Picasso's War, page 14
Notwithstanding the arrest, the French authorities decided that Roché’s unusual talents would be useful to the war effort, and after a stint at French military headquarters, he was dispatched to the United States to assist with a Franco-American industrial commission. Bored by the government work, he soon plunged into New York’s wartime art scene, making friends with Duchamp, playing chess with the exiled painter Francis Picabia, falling in love with the patroness and salon host Louise Arensberg, and starting a short-lived Dada magazine called The Blind Man with a free-spirited young American named Beatrice Wood. It was amid this activity that, in the spring of 1917, Roché had attended a large gathering of artists and writers hosted by Quinn. Now, two years later, they were finally becoming properly acquainted.
* * *
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Before they sat down to lunch, Quinn wanted Roché to see his paintings. As they wandered through the apartment, Roché was stunned. In room after room, there was hardly any furniture. Instead, everywhere he looked were thick standing rows of paintings, turned nose to the wall. In a front bedroom were the Irish marine pictures that Quinn had collected in his youth; another room contained the big Augustus Johns and works by other British contemporaries. There were a huge number of paintings by new American artists, like John Marin and Charles Prendergast and Walt Kuhn. And then, in several back bedrooms, the heart of the collection, dozens of paintings by the French and European moderns. Though Quinn had only a small number of works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne, each one, it seemed to Roché, was a masterpiece. And then, perhaps most surprising, came a series of important works by the painters he knew in Paris: Braque, Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Picasso. As he would later describe it, these were toiles de combat, canvases you could go to battle with.[25]
Yet Quinn was deeply dissatisfied. As he showed Roché different paintings, he confided that he felt that much of what he owned was second-rate. Several times, as he got out a particular work, he told Roché, “I would like a better version of this.” He also mentioned a series of exceptional works he wanted, needed. Then he asked Roché if he could help him. What Quinn was proposing was for Roché to be his “informant,” finding and telling him about paintings, in exchange for a commission on each painting Quinn bought. Aware that Roché himself collected, on a small scale, works by many of the same artists, he added that he wanted Roché to show him the paintings that he would be tempted to buy and offer Quinn the opportunity to buy them first: a hard bargain that was at the same time a flattering endorsement of Roché’s taste. Roché didn’t know what to say. He had already dabbled in the modern art trade, linking artists to collectors as he maintained his vast social network in Paris. He also needed a new vocation, having finished his wartime mission for the government. Clearly, the lawyer had a powerful sense of what he wanted but it seemed unclear how much Roché would be able to do. Some of the paintings Quinn wanted were so scarce, or hidden away in artists’ studios, that they were likely unattainable.
After the lunch, Roché thanked Quinn for the offer and they agreed to stay in touch. Then, the night before his departure for France, he received a letter from Quinn, restating the lawyer’s interest in collaborating with him. “I am going to try to limit my purchases, as much as possible, to first-rate examples,” Quinn wrote, “…to works of museum rank or what we refer to here as star pieces.” He also outlined his proposed method. It would be up to Roché to cultivate artists, identify standout paintings, and send him black-and-white photographs, along with careful descriptions; then Quinn would make his own judgment. He warned that he would likely reject most of Roché’s suggestions. “I may not be interested in many of the things you write about,” he said. More gamely, he suggested that whatever came of their work, Roché had gained a place in his circle. “I shall be glad to hear from you, when you feel in the mood for writing,” Quinn wrote, adding that he hoped to find him “enjoying life as much as possible.”[26]
The next morning, as he waited for his boat to leave New York harbor, Roché read the letter again. What Quinn proposed was almost comically impractical. He would not only have to stand in for a difficult American collector who disliked most of what was offered; he would also have to persuade leading Paris artists and dealers that this New Yorker, who rarely came to Paris and might take months to make up his mind about any given work, was sufficiently important that they should covet the chance just to get their canvases into his hands. Having been to Quinn’s apartment, though, he sensed how closely his tastes aligned with his own. He also found Quinn almost as interesting as his paintings. With the boat still at the dock, he scrawled out a short reply and put it in the mail: “I quite approve your plans.”[27]
What Roché did not know was that Quinn’s ambition to create the first museum-like collection of advanced modern art in the United States faced a personal obstacle as well. As she began to see Quinn, Jeanne Foster wondered if he was more ill than he let on. With his morbid fear of disease and death, Quinn never mentioned cancer to anyone. But he wore a brace, and there seemed to be other lingering effects of what he referred to as his ulcer operation, or simply, “the trouble.” Foster was sure there was more to it, and a few months after they met, she asked his doctors, who told her that they were sure that he had no more than six years to live.[28] It amounted to a very short span for a project that, by Quinn’s own account, would require “more time and involve more patience” than anything he had undertaken.[29]
12
DO I KNOW THIS MAN?
A few weeks after Roché returned to Paris, a journalist named Georges Martin set out for an appointment in a chic Right Bank neighborhood. He was on assignment for L’Intransigeant, France’s leading conservative paper; it was raining, and a characteristic gray cloud cover hung over the city. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help pausing to admire the très bourgeois feel of the district. Nearby, amid small boutiques and prim apartment houses, was the Latinville patisserie, the place where Proust’s faithful housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, would go late at night to acquire “something with chocolate” for her employer.[1] Farther up the street was the Salle Gaveau, the coveted modern recital hall that had managed to render Louis XVI–style neoclassicism in reinforced concrete. The Lycée Condorcet, the prestigious training ground for the country’s professional elite, was a few minutes away.
Reaching the doorway of a classic six-story Haussmann building, Martin walked into the foyer, where a modern elevator whisked him to an apartment that took up the entire fourth floor.[2] A maid promptly answered the door, informing him that the man he had come to see would appear momentarily. Then she ushered him into a dining room with parquet floors, a round Louis Philippe table, and gauze-curtained windows. A parakeet chirped in a cage on a side table, and the walls were carefully hung with bright colored pictures in ornate gilded frames. The whole ménage struck Martin as almost painfully fashionable: like a Georges Lepape illustration from the pages of Paris Vogue.
But the pictures in those golden rectangles were not decorative scenes of the beautiful life; they were startling Cubist abstractions. After a few minutes, a small, spry man emerged, freshly shaven, a dark forelock sweeping across his forehead. He was wearing silk pajamas. Picasso was about to give his first solo exhibition in Paris since well before the war and Martin had come to talk to him about it.
The artist was thirty-eight, but Martin thought he might pass for a decade younger: a jeune maître. Immediately, he led Martin through a pair of doors into a pair of large adjoining rooms. Here, there were also ample windows and elegant moldings, and each room was endowed with a marble fireplace surmounted by a tall mirror. In absolute contrast to the fastidious order of the dining room, however, a state of utter chaos reigned: They had entered Picasso’s studio. Casually propped on a heap of canvases was a gnarled, desiccated wooden Christ, perhaps from some medieval Spanish church; a group of ancient carved figures, possibly from Senegal or Polynesia, seemed to be communing with a series of strange Cubist sculptures. Dominating the whole mess was a large, curiously formal portrait of a young, very pale woman seated and holding a fan, her hair carefully parted in the middle.
As Martin surveyed the room, he began to ask Picasso about his métier. Picasso offered a brisk and curiously anodyne life story. “Success came little by little,” he said, blandly. “I sold my works to dealers, and now you can find my pictures hanging next to Matisses and Cézannes as far away as Moscow.” Unmentioned were his precarious early years in the filthy bateau-lavoir, when he had eaten meals on credit and rummaged in trash cans to feed his dog. He didn’t talk about his checkered history with exhibitions, his struggles during the war, or the fact that, for much of the past five years, he hadn’t had a dealer at all. Nor did he tell Martin that most of his Cubist paintings had been sequestered by the French government in 1914 and had been seen by no one for years, or that the brief appearance of his Demoiselles d’Avignon, which remained in his personal possession, at a group show during the war had left the public cold. (“He has painted, or rather daubed, five women who are, truth be told, all hacked up,” Le Cri de Paris had written.[3]) To hear Picasso tell it, he’d had a steady upward trajectory among the arbiters of bon goût almost from the moment he arrived in Paris. And now, he continued pleasantly, “an exhibition of my drawings is about to open at a dealer here on rue La Boétie, a neighbor of mine.”[4]
Picasso must have been enjoying his own performance. Gone were the old brown raincoat, loose green sweater, and ill-fitting blue trousers he’d worn during the dark days of the war.[5] Gone was his old circle of radical poets, louche Spaniards, and avant-garde hangers-on; he hadn’t spoken to Gertrude Stein in two years. Even his old Cubist friends had lost touch with him. Do I know this man? Braque wondered aloud after seeing a photograph of Picasso in his new getup.[6] In Picasso’s domestic arrangements, Frika, his beloved German shepherd half-breed, had long since been succeeded by Lotti, a Pyrenean sheepdog. And in place of his quiet, unassuming Eva, he now had an imposing wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova—the sitter in the large portrait that Martin couldn’t take his eyes off.
In almost every respect, Picasso’s existence had shifted 180 degrees from before the war. It was a metamorphosis as dramatic for his social identity as the Demoiselles had been for his art. And in no small way, the transformation owed to yet another part of his new life: his new dealer, Paul Rosenberg. It was Rosenberg who had planted Picasso and Olga in the heart of Right Bank society, finding them the apartment on rue La Boétie and then, with studied choreography, reintroducing him to the public. If before the war, Picasso’s world had been sustained by the austere, antibourgeois, publicity-shy Kahnweiler, now it was shaped by the taste-making showman Rosenberg, who lived next door to him.
With remarkable speed, Picasso had become the focal point of Rosenberg’s strategy. Though the opening of his huge gallery, back in the spring of 1914, had been exceedingly ill timed, the dealer had been carefully positioning himself for the reemergence of the Paris art world after the war. Almost as soon as he had completed his own military service, he had begun to prepare for the postwar boom that he was confident would be coming. In 1917, with museums still shuttered but the public starved for culture, he had mounted an improbably resplendent show of classic late-nineteenth-century paintings to raise money for disabled war veterans. Featuring a distinguished group of works by Cézanne, Corot, Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh, and others, the show was attended by some of his own military superiors and did much to raise Rosenberg’s profile. As he reestablished himself, he also began to move more decisively into twentieth-century art. It was amid this activity that he had joined forces with Picasso.
By the end of the war, Picasso enjoyed substantial name recognition in Paris, but much of his most important work remained obscure. He was, as his friend and biographer Pierre Daix later put it, a “celebrated unknown.”[7] During the war, Picasso had gained some help from Rosenberg’s brother, Léonce, who had briefly tried to corner the market in Cubism following Kahnweiler’s exile. But Léonce’s efforts had largely come to nothing, and aside from Picasso’s old circle, which had largely disintegrated, and the handful of connoisseurs who collected him, few in France knew much about the artist’s development since his early Blue and Rose period paintings. He was ripe for reinvention, and Paul Rosenberg, who was a far shrewder judge of the market than his older sibling, seized the opportunity. “We’re going to see a lot more of each other,” he told Picasso.[8]
Picasso was a ready accomplice. The dispersal of his old group, the break with Kahnweiler, his own helplessness in the face of his friends’ sacrifices, and especially the death of Eva had exacted a heavy toll, and he had spent much of the war trying to get his life in order. At first, responding in the only way he knew how, he had plunged into a series of impetuous liaisons that invariably ended badly. Within the course of a year, he had proposed to two different women, both of whom bluntly rejected him for more stable partners. (“Picasso had decided to marry me,” one of them later wrote. “I was not altogether sold on the idea.”[9]) Yet a third, a Martinique native, had abandoned him in a matter of weeks, unable to cope with his gloom.[10] At thirty-five, the man who had once gathered around him all the poets and painters of Montmartre, and a seemingly unending stream of women, was beginning to wonder if he was doomed to solitude.
But then he’d been given an unlikely fresh start in one of the Continent’s last remaining bastions of high-culture frivolity. A few months after Eva’s death, Jean Cocteau, the wealthy and insistent young poet and Parisian dandy, turned up at Picasso’s studio while on leave from the war. Picasso had met Cocteau the previous summer, but this time he came with an extravagant proposal: He was desperately trying to persuade Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to produce a modernist ballet he had written called Parade, and he hoped to enlist Picasso to design the sets. Catering to Parisian society, the Ballets Russes had little connection to the bohemian circles that Picasso frequented. During the war, it had also suffered financial setbacks—including a disastrous tour of the United States, where it had almost been shut down by the police for alleged indecency. But Diaghilev’s troupe was known all over Europe and it was one of the few going cultural concerns at the time; the commission also would bring Picasso some income. Gradually, Picasso was won over to Cocteau’s idea, and in early 1917, he and Cocteau traveled with the ballet company to Rome to begin working on the production.
For Picasso, the project provided the seeds of a new life. Shortly after he arrived in Rome, he became entranced by the young Ballets Russes dancer Olga Khokhlova, a slender, dark-haired, classically featured woman from St. Petersburg. She had been selected for the troupe by Nijinsky himself some years earlier and seemed to be a rising talent; she also was hard to get. The daughter of a czarist colonel, she seemed to come from a more elevated background than some of the other dancers, and she kept her distance from the men in the company. When Diaghilev learned of Picasso’s interest, he warned him that her parents would never approve. But Picasso was unshakeable. By the time the troupe went down to Naples for a series of performances in late April, Picasso was accompanying Olga on long carriage rides in the shadow of Vesuvius. After a long engagement, they were married in a private ceremony in Paris during the final summer of the war.
The real transformation, however, began with the honeymoon, which he and Olga spent as guests of the Chilean socialite Eugenia Errázuriz in the south of France. An exacting woman with an unusually advanced taste in art and design, Errázuriz had met Picasso shortly before he began making sets for the Ballets Russes. Her help had proven especially crucial in Picasso’s courtship of Olga, who came with expectations that were completely new to him. (“Olga likes tea, caviar, pastries, and so on,” Picasso confided to a Catalan friend. “Me, I like sausage and beans.”[11]) And in the weeks after their marriage, staying at the luxurious Errázuriz villa in Biarritz, Picasso had his first sustained encounters with the social set that would soon dominate his life. Among them were Coco Chanel, the Old Master dealer Georges Wildenstein, and Wildenstein’s neighbor and sometime business partner, Paul Rosenberg.
In Biarritz, Picasso was fascinated to watch Rosenberg, almost dancing with energy, ply Eugenia’s rich friends with modern art. “He’s sold all his Rousseaus,” Picasso reported to Apollinaire.[12] That anyone could do a brisk business with Henri Rousseau, the late self-taught artist whom Picasso adored, in this war-stricken country seemed remarkable. It also was pertinent. With his marriage to Olga, he could no longer rely on handouts from people like Madame Errázuriz and occasional one-off sales; he desperately needed a regular dealer. Soon Picasso was showing Rosenberg and Wildenstein his recent work, which ranged from large Cubist still lifes, to his jazzy and possibly Chanel-inspired Bathers, to a majestic, neoclassical Pierrot. Raising the stakes, he also agreed to paint the dealers’ wives.
For Picasso, the portraits of Madame Wildenstein and Madame Rosenberg were a delicate undertaking. These elegant and very Parisian women were far less adventurous than Errázuriz; if they didn’t like the pictures, it might wreck his chances with the dealers. Sensing that he should err conservatively, he turned Madame Wildenstein into something like Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville; then, in an even more bravura painting, he depicted Madame Rosenberg with her plump young daughter Micheline (“Miche”) on her knee, a work that seemed to draw on everything from the Madonna-and-child tradition of Renaissance painting through to Renoir. The performance was a blatant display of his range and skill, but it worked. Soon after the Madame Rosenberg painting was finished, Rosenberg took it back to Paris, where it created a stir. “Everyone knows that Picasso did a portrait of my wife and daughter,” he wrote him.[13] Picasso had found a new dealer.
