1913 (15 page)

At the same time as Musil’s leave is granted, Franz Blei writes
to the Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig and tells them about the great, ‘splendid’ novel that Robert Musil was working on. If he had a ‘library-less summer’, it would soon be completed.

Who am I, and if so how many? In 1913 Otto Dix paints his
Small Self-Portrait
, his
Self-Portrait
, the painting
Heads (Self-Portraits
), then the
Self-Portrait with Gladioli
and, of course, the
Self-Portrait as Smoker
. Max Beckmann, the great self-portraitist, writes in his diary in 1913: ‘How sad and unpleasant always having to spend time with oneself. Sometimes one would be glad to be free of oneself.’

For Picasso, as always when a new lover came along, life and art have been transformed completely. In this case it was a particularly lovely story: the great odalisque, the sultry beauty Fernande Olivier, lascivious by profession, cheated on Picasso with the young painter Ubaldo Oppi and got her friend Marcelle Humbert involved, one of the most unpopular women in Montmartre. Marcelle was more than happy to distract Picasso during Fernande’s rendezvous, because she herself had long been smitten with Picasso. And before he chose her as his new paramour, he gave her a new name: Eva. Above all, he didn’t want his girlfriend to have exactly the same name as the lover of his friend, and increasingly his competitor, Braque. So for Picasso, Eva became the symbol of his rejection of the first phase of Cubism and a move to Synthetic Cubism. In his early thirties he seems to have seen in Eva the opportunity to become bourgeois, to get away, at least a little, from the bohemianism that was keeping him from working. And so they both move from Montmartre to Montparnasse, where the new Line 12 of the Paris Métro happened to go. While Montmartre remained the place for the penurious artists, the opium smokers, the prostitutes and the seedy
varieties
, Montparnasse was becoming the new haunt of the successful players in the Paris creative industry.
In the words of the great impresario Apollinaire, ‘In Montparnasse, on the other hand, you find the real artists, dressed in the American style. Some of them might dip their noses in cocaine, but no matter.’

In 1912 the 31-year-old Picasso and Eva moved into an apartment and a studio in a complex that was barely ten years old, at 242 Boulevard Raspail. Then, in January 1913, Picasso even introduced his new girlfriend to his father in Barcelona. Don José, formerly a stern paterfamilias, clearly had nothing against either Eva or against Pablo’s Synthetic Cubism – but that may have had something to do with the fact that he was by now entirely blind. When Picasso and Eva met, they had escaped to Céret, in the Pyrenees. And now, on 10 March 1913, they did it again. Picasso wanted to flee the city and its art scene so he could finally get some work done. They took a deep breath when they reached the mountain town, sat down at a pavement café and enjoyed a cup of coffee as the spring sun began to glow. They immediately rented the Maison Delcros and prepared to stay there till autumn. Two days later he sends two cheerful postcards to his most important patrons: his art dealer Kahnweiler, with whom he had signed a lucrative exclusive contract in December 1912, which means that for the first time he is earning proper money (and can buy lots of pretty blouses for Eva). And he writes to Gertrude Stein, the salon hostess and great art collector, who had done a lot of work in the background to ensure that Picasso was shown in the Armory Show in February. The postcard to Gertrude Stein, who is trying to throw her brother Leo out of the flat they share, and who is now living with her friend Alice Toklas, shows three Catalan farmers – in a handwritten caption Picasso identifies the one with the beard as ‘portrait of Matisse’.

Soon Picasso’s good mood evaporates, because his father’s health is deteriorating. He hurries to Barcelona, before going on to bury himself away in his studio in Céret again. He is happy when his slovenly friend Max Jacob comes from Paris. Max writes to friends in the city: ‘I would like to change my life, I’m going to Céret to spend a few months with Picasso.’ But as the painter spends most of his time sitting in his studio stubbornly working away on new possibilities for
his
papiers collés
, the collages of Synthetic Cubism, Max Jacob spends most of his time with Eva. As it rains incessantly, they sit inside and sip cocoa and wait until the Master has finished his day’s work. In the evening they drink wine together; at night the damp air is filled with frogs and toads and nightingales.

But Picasso’s thoughts are with his sick father, the father of fathers, who taught him to draw, whom he loves and whom he hates. When he was sixteen, he had said, ‘In art you must kill your father.’ And now the time has come. Don José dies, and Picasso is paralysed with grief. But that’s not the last of it: that spring Eva falls seriously ill. She has cancer. And then, when his greatest comforter falls ill too, it’s the final straw: Frika, his beloved dog, to whom he has paid just as much devoted attention as to his wives (perhaps even more), is on her deathbed. Since Picasso’s first days in Paris, Frika, that curious mixture of Alsatian and Breton spaniel, had always been by his side, had lived through many wives and the Blue and Rose and Cubist periods. On 14 May Eva writes to Gertrude Stein: ‘Frika can no longer be saved.’ No vet can help now, so Picasso asks the local huntsman-in-chief to deal Frika the
coup de grâce
. As long as he lives, Picasso will never forget the name of the huntsman, ‘El Ruquetó’ – nor how he wept during those days. Father dead, dog dead, beloved terminally ill, incessant rain outside. In the spring of 1913, in Céret, Picasso is having his greatest spiritual crisis.

On 22 March Dr Gottfried Benn receives a welcome piece of news: ‘Dr Benn, assistant physician with the Infantry Regiment General Field Marshall Prince Friedrich Karl von Preussen No. 64, is being transferred at his own request to the medical officers of Landwehr Division 1.’ Then he switches from the institute of pathology and anatomy of the Westend Hospital to the City Hospital Charlottenburg.

On 29 March Karl Kraus delivers a lecture in the Vierjahreszeiten-Saal in Munich. Among the audience is Heinrich Mann. Warm applause.

On 4 March there is a big dinner at the German Embassy in London. Among those present is, of course, Harry Graf Kessler, that German snob in the white three-piece suit whose address book has 10,000 entries, friend of Henry van de Velde, Edvard Munch and Aristide Maillol, who founded the Cranach Press in Weimar and had to clear his desk as museum director there over some supposedly salacious Rodin watercolours. That same Graf Kessler who commutes between Paris, Weimar, Brussels, London and Munich as one of the great catalysts of modern art and Art Nouveau. It is through him that we become a little better acquainted with the queen of England. At this particular reception he had just introduced the German ambassador, Von Lichnowsky (whose artistically minded, Picasso-collecting, wife liked him), to George Bernard Shaw. Now, at this dinner, she pays him back: Kessler is introduced to the English queen. ‘She looked reasonably good, in silver brocade with a crown of diamonds and big turquoise stones.’ Otherwise she was rather a trial: ‘I couldn’t leave her standing on her own, and she couldn’t find a way out of the conversation, and you have to keep winding the poor thing up like a run-down watch, but that only works for thirty seconds at a time.’ Incidentally, as he confides to his diary, there is no threat of war, or so he has heard: ‘The European situation has been completely reversed for a year and a half. The Russians and the French are forced to be peaceful, as they can no longer rely on England’s support.’ Well, then.

Thomas Mann writes a letter to Jakob Wassermann in March 1913: ‘The encounter between negligence and obsessive devotion to duty in wartime is a profoundly poetic invention. And how greatly and severely war is felt as a crisis of moral cleansing, as a grandiose stride
of life’s seriousness beyond all sentimental confusions!’ The war Thomas Mann is talking about is the one of 1870–71.