and the foolish elation of heart as a persuasion that anything he did was worth showing—that his briefest jotting down of a passing thought, in his private shorthand, was a valid communication of real importance. In short, that the rot of self-indulgence might have spread to his art. If that was so then neither his way of life nor even his work could be a satisfaction to him. If servile adulation, intensive coddling, guarding, shielding from every draught, had so reinforced the deep contradictions in his own character that they had turned him bad then obviously there was no question of happiness. It seemed unlikely that that fine head, with habitual kindness, gaiety, and strength carved deep into all its lines and wrinkles could go bad; but it was not impossible—there are innumerable instances of disastrous change pitiably late in life—and the prospect grieved me.
It was not a matter of his reputation: in its main lines that was fixed and nothing he might do now could destroy the past. What filled my mind was the idea that his last years were unhappy, for if in addition to sexual wretchedness he had also to bear a low opinion of himself (for it was impossible to bel
ieve that his critical faculty had died, however it might be overlaid by indulgence) then his end would be miserable indeed. That was something I found hard to contemplate: although I was by no means an unconditional admirer of Picasso—it seemed to me that less than fifteen thousand canvases could have contained even his genius as a painter—he had given me more than any other single creative man; and slight though our acquaintance was it had produced real affection on my side, an affection strengthened by most of what I heard in later years from the many friends we shared.
So now, in the autumn of 1972, it was with mixed feelings that I walked out of the sunlit square and into the Gothic darkness, along the cold stone passages and so to the vast chapel. There I met the sun again, a fierce, gay, truculent, many-colored sun coming not from the pale windows but from the crowd of pictures blazing on the walls. Arrogant musketeers with swords and broad-brimmed hats; formidable piratical characters with huge eyes at different levels; old friends such as Harlequin on a stage with half-drawn red curtains, almost overwhelmed by the furious activity of a nude racing across the scene, trailing a cupid in the air behind her; hundreds of women; and most of these people crowded into small squarish canvases so that their abounding vitality overflowed on to the next. Hundreds of pictures, brilliant color everywhere, and springing life. In a way it was not unlike standing in the transept of Chartres cathedral: yet there was an essential difference, for here there was nothing in the least anonymous—it was an intensely personal confrontation, and the immense personality that filled the whole space was that of Picasso, a Picasso sparkling with fresh invention; and invention, as Vauvenargues observes, is the sole proof of genius.
There were some magnificent single pictures that remain in my mind, particularly those isolated at the east end, but my general impression was that of a host whose members, though individually distinct and even at apparent variance, tended to merge into five or six main groups; and it came to me that this was how late Picasso should be seen, that although each picture was an entity in its own right it was also part of a whole and that the full statement of say two months’ work was to be apprehended only when these relationships could be seen. It was not a question of variations on a single theme but of something far more subtle, an extension of painting in time and space, allied to what he had done in the days of Cubism and to some extent in the Meninas and the other suites, though there he was obviously more bound to a given text, whereas here he was tied to no one but Picasso, as free as the wind.
Free as the wind and happy: no one but a happy man could have painted those pictures, and no amount of verbal assurance could have been half so convincing. Certainly there were shadows—the drawings were proof of that—but Picasso was not made for total happiness and in any case they did not affect the heart of the matter: though grave enough for any ordinary man, here the shadows were comparatively insignificant. Picasso was not an ordinary man: his more than ordinary suffering and rebellion was counterbalanced, and I believe more than counterbalanced, by extraordinary satisfactions. His life outside his studio may not have been all that his friends could have wished for him, but most of his waking life, most even in the common measurement of time and far more if intensity is to be taken into account, was spent at his easel, alone in the far purer world of his own creation.
It was only hours after 1 had left the exhibition that with a start of added pleasure I realized that never once during the whole time I spent there had I remembered that this was the work of a man very old in years. It had never occurred to me to say that this was a wonderful performance for Picasso at ninety, nor to make the least allowance; and I was delighted to learn that his fiery spirit was already deep in the arrangements for still another show in the same surroundings and that he was painting the pictures for it.
A few months later, on April 8, 1973, he died, died suddenly with his mind full of plans for the coming year, which might have seen a full working-out of his latest concept.
In the winter he had caught influenza, a bad attack from which he slowly recovered but which left him weak and run down. Nevertheless he was working again in the early spring, getting up at about noon and sometimes staying on in his studio until six the next morning, and on April 7 he invited friends to dinner. But when he went to bed that night he had a feeling of breathlessness, and the local doctor detected a bad infection of his lungs and the strong likelihood of very serious heart-trouble. The next day an eminent cardiologist—a friend of Picasso’s—was called in, flying down from Paris by the early morning plane. He saw at once that there was no hope, but he did what he could to make his patient comfortable. Picasso was fascinated by his instruments, full of the liveliest curiosity; he had got up and shaved—he wanted to show the specialist some of the pictures in his studio—but presently shortness of breath made him lie down again: he had not the least notion that he was dying. At times he drifted off, talking quietly to himself, and the doctor often heard him speak of Apollinaire. He sank gradually through the morning, but with no pain; and in a lucid moment towards the very end he spoke quite clearly to the specialist, a bachelor, saying, as he reached out his hand to Jacqueline, “You are wrong not to marry. It’s useful.”
Then a little before noon his heart failed at last and he died, there in his own bed, amid a jumble of his pictures and possessions, and surrounded by his household.
After a pause of several days, during which his son Paulo arrived, they buried him very privately in the garden at Vauvenargues, traveling through untimely snow to reach that remote and isolated house: he left the world with the ancient words of the Church said over him, for a priest attended his coffin, together with some local Communist councilors (but scarcely a single other friend), and between them they lowered Picasso into his solitary grave, a man almost as lonely as the sun, but one who glowed with much the same fierce burning life.
Appendixes
1. Picasso’s Family Tree
2. Picasso’s Relationship to Tío Perico the Hermit
3. Picasso’s Stars
4. Picasso’s Palm
5. Jung on Picasso
1
PICASSO’S FAMILY TREE
2
PICASSO’S RELATIONSHIP TO
TIO PERICO THE HERMIT
(based on Sabartés)
3
Picasso’s Stars
MANY people have cast Picasso’s horoscope, but perhaps not all of them knew that in the nineteenth century Spanish time was twenty-six minutes behind that of Greenwich: and if this difference is not taken into account the predictions cannot be quite so accurate as one might wish. Bearing this in mind, therefore, I applied to an eminent astrologer, Mr. G. C. Nixon of London, and concealing the name of my subject, desired him to tell me all he could.
He replied: “At the time [Picasso] was born the sign Cancer was rising and the Moon was in Scorpio in the 5th house conjunct the important star Antares. Saturn and Neptune were also elevated in the 10th house in Aries in opposition to the Sun in the sidereal sign Libra. Mercury was in Scorpio in opposition to Jupiter in Taurus and Venus was in Virgo in the 3rd house receiving the aspect of Mars in Gemini in the 12th house.
“The positions suggest a sensitive and artistic temperament, music, literary or painting, a stormy life and much hardship and with risk of much humiliation and downfall in the end.”
4
Picasso’s Palm
MAX Jacob’s reading of Picasso’s hand is not dated, but it was probably made before 1909. The ink has faded in some places and in others the writing can hardly be made out, but I think I have deciphered it correctly. Apart from its scientific value, the document gives a picture of the Picasso Max Jacob knew when they were both so young: Picasso treasured it all his life, and it formed part of his donation to the Barcelona museum.
The reading consists of two sheets, each with an elegant drawing of a hand; on one Jacob shows the geography of hands in general, with observations about their shape and the nature of their skin; on the other he turns
to Picasso’s hand in particular, his left hand, and after the remark ardent tempérament he begins:
1 line of life—weakness and illness up to the age of 68, serious at the end of his days.
2 line of luck: brilliant beginning in life—from the practical point of view cruel disappointments and a change of fortune before the age of 30 or 35, but success in the arts—brilliant (square in the line of life). Life will grow more peaceful towards the end. Wealth can be hoped for (bracelet 3). 4 - 4, the hepatic line is weak and divided, sign of indifferent health.
5 the mount of Mercury is prominent—intelligence—but the first joint of the little finger is short—näveté.
Particular observations. All the lines seem to arise at the base of this hand’s line of fortune—it is like the first spark of a firework. This kind of living star is seldom seen, and then only in predestined individuals. A flight of lines stretching out towards the mount of inspiration would show us a poetic temperament even if the elongation of the hand had not already led us to form this opinion. The base of the hand is broad and square, the mark of sensuality but also of candour and integrity. A pennant-shaped hand shows a charming, sociable character.
The thumb is short, no strength of will. The line of the head forks and vanishes; perhaps the judgment is not protected from the sudden whims of the imagination nor from set, preconceived ideas.
The line of the heart is magnificent; attachments will be many and warm; on this side too the disappointments will be cruel—they frighten me.
The distance between the line of the heart and that of the head reveals a soul both broad and deep.