Picasso's weeping women

A Life of Picasso: The Minotaur Years, 1933-1943, by John Richardson. NY: Knopf, 2021. 308 pp. $40

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair.
—Shakespeare, Sonnet 144.

Scott Fitzgerald observed that Hemingway needed a new woman for every big book. Picasso also needed sexual excitement from different women who would, as John Richardson writes, “rejuvenate his psyche, reawaken his imagery and inspire a brilliant sequence of paintings.” Picasso had several simultaneous lovers during his miserable marriage to the former Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova. Fascinated at first but soon repelled by her involvement in high society, he found her snobbish, materialistic and boring. He would lose half of everything he owned if he divorced her, so after a seven-year legal battle he finally got a judicial separation.

The first of two competitors as his maîtresse-en-titre was Marie-Thérèse Walter, a teenage blonde beauty who’d never heard of him when he approached her on a Paris street in 1927. She was submissive and took care of their daughter Maya, born in 1935. She was willing to remain hidden and always ready to reenter his life when summoned. Serene, gentle and loving, but immature and limited, she was completely different from the dark, complex and intellectual Dora Maar. Two years older, Dora was a talented photographer who could discuss painting, poetry and politics, but her difficult, melancholy temperament provoked jealous and often violent arguments. Picasso treated Dora cruelly and her masochistic suffering also inspired his art.

His great painting of the terrified Dora as The Weeping Woman (1937, Tate Gallery, London) portrays her topped with a faux-chic red hat — wide-eyed, green-faced and stringy-haired. Her stubby fingers force a crushed hanky into her feral mouth to staunch the flow of tears that gouge rivulets in her cheeks. Richardson notes that her “smeared lipstick, smudged eye makeup, tears seemingly wired to the eyes and the soaked handkerchief clutched in her spikey-fingernailed hands capture her extreme states of agony.” Picasso’s portraits of Marie-Thérèse, by contrast, are charming, tranquil and tender. (Richardson includes glamorous photos of his friend Dora and unflattering ones of her stunning rival Marie-Thérèse.) Picasso had a paternal love for Marie-Thérèse, a sadistic love for Dora, and enjoyed having them compete for his favour.

Two lovers did not satisfy the middle-aged satyr. He also had an affair with the French surrealist poet Alice Paalen, whom he ambivalently described as “the necklace of smiles deposited in the wound’s nest by the tempest.” His close poet-friend Paul Éluard offered Picasso his attractive Alsatian wife Nusch, a former circus performer and street-singer, as a gesture of friendship. When Paul became infuriated by the refusal, Picasso gracefully submitted and confessed, “I only did it to make Éluard happy. I didn’t want him to think I didn’t like his wife.”

Picasso was also attracted to the aristocrat, heiress and Botticelli-beauty Lady Caroline Blackwood. The painter Lucian Freud, then married to Caroline, uneasily recalled that when they visited the studio, “Picasso insisted she squeeze into a tight chimneylike space to see Paris from the roof. He would support her from below. This interlude took longer than it should have,” and Freud was tormented by jealousy.

Richardson could have said more about Picasso’s connection with another famous beauty, the American model and war photographer Lee Miller. It’s not clear if he seduced two other followers: Dora’s friend Jacqueline Lamba and the exotic Guadeloupe model Adrienne Fidelin, whose bottom rests on Picasso’s head in a delightful photo. Each woman, like Leda with Zeus in Yeats’ poem, hoped to “put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop.”

Picasso was lively, funny and sometimes cruel. His friends adored him and wanted to bask in his godlike presence. One worshipper exclaimed that she was privileged to be alive at a time when she could meet Picasso. He also surrounded himself like a matador with his admiring male cuadrilla, and his faithful chauffeur even wore, as livery, the same black and white-polka dot shirt as his master.

In the 1930s Picasso wrote a lot of surrealist poetry which (though Richardson doesn’t mention it) was strongly influenced by Lautréamont’s Chants de Maldoror: a rapturous, hallucinatory, satanic monologue that combined cruelty with black humour, and urged artists to reject normal life and fulfil their own creative destiny. Picasso similarly wrote in a stream-of-consciousness mode: “the slender sojourn of the secret price of pain simmers on the low fire of memory where the onion plays the star if the hand detaches itself from its lines having read and reread the past but at the crack of the riding-whip straight in the eyes.” Gertrude Stein, displeased when he invaded her territory, put him down (as few others dared to do) by neatly declaring: “You are extraordinary within your limits but your limits are extraordinarily there.”

Picasso believed that photography had liberated painting from the actual subject, and said surrealism in poetry and painting created “a resemblance deeper and more real than the real.” His artistic techniques and constant flow of protean styles, with weird lighting, blasphemous allusions and sexual fetishism, included — with dubious success — fragmentary material, bits of sculpture and studio junk. His rush of inspiration was so great that in restaurants he would seize “burnt matches, lipstick, mustard, wine or colour squeezed from flowers and leaves, and quietly draw portraits on the tablecloth” while capturing his companions with his famous mirada fuerte (powerful stare).

Picasso forced his viewers to disentangle his complex images and logically reassemble them in their eyes and minds. The grossly distorted features in his portraits were uncannily foreshadowed in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871) when Humpty Dumpty tells Alice how to distinguish her face from those of other girls: “if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose — or the mouth at the top — that would be some help.”

In this volume Richardson emphasises Picasso’s art more than his life. Though his endless accounts of the recurrent motif of the minotaur — the mythical, sexually potent bull that devoured maidens in his labyrinth — reveal the artist’s mercurial change of moods, they also become tedious: “The following day Picasso executed a watercolour, likewise of two figures contemplating one another, one a naturalistically drawn nude (only the black shape or shadow behind her is ambiguous), the other a strange two-headed creature consisting of bits of statuary balanced on half a table, which in turn balances on a ball.” Richardson can also, at times, provide ingenious descriptions of drawings, watercolours and gouaches. He calls Picasso’s unusual deformation of Marie-Thérèse “a kinky cluster of boxed vaginas, beehive breasts and turdlike fingers.”

The masterpiece of this period is “Guernica” (1937, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), inspired by the total destruction of the northern Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. In three hours of coordinated air assaults the German Luftwaffe levelled the city, which had no military value, and bombed, burned and asphyxiated more than 1,500 civilians. Picasso also remembered how the poet Rafael Alberti, helping to evacuate the Prado Museum during the bombing of Madrid, was forced to dump Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” in the street while he fled for cover during an air raid.

Guernica, exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World’s Fair, was so large that it had to be tipped forward when Picasso painted the top part. It not only portrays the devastation in Spain, but also foreshadows the apocalyptic World War that broke out two years later. It shows the agony and suffering of the town, with bladed bulls and eviscerated horses, wounded warriors, burning victims and screaming mothers holding their dead infants. Richardson unconvincingly claims that the muscular arm, thrusting out the sacred lamp to have it lit by the sun, belongs to Picasso’s seven-year-old sister Conchita. But she died of diphtheria in La Coruña in January 1895 when he was thirteen — far away and long ago.

During this time Picasso had serious problems with Paulo, his son with Olga, born in 1921. The son of a genius and an unstable woman, Paulo hung around with thieves and pimps, took and sold drugs, and had physical and mental problems. One friend cynically suggested that he could make more money by stealing and selling one of his father’s paintings. Picasso finally responded to Olga’s frantic letters by placing both mother and son for more than a year in a posh Swiss sanitarium (alma mater of Zelda Fitzgerald). He complained that it “was costing him a pile of money, but worth it to have them both out of the way.”

It was ironic that the French authorities prevented Picasso from painting in peacetime by sealing off his studios during his divorce proceedings from Olga, and that the Germans allowed him to paint when he bravely chose to remain in Paris during the Occupation. His savagely satiric etchings “The Dream and Lie of Franco” (1937) had portrayed the fat general mounted on a pig, dressed as a woman, and presiding over slimy serpents and toads.

When Picasso failed to obtain French citizenship, he risked extradition and death as an enemy of fascist Spain. Richardson notes, “He laid low but would not hide. Worldwide renown apparently saved him.” Picasso insouciantly declared, “I’m not looking for risks to take, but in a sort of passive way I don’t care to yield to either force or terror… So I’ll stay whatever the cost.” Rejecting realism in 1944, he stated, “I have not painted the war, because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict. But I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings I have done.”

Richardson (1924-2019) got a great deal of help from his cadre of research assistants and heroically finished the fourth volume of Picasso’s life in his nineties. But this book, though elegantly written and with a lot of illuminating first-hand information by Richardson, who knew Picasso and his friends, does not match the supreme standards of the previous ones.

His second volume, covering ten years from 1907 to 1916, has 433 pages of text. This volume, covering eleven years, has only 255 pages of text, almost half taken up by 212 lavish illustrations that are not keyed to his descriptions. It also includes, for the unusually low price of $40, 48 splendid unnumbered pages in colour. The logical and dramatic end of this volume should have been the joyous Liberation of Paris in May 1944, not May 1943 when he met his next mistress Françoise Gilot. Knopf has no plans to commission a book on the last thirty years of Picasso’s life, from 1944 to 1973.

It’s surprising that Richardson buries the best scene in this volume in an endnote. When Picasso was painting Guernica, Marie-Thérèse visited his studio, found Dora there and grew angry. She ordered Dora to leave and when Dora refused, she asked Picasso to make a modern Judgment of Paris. He recalled: “It was a hard decision to make. I liked them both, for different reasons: Marie-Thérèse because she was sweet and gentle and did whatever I wanted her to do and Dora because she was intelligent. I decided I had no interest in making a decision. I was satisfied with things as they were. I told them they’d have to fight it out themselves. So they began to wrestle. It’s one of my choicest memories.”

Oddly, at the end of the first chapter, instead of the end of the book, Richardson describes the tragic end of Picasso’s weeping women, who were either destroyed by him or couldn’t live without him: “Olga spent the last thirty years of her life in self-destructive devotion… Marie-Thérèse survived her affair with the artist, but took her own life four years after his death.” Dora Maar suffered a mental collapse. “Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, would sacrifice herself on the altar of his art… Thirteen years after his death, Jacqueline, too, would commit suicide.”

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real