A Life of Picasso

by John Richardson

  On Armistice night, Cocteau and a great many others drowned their sorrow at Apollinaire’s death and their joy at the war’s end in champagne at an enormous victory party given by the couturier Paul Poiret. Picasso was too stricken to go. Except for the death of his sister Conchita, the death of Apollinaire would haunt him more than any other. To commemorate his friend, he let it be known that he was going to design a monument, which would capture the polymorphous spirit of this charismatic genius. As we will see, the revolutionary maquettes that Picasso presented would be turned down, year after year, by the widow and the reactionaries on the Comité Apollinaire. This would be a blessing in disguise. The Comité’s refusals would challenge Picasso to come up with a succession of the most imaginative and influential sculpture of the twentieth century. Despite his reservations about Apollinaire’s understanding of modern art, Picasso revered him as a catalyst—he had a hand in making a lot of great art happen. His genius “lit up the darkness and showed us the way” is how he put it.

  In the fight for Apollinaire’s throne, Breton had considerable advantages. He had an intimidating intellect and an intimidating sense of authority to match. He could be charming but also tyrannical and mean-spirited. Despite his passion for Freud and the Marquis de Sade, he encouraged his followers to be as homophobic as himself. Because of its didacticism, Breton’s prose is admired more than it is read, but his essay on Picasso in Minotaure (1933) is as perceptive as anything written about the artist in his middle years. By comparison Cocteau was a featherweight, done in, as Misia Sert said, by his desire “to please everyone at the same time, Picasso, Madame de Chevigné and the sharpshooters in the Marines. Instead of wasting his best years trying to please, he should seek to displease.”26 It is tragic that Cocteau’s mercurial imagination, his scintillating style, his incomparable wit, his early novels and his later diaries, his modish films and plays, which reflect the life and style of his times so sharply and wittily, are so lacking in ballast that they tend to evaporate like his magical conversation.

  In the face of Breton’s campaign against him Cocteau embarked on a literary public relations campaign. To establish that he was no longer the precious poetaster of Le Prince frivole, he published a long “modern” poem, Le Cap de Bonne Espérance (Cape of Good Hope). This takes the form of a tribute to the heroic fighter pilot Roland Garros, on whom Cocteau had a crush. Garros had been shot down by the Germans, taken prisoner, and had escaped and resumed flying against the enemy, only to be shot down again, this time fatally. Cocteau claimed that the proofs of his as yet unpublished poem were found in the wreckage of Garros’s plane. The “modernity” of this epitaph rested in the effects he had borrowed from his predecessors— Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Pierre Albert-Birot (the lettriste passage).27 To launch this accomplished pastiche on literary Paris Cocteau exploited his magnetism as a performance artist. The readings that he gave in fashionable drawing rooms—Paul Morand’s, the Etienne de Beaumonts’, Jean Hugo’s—were “stunning.” This was partly the consequence of the metallic megaphone voice Cocteau had affected for these occasions. However, Cocteau’s salesmanship could not hide the fact that Le Cap de Bonne Espérance is too thin, too long, and too self-aggrandizing. Instead of taking root on the page, as Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés triumphantly succeeds in doing, Cocteau’s fragments of words and phrases vanish as rapidly as slogans on billboards seen from a passing car.

  Jean Hugo has described the reading that his fiancée, Valentine Gross, organized in her apartment in the Palais Royal on September 3, 1918. Besides Picasso and, presumably, Olga, the carefully picked guests included Proust, Misia, André Lhôte, the actor Pierre Bertin, and André Breton, whom Cocteau had deluded himself into believing that he could transform into a potential fan. After waiting an hour for Proust to arrive, Cocteau decided to start his reading. When Proust finally turned up with two friends, Cocteau rounded on him and petulantly told him to go away: “va-t-en, Marcel!”28 Proust left. Cocteau proceeded, as Hugo later recalled,

  [to] read marvelously well and it was difficult not to admire a work read by him. When the evening was over and each of the guests had enthusiastically congratulated him, he went over to Breton, who tried to avoid him. I happened to be nearby. Cocteau explained [to him] in an undertone: “It’s very good, isn’t it?, but it’s not what’s needed, it’s too sublime and (with a glance in my direction) too Victor Hugo. …” Dumbfounded, Breton froze. Cocteau went white and let [Breton] slip away towards the door.29

  Cocteau held his next public reading in certifiably intellectual surroundings: the back room of Adrienne Monnier’s celebrated bookshop. Monnier has described the Madame Verdurin-like preparations for this modest event. Cocteau had told André Gide that Monnier wanted him to give a reading in the bookshop. “ ‘You will come, won’t you?’ We saw almost immediately, Gide and I had been hoodwinked.”30 Cocteau had also tried to entrap Paul Valéry into attending, but his intrigues failed. Interestingly, Cocteau had asked Monnier “above all not to invite society women.” He also “insisted that I have all the young people possible come.” Apart from Gide and his lover Marc Allégret, whom Cocteau had lured away from Gide and earned his enmity, only Breton and Soupault were to be seen, both of them still wearing their horizon-blue uniforms. “They held themselves very straight, radiating hostility.”31

  On June 10, 1919, Breton would have further cause to excoriate his victim. As Cocteau informed Picasso, who was in London, there was about to be a tribute to Apollinaire at Léonce Rosenberg’s L’Effort Moderne gallery. “Your paintings are arranged… nicely set out like desks in a classroom equidistant from each other. When Léonce is not looking, they stick their tongues out at him. I am going to read in front of my Harlequin painting [MoMA’s great 1915 Picasso] and strike a modest pose so that people will recognize me.”32 Cocteau’s eulogy at this event would confirm his opponents in their contempt. He envisioned Apollinaire in heaven, as if it were a chic resort where he could make interesting new friends and invent a new ism, “eternism.” In the early 1920s the surrealists’ attacks on Cocteau would start in earnest. Picasso was loyal to Cocteau insofar as he needed a Rigoletto. He also foresaw that Breton’s support might be more useful. And so beyond allowing Cocteau to shelter in his shadow, he stayed above the fray.

  9

  Rue la Boétie

  Former friends and associates in the art world denounced Picasso’s new address, 23, rue la Boétie, as all too redolent of bourgeois affluence and commerce— bereft of distinction and charm. Rosenberg’s cousin and business associate, Jos Hessel, had been the first to move there, and so many of his associates had followed suit that the rue la Boétie had replaced the rue Laffitte as the center of the Paris art trade. It was lined with galleries and expensive antiquaires. Jacques-Emile Blanche described Rosenberg’s premises as especially vulgar: a marble-fronted “Ritz Palace … with a façade [and] vestibule of marble; a staircase of onyx … vast rooms hung with watered silk” and elaborately lit by clusters of light bulbs “like grapes on the vine.”1 One might wonder why, in view of his denunciations of “dealers [as] the enemy,” Picasso wanted to live on the Right Bank in their very midst instead of on the Left Bank—Saint-Germain-des-Prés or Montparnasse—where he had previously resided. It was because he would have encountered disgruntled cubists and former girlfriends at every turn. Also Olga wanted him to shed his Bohemian associations.

  The Picassos moved into their new apartment a week before Christmas 1918. It consisted of a single, spacious floor. Georges Martin, who interviewed the artist for L’Intransigeant a year later,2 recalled small cubist paintings in conventional frames on the dining room walls and a cage with a parrot in one corner (“as in an elderly spinster’s house”). To receive the journalist, Picasso made a movie-star entry, “young-looking, shaved, in white silk pajamas,” accompanied by Lotti, his large Pyrenean sheepdog. He showed Martin into two other spacious, light-filled rooms, “where total disorder reigned”—stacks of canvases, an array of trib
al and Oceanic sculpture, a large seventeenth-century Spanish carving of Christ on the cross “with its dry and knotted arms outstretched” (a gift from the pious Eugenia), which had inspired a recent Crucifixion drawing.3

  The apartment was divided into his and her realms. Picasso had taken over the rooms looking onto the street for his studios; the rooms at the back were his wife’s domain. To judge by drawings of the salon and dining room,4 Olga did up the rooms in a conventional but relaxed way. Apart from the paintings and drawings on the walls, the only Picassian touches were the upholstery of the armchairs in the salon, each in a different bright color, and the screen that he painted for Olga’s sitting room. Eugenia would have had a hand in this (a good upholsterer, she decreed, was every bit as important to a woman as a good couturier). Olga turned out to be an exemplary maîtresse de maison: “not the slightest disorder, not a grain of dust,” according to Brassaï.5 Picasso, on the other hand, was a compulsive hoarder with an idiosyncratic relish of dust: it enabled him to tell whether anybody had disturbed his piles of old journals, letters, and smokers’ debris. The bedroom smacked of Olga: twin brass bedsteads, just like the Hôtel Lutétia.

  Picasso. The Dining Room at rue la Boétie, 1918-19. Pencil on paper, 20 x 27 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.

  To keep her domain just so, Olga assembled an impeccable staff: a white-gloved butler, cook, and maid. She was exacting, Clive Bell said, and took her role as hostess very seriously. With the social guidance of Cocteau and Misia, she was soon giving suitable little dinners and suppers after first nights at the ballet or theater. The Picas-sos attended similar occasions: for instance, the party Cocteau threw (late 1918) in his mother’s apartment. As Jean Hugo relates in his memoirs, “The dawn of Les Six was about to break: Auric and Poulenc played Couperin, Scarlatti and Satie.”6 Fond as he was of Satie and Stravinsky, Picasso confessed that he had a terrible problem staying awake while their compositions were being performed.

  Besides their address, the Picassos’ genteel existence would come under fire. The more the artist protested that life in the studio had nothing to do with life in the salon—which was entirely true—the more his erstwhile associates, exemplified by Max Jacob, sneered. Cocteau and Diaghilev, Jacob said, had tainted the artist with their worldliness, which appealed to an inherent bourgeois streak in Picasso—a streak that no previous woman in his life had invoked. The artist’s sardonic nature and penchant for self-mockery should also be taken into account. The comme il faut impersonation was in part an elaborate joke.

  Picasso. Girl with a Hoop, 1919. Oil and sand on canvas, 142.5 x 79 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

  Whenever Picasso embarked on a new relationship there would sooner or later be a new studio, apartment, or house; and since he became very attached to his various homes, he kept records of them—the look, the space, the atmosphere, the view—in drawings, paintings, and later photographs. The earliest of the rue la Boétie images are of the dining room: frontal views of the lace-curtained windows at the back,7 with a gueri-don—presumably the one we know from Montrouge. Picasso was becoming ever more intrigued by this piece of furniture, intrigued by its silhouette, by the way it supported and enhanced still lifes, much as a plinth supports and enhances a sculpture. The gueridon was about to become an infinitely adaptable motif—a personage in Picasso’s work.

  Drawings and one or two paintings show that Picasso had left his conventionally paneled studio walls the way they were. Cornices, chair rails, and chimneypieces play an ironical background role in many a still life. Look how the trumeau—the mirror set into the wall above the fireplace—provides his large, parodic Girl with a Hoop with a frame in such a way that it puts a subject as it were into quotes.8 To mock a conventional genre scene, Picasso uses cubist notation to give the painting’s inane subject—a dolled-up, loopy-looking child in a big hat standing with her wonky hoop in front of a living room fireplace—an edge that is both comical and modernist.

  He does the same with an even larger painting (185 x 140 cm) entitled The Lovers:9 a spoof not only of Manet, but of Picasso’s bourgeois lifestyle. Note the man’s starched evening shirt, the sort that Olga obliged him to wear; the fringed chaise longue; the paneling and the “abstractions” hanging on the wall. The better to mock himself, he has assumed the role of Manet. Roberto Otero was present when Picasso decided to include this painting (which he referred to as Hommage à Manet) in Malraux’s 1966 retrospective. He mimicked the artist standing in front of the canvas, his brow furrowed with concern: “ ‘Caramba,’ he said. ‘The little cat has been erased. I’ll draw it in again with charcoal. Besides, it has to have fixative and the word “Manet” has to be written in at the top. What do you think? Malraux wants to give me an homage show? Well, I want to do the same for Manet! To each his own.’ ”10

  Olga reading, rue la Boétie, in front of the folding screen and works painted by Picasso, 1921.

  There is no mockery in Picasso’s images of Olga. In the 1919 Woman Wearing a Wristwatch,11 Picasso comes up with an idiom that is Ingresque and cubis-tic in its gamut of grays and ochres, which anticipates many melancholy portraits of her to come. Painted at the rue la Boétie, seven months after the Montrouge portrait, this painting is to my mind the finest of all Picasso’s representational images of Olga. The wrist-watch—until recently an accessory considered outré on women and effeminate on men—exorcises the taint of Ingres, a taint that had left his cubist followers in a state of resentful confusion. Picasso must have given Olga a wristwatch, just as, years later, he would give one to Marie-Thérèse Walter. Lydia Gasman believes that wristwatches had a special significance for Picasso. Marie-Thérèse developed a superstitious reverence for her watch; it appears on her arm in a particularly demonic painting—dating from 1936, the year Picasso finally broke with Olga and began to fall out of love with Marie-Thérèse. According to Gasman the ominousness of wristwatches in Picasso’s imagery has to do with “time corroding love.”12

  Picasso’s choice of Paul Rosenberg as his representative was a sensible one, even though he had none of the qualities that distinguished his prewar dealer, D.-H. Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler was unquestionably the most intelligent, farsighted, and scrupulous dealer of his generation. He had an intuitive eye and an instinctive understanding of modernism: by 1914 he had Braque, Léger, Gris, as well as Picasso under contract. He also had the courage to support his artists in the face of attacks by chauvinists and cubist hacks and devise strategies to counter them. Unfortunately, Kahn-weiler’s decision to spend the war in Switzerland and leave his vast stock to be appropriated by the French state as enemy property had so infuriated Picasso that he refused to have anything to do with him when he returned to Paris. This fight with Kahnweiler is what necessitated the alliance with Rosenberg.

  Rosenberg was an enormously successful dealer—totally focused on the art market, immensely hardworking, rapacious, and deeply committed to his artists, so long as their work sold. Rosenberg’s expertise was limited to French nineteenth-century masters—it included Delacroix, Ingres, and Corot, as well as the post-impressionists— and he traded in them more assiduously than any of his rivals. However, the prospect of invading a promising new field transformed Rosenberg into a canny appraiser of modern art. Picasso would have preferred to sign up with the dealer who had given him his first Paris show, Ambroise Vollard. But this formidable supporter of Cézanne and Gauguin as well as the impressionists had closed his Right Bank gallery in 1914, and was now ensconced in an hôtel particulier on the Left Bank as a private dealer and the publisher of éditions de luxe illustrated by modern artists. Vollard would later commission some of Picasso’s finest engravings.

  The “contract” that Picasso and Rosenberg negotiated never existed on paper; it would be a matter of mutual trust. Picasso granted the dealer a droit de première vue: a right to first refusal on all current work. The arrangement would be backed by Wildenstein and Hessel,13 who had entered into partnership with Rosenberg. A
ccording to FitzGerald, the dealers agreed to

  split the Picasso market between them. They bought from him in equal shares, Wildenstein representing his work in America and Rosenberg in Europe. The only living artist handled by Wildenstein, Picasso joined a stable that held a vast inventory, with many acknowledged masterpieces. Yet, from the beginning, Wildenstein remained discreetly in the background. Rosenberg was the dealer publicly associated with Picasso.14

  Although Picasso said that he always dealt with Paul Rosenberg and never his partner, Georges Wildenstein, Georges’s son, Daniel, claims in his memoir that his father had “a red telephone with two separate lines, one line connected to Paul’s gallery, the other to Picasso’s studio.”15 In fact, Picasso had a far more effective means of communicating with his dealer than Wildenstein’s quasi-presidential hotline. He would call Rosenberg and ask him to step out onto his next door balcony and take a look at whatever he needed to show him.16

  By the end of 1918, Paul Rosenberg had paid Picasso 55,000 francs for the portrait of his wife and a group of lesser recent works. At first sales were slow, largely because the prices Rosenberg asked were much higher than those that his preceding dealers had asked. Over the next few years, these prices would soar. So would Picasso’s earnings, thanks to his wisdom in not tying himself down, as standard contracts did, to a fixed rate per canvas point for a fixed period of time.17 (The contract permitted Picasso to raise the price that Rosenberg paid per canvas point as the value of his work on the market increased.) Picasso had a limited understanding of business, so this strategy was probably masterminded by his astute banker, Max Pelle-quer. In the course of his twenty years with Rosenberg, the artist repeatedly raised his prices as the value of his work went up and the value of the French franc went down. At first cordial and neighborly, personal relations between the cold-blooded dealer and the hot-blooded artist would inexorably cease to be either. On a business level, it worked until the outbreak of World War II.