They also talked about someone Picasso had described as “a very boring old aunt, a religious maniac who was constantly telling her beads.” This was Tía Pepa. The family wanted a portrait of her, but the old lady had always refused to pose.
And then, one scorching summer day when Picasso was back in Málaga for the holidays, she suddenly changed her mind and showed up despite the heat in cap and shawl, ready to be painted. Young Pablo, the family Polaroid, was out playing with his cousins. He was called in. He took out his paints and brushes and went to work.
He liked to claim that he had finished the portrait in an hour, but he was not above exaggerating in such matters. He also said, with some satisfaction, that she died the following week.
Finally, Doña Lola said kindly, “Maybe she would like to see the pictures.” Lolita led me through more darkened rooms, past a case filled with plaster casts of deformed feet, a specialty of Pablín, who was a doctor. (This detail particularly delighted Picasso when I told him about it.) Sometimes the light was so dim that Lolita held up a lit match for me to get a better view.
“You can’t see much, can you?” she said sympathetically. I agreed, and asked if it might be possible for me to come back by daylight. This caused consternation. The family conferred. No one stirred until midday. Since both nephews were doctors and had their offices there, I wondered about their office hours. Finally, it was agreed that I could come back at six the next afternoon.
Incidentally, everything I saw at the Vilatós’ was black with grime. There were pictures all over the place, on the floor, propped against furniture, on the sofa, hanging askew from a single nail. Most of them were unframed and dim from decades of dust.
What I finally saw, and was able to photograph and publish for the first time, were early sketches and paintings of family members and friends and a whole group of paintings dating from the 1917 visit. Most of these works are now in the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. They made a magnificent spread in the fourth issue of L’ŒIL and won us international acclaim. There were full pages in Time and Life and many write-ups in other publications.
Several of the large canvases by the fourteen-year-old Picasso included his father and sister. The one now known as Science and Charity involved an unfortunate woman dying in bed, attended by a doctor and a nun. The doctor was posed by Don José, Picasso’s father, a failed academic artist who specialized in painting fur and feathers. It was he who had staged the scenario, thinking an edifying subject would make a good impression in academic circles.
Another big painting, The First Communion, involved a kneeling young person in white and a standing priest. Don José had modeled once again, and sister Lola posed for the first Communion candidate. Doña Lola told me about this picture: “I didn’t want to pose. I didn’t have a first Communion dress. But Pablo kept insisting, so I finally borrowed a dress from a friend.”
There were a number of self-portraits, sketched and painted. One showed him, already displaying his love of disguises, wearing an eighteenth-century white wig, tweaking reality by the tail.
Among the 1917 crop was a figure built up in typical Cubist overlapping planes, but with the surprising addition of a hand in trompe l’oeil that seems to be bursting through the canvas. I had thought it represented a seated diner with a bowl of fruit (which is how the Picasso Museum in Barcelona has labeled it), but when I showed a photograph of it to Picasso, he corrected me: “No, it’s a waiter setting the table. Can’t you see he is holding a knife and fork in one hand?”
There was a painting Picasso simply identified as Figure (the Barcelona museum calls it Seated Woman) that was totally unlike anything I had seen from that period. The “figure” with its full curves evokes both human anatomy and musical instruments. It was painted in broad surfaces of chalky tones—a dusty pink, almond green, gray, white, black—painted so thinly that the bare canvas can be seen in several places.
When I talked about it to Picasso in Paris, he agreed that it was “hors série,” as he put it—one of a kind. He said it represented certain preoccupations that he was to take up later.
There were two paintings of Spanish dancers, totally different from each other but painted, Picasso said, within a few days of each other. He could veer rapidly from one style to another. One had a straightforward approach, the features modeled, the upper part of the figure and its surrounding space highlighted by a confetti of colored dots. The other danced to a Cubist tune, in colors reminiscent of Juan Gris.
When I got back to Paris and went over to show Picasso the family photographs, as promised, and to deliver some gifts from the Vilatós, I asked him whether the seated dancer was a portrait of Olga, as the Vilatós had told me. “Absolutely not,” he answered. “They are thinking of a totally different painting. I can’t quite remember this dancer’s real name, because we always called her la Salchichona [the Sausage].”
An old friend of mine, the English collector and early Picasso biographer Roland Penrose, wrote in his Picasso Memoirs that he had gone to visit Picasso when I was expected. Picasso had woken up in a bad mood and had told Sabartés his back hurt and he wouldn’t see anyone. Penrose was disconsolate. Then I was announced. Picasso leaped out of bed and made his appearance in a white dressing gown. To quote Penrose: “Picasso welcomed Rosamond and soon forgot his pains under the combined influence of her charm and memories of the early paintings and of his sister and family. Rosamond’s account of her visit amused Picasso greatly, especially the lack of light for nocturnal habits.”
Picasso looked at his sister’s photograph and remembered how beautiful she had been, and how often he had made her portrait. He said: “It’s terrible. She should be killed, n’est-ce pas? My mother used to say there is nothing worse for a woman than to grow old, because that means to grow ugly.” Roland remarked that his sister’s eyes were as dark and sparkling as ever, but Picasso could only see the swollen formless chin, her flabby cheeks, and her tousled gray hair.
What delighted Picasso was a photograph of a bust of the Virgin that had been acquired by his father at a flea market, originally a plaster cast of a Greek goddess. He had painted it white with utmost realism, with the addition of eyelashes and golden tears and a look of sorrow.
Picasso called it a forerunner of collage. He was amused by the way two round lamps had been placed where breasts might have been.
I showed him photographs of the Vilató apartment. He looked attentively at the furnishings and exclaimed, “Ha! They live better than I do.” When he spied a 1904 engraving called The Frugal Repast, he said, rather sharply, “I didn’t remember they had that. It’s worth a fortune now.”
Picasso loved presents, and he lost no time in opening those I had been given to take back to him. There were heavy boxes that contained membrillo—a sweet gelatinous candy that only a Spanish palate can appreciate. Next came a penny bank in the form of a rooster. It rattled. The family had put in a coin for good luck. Then there was a paper bag stamped with the name of a pork butcher. It was full of sugared almonds. “That’s Spain for you,” Picasso said. “You buy candy at the butcher’s.”
Next came a carefully wrapped package with a lot of tissue paper. Rolled up inside was a handful of cotton seeds. Picasso looked around at his studio with its heaped canvases, its antediluvian papers, its portfolios, magazines, and sculptures, and said happily, “They’re just what we need. Let’s plant them right here.”
Picasso’s black moods could be annihilating. He enjoyed torturing his worshippers, keeping them waiting endlessly or not opening the door to them at all when a rendezvous had been arranged. But his kindnesses to me were memorable.
Once he sent me a photograph of himself reading L’ŒIL with his wife, Jacqueline Roque, looking over his shoulder. I thought, what a splendid thing it would be if he allowed us to use it to publicize the review. I wrote, asking for his permission. Writing to Picasso was like sending a message in a bottle—he never answered. But I thought I would at least try.
He d
idn’t answer with a letter, but by return I received a strip of Leica negatives with shot after shot of Picasso holding up my magazine.
A few years later he sent me a little book he had written and illustrated himself. It was called El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz, after the famous painting by El Greco. It brought together an assortment of unlikely bedfellows—Velázquez and the great bullfighter Manolete, for instance—and a torrent of images, both verbal and visual.
With his usual itch to change everything he touched, Picasso had inscribed it all over the cover, making my name part of a face. He had repeated the inscription inside, possibly from affection for me, but more probably because he couldn’t bear to leave a blank page alone. He misspelled my name twice, but that did not surprise me; he had a very freewheeling eighteenth-century way with spelling. In fact, he once told me he had never learned the alphabet and had no intention of ever doing so. “Why should one letter follow another in a predestined order? Ridiculous!”
He carried on his embellishments on another page inside the book and conjured up a man wearing a squashy hat. He always loved fanciful hats, and one of the happier days of his life was when Gary Cooper came to see him in the south of France and gave him his classic ten-gallon hat. For weeks after that, Picasso insisted on going around in only that hat and his shorts.
That was not the last of Picasso’s “benedictions” for me.
I had been to Munich on one of my material forays for the magazine. At the great Alte Pinakothek Museum, I discovered an artist new to me, Albrecht Altdorfer, a German who worked in the early sixteenth century (about the same time as Dürer). I was struck by his jam-packed battle scene and his quirky take on the Susanna and the Elders tale, in which Susanna is not giving much away.
Back in Paris, I mentioned my new enthusiasm to Picasso. He heartily disliked travel, but he knew from books and catalogs the whereabouts of the works of art that interested him.
“Altdorfer,” he said, “I had a book about Altdorfer.” It turned out that once Kahnweiler had paid a call on Picasso with a book about Altdorfer under his arm. Curious as a monkey, Picasso had grabbed the book and never gave it back. “In fact,” Picasso continued, “I made some drawings after Altdorfer.”
“Could I see them?” I asked in great excitement. The idea of publishing unknown drawings by Picasso was thrilling. “How do you expect me to find them?” he asked, and gestured at the chaotic accumulation all around him. I agreed the possibilities looked bleak.
“You know, it had happened,” he told me, “that I have promised to someone to do a drawing, and I have done it. But when they come to pick it up, I simply can’t find it. Do you know what I do? I go out of the room and pretend to be looking for it, and I do another, and no one knows the difference.”
I left without much hope.
But a few days later Sabartés, his gloomy factotum, telephoned me and said laconically, “Come around, he has something for you.” Sabartés never referred to Picasso by name.
I was back in Picasso’s studio in no time—my office was just around the corner—with a bunch of flowers that he completely ignored. (Unlike Matisse, flowers meant nothing to him.) There he was, beaming, his work trousers held up by a piece of rope. “I found them,” he said triumphantly, pleased with himself, and pleased for me.
He had made drawings of the whole composition, The Body of Saint Sebastian Recovered from the Water, and from details of a figure praying, and he had signed them and dated them “Albrecht Altdorfer” in Gothic letters.
We published them in the May issue of our first year. Naturally, I gave back the drawings. But they were never seen again—never reproduced anywhere except in my magazine. They didn’t even show up in the inventories of his estate.
We gradually built up a network of specialists, art historians, writers, but more than once I pitched in at the last minute when some long-awaited manuscript failed to materialize. Running a monthly magazine with a skeleton staff and little backlog required resource and improvisation.
That was the case with our feature on Francis Picabia. André Breton, known as the Pope of Surrealism, had promised a text. The color was already engraved at the printers—but not a word from Breton. Finally, in despair, I telephoned him.
In rolling pontifical tones of beautifully articulated French, he said, “Madame, in spite of my high regard for you, I regret to tell you that I cannot write your article.”
“Why not?” I gasped.
“Parce que j’ai été envouté par un objet maléfique”—“Because I have been bewitched by an evil object.”
(How is that for an excuse for writer’s block?)
“Well, get rid of it,” I said.
“Impossible, madame.” He spun out various arcane reasons. There was no budging him.
I did some research and found that there were two Picabia widows living in Paris. There was an Olga and a Gabrielle Buffet Picabia. I went to interview them both (not together).
Gabrielle Buffet Picabia was by far the more interesting. Finally I asked her if she would allow me to write an article based on her memoirs, as she had described her life to me, and to sign it “Gabrielle Buffet Picabia.” She agreed (and incidentally got the fee).
Gabrielle Buffet Picabia’s (alias RB’s) article is in all the Picabia anthologies.
In the February issue of our second year, 1956, John Russell appeared for the first time. I didn’t know him personally, but I would always make sure to get my copy of the London Sunday Times in order to read the splendid weekly article by someone called John Russell. I wrote to him and asked if he would consider writing for L’ŒIL. He wrote back that he would.
For two years we corresponded back and forth as editor and valued contributor. When finally he came to Paris and we met, we were both married to other people. It took fourteen years to disentangle this situation. Meanwhile, John wrote a number of brilliant articles for my magazine, and always on time.
An early one was on Oskar Kokoschka; we illustrated it with the turbulent self-portrait in a lifeboat with his great love, Alma Mahler.
I had gotten to know Kokoschka when we were both in New York. Back in Paris he wrote to me, “Be a good girl. You KNOW I am a better painter than Picasso.”
Publications in France were apt to be very Gallic-centered in those days. We liked to think we had an international outlook. Early on, L’ŒIL was looking toward the United States. Much has been made recently of the auction of pictures collected by Robert and Ethel Scull. I went to New York with a photographer and recorded the Scull story in 1963, with the James Rosenquist mural and a Kenneth Noland target. I went to see Mark Rothko in the Bowery in 1960 and survived having to drink bourbon out of a paper cup at ten in the morning.
We showed Jackson Pollock in 1958 and during the following decade ran features on Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg (twice), Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman, and Andy Warhol.
We consistently presented articles about architects and architecture, both in France and abroad. We ran several features about Philip Johnson; he always made good copy. One was on his famous Glass House in Connecticut. Little did I know that many years later—in 1975—John Russell and I would be married there.
We wrote about Paul Rudolph. I went to talk to the great Louis Kahn a number of times. (Each time he told me, “Forget what I told you last time. Everything has changed.”) He was working on that most successful of new museums, the Kimbell in Fort Worth. We did a feature on Marcel Breuer, who was designing the Whitney Museum.
I actually went with Breuer to Rotterdam to write about a department store, de Bijenkorf, that he had designed. At the time, its design and interior arrangements were the most advanced in Europe. Rotterdam had been largely destroyed by bombing in May 1940, so this inauguration had symbolic overtones. The mayor and other town worthies were on hand, and several hundred guests from foreign countries.
Center stage, as it were—immobile at the time—was a moving staircase clothed in teak. After the mayor’s welcoming sp
eech, he pressed a button, whereupon, to bursts of music—the triumphal march from Aida, no less—the officials took their places one by one on the staircase to be slowly lofted upward and out of sight, to loud applause.
Often I wrote these articles myself, sometimes under an assumed name. In the first decade of the magazine I traveled and wrote articles from Belgium, Finland, Italy, Denmark, New York, Los Angeles, and St. Louis, and there were a number of features from England, not only London.
By 1970, I had shed my French partner and headed for almost unknown, to me, territory: the United States.
L’ŒIL went through various convulsions. It was acquired by several publishing conglomerates. At one point a Japanese dragon lady bought it as a divorce present for her husband. For a while it disappeared from sight. It reemerged with a capable and charming young man as editor, Jean-Christophe Castelain. When L’ŒIL was celebrating its five hundredth issue in October 1998, Jean-Christophe very courteously came to New York to interview me and write a generous text accompanied by my photograph.
L’ŒIL today is not what I had created, nor should it be. Times have changed.
At age six on my pony Teddy, after winning a cup in my first horse show
At sixteen with my harp
Now twenty-two years old, in my Acapulco garden with my husband, Lewis A. Riley, Jr., and assorted animals, 1938
With my sister, Heather, by my Acapulco pool, 1939 (Victor Kraft)
For L’ŒIL I had Giacometti’s The Chariot photographed in the Parc Monceau, Paris; the children’s bicycles echo the sculpture’s wheels. 1955. (Sabine Weis for L’ŒIL)
Interviewing Chanel for Vogue; sketched by Eric, 1954
With Fernand Léger at his house in the country, 1954 (Robert Doisneau)
Some of My Lives Page 13
