And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (32 page)

German officers also visited Picasso’s studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins, and it was there that the famous—and perhaps apocryphal—exchange took place about
Guernica
, his 1937 painting protesting the Luftwaffe’s bombing of the eponymous Basque town. As Picasso often told the story, offered a postcard of
Guernica
, one German asked, “Did you do this?” To which Picasso replied, “No, you did!”

Other Germans would also knock on his door, curious to meet the man already considered the world’s most important living artist. Gerhard Heller was taken to meet Picasso by the Gallimard editor—and secret
résistant
—Jean Paulhan in June 1942. In his memoir, Heller recalled his excitement: “We rang. Picasso himself came to open. I recognized his familiar silhouette: small, stocky, wrapped in a sort of blanket kept in place by a leather belt, a cap on his bald head and fiery eyes that pierced us. Very pleasant, very simple, he led us into his apartment, then into vast lofts with oak beams. Everywhere there were paintings, piled up, hanging, leaning on each other, upside down; he showed them, one by one, saying little, awaiting our reaction. I felt as if I were drunk.”
¹⁶
One month later, Picasso was visited by the novelist Ernst Jünger, also stationed in Paris with the Wehrmacht. In his journal entry for July 22, 1942, sounding no less excited than Heller, Jünger described Picasso’s apartment in detail. After much discussion about art, Jünger then quoted Picasso as saying: “The two of us, just as we’re sitting here, we could negotiate peace this very afternoon. This evening men could smile.”
¹⁷
It was a remark that Jünger loved to repeat.

The one time that Picasso left Paris was in early 1943, when he visited one of his oldest friends, the poet Max Jacob, with whom he had
shared a room decades earlier. Jewish by birth, Jacob had converted to Catholicism in 1909 and was living in the monastery of Fleury in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, although he knew that his conversion would not shield him from Nazi persecution. The painter and the poet spent much of the day together, visiting the basilica and walking beside the Loire. Whether Picasso sensed his friend’s pessimism is not known, but Jacob, who defiantly wore a yellow star while helping priests during mass, was increasingly resigned to being arrested. His brother Gaston had already been deported, and in January 1944 his sister and brother-in-law were also sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.

On February 24, 1944, Jacob was himself arrested by the Gestapo. He managed to smuggle a letter to Cocteau in which he begged for Sacha Guitry’s help.
^*
Cocteau also appealed to Heller to intervene. In his memoir, Heller claimed that he lobbied Ambassador Abetz and the German secret service and eventually obtained an order for Jacob’s release. But the poet died of bronchial pneumonia in Drancy on March 6 before he could be rescued. Picasso’s behavior at that time was hard to explain. Pierre Colle, a Paris art dealer who was Jacob’s literary executor, said that Picasso had refused to add his voice to those calling for Jacob’s release. On the other hand, Georges Prade, an infamous
pétainiste
, said he told Picasso that his signature on a letter to the Germans would be counterproductive. Still, on March 18, along with Derain and a handful of Jacob’s friends, Picasso attended a commemorative mass at the Church of Saint-Roch in Paris. And on March 21, Picasso joined a larger group of some fifty mourners, including Braque, Éluard, Mauriac, Maar, Coco Chanel and Paulhan, at a second mass in the same church.

Certainly, Picasso would have been informed, not only about the darkening plight of Jews in France and the internment of tens of thousands of Spanish Republicans, but also about the growth of the resistance. André Dubois, who used his senior post in the Interior Ministry to protect many intellectuals and refugees, would stop by frequently. Among others who kept Picasso up to date were Sartre, Cocteau, the poets Jacques Prévert and Robert Desnos, the photographer Brassaï and, even after he joined the resistance in 1944, André
Malraux. Annie Ubersfeld, a young
résistante
who later became a respected theater teacher, said that as early as 1942 Picasso gave money to the resistance and occasionally hid fugitives in his apartment. “You can’t imagine what risks he took,” she recalled many decades later.
¹⁸

But Picasso also had to take precautions. Gilot, who was introduced to her future lover by the actor Alain Cuny at Le Catalan in May 1943, said she knew Picasso always gave money to Spanish exile causes and may also have helped the resistance, adding, “But whatever people did, you never talked about it, because the more people who know something, the more the danger.” After she began almost daily visits to Picasso in his studio, she noticed that at least once a month Germans would knock on his door. She recalled, “They’d never be in uniform when they came, a group of five or six. And Pablo would ask me to follow them to make sure they didn’t plant any documents they could ‘find’ later. He was always concerned about that. There was also a very good photographer, a German, a homosexual, not a Nazi, Herbert List, who would come very often. And each time, Pablo told me to follow him around to see what he was doing.”

When Picasso met Gilot, who, at twenty-two, was forty years his junior, he was still involved with both Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter. But while Gilot did not become his mistress until nine months later and the pair did not live together until after the war, she became a close observer of his routine. “He did not get up very early,” she recalled. “And he would have people like me come to see him between eleven-thirty a.m. and one-thirty p.m. He would have a light lunch and then work all afternoon and evening. And then he would have a light dinner. He was not a big eater.”

Nonetheless, Picasso usually went out for his meals, invariably accompanied by his Spanish secretary, Jaime Sabartés, and, until his death in March 1942, by the Spanish painter Julio González. Thanks to the black market, even small bistros like Le Catalan and others on the rue Dauphine that he frequented were not short of food. (Le Catalan was once closed for a week after it was found serving meat on a meatless day.) But, apart from attending openings at Jeanne Bucher’s gallery on the boulevard du Montparnasse, Picasso rarely ventured far from his neighborhood. “He had a car, but I did not see him use it,” Gilot said. “You had to get gasoline from the Germans, so that was seen as an act of collaboration. If he had to go anywhere,
like the Leiris Gallery, he’d take the
métro
because that was the most neutral thing. It was anonymous. On buses, you could be noticed.” The right-wing writer Paul Léautaud bumped into Picasso on the rue Jacob one morning in April 1944. Léautaud noted in his journal: “He crossed the road to join me. He has let his hair grow down to his collar. His hair is all white. He does not have the face of an old man at all. From behind, you could take him for one. Strange thing. Until now I didn’t realize how small he is. He has a charming face and a teasing manner.”
¹⁹

Throughout the occupation, Picasso continued working. In 1941, he was even inspired to write a short six-act play,
Le Désir attrapé par la queue
(Desire Caught by the Tail), penned in the Surrealist tradition of “automatic” writing and therefore close to unintelligible. Still, for its first reading, on March 19, 1944, in the home of Michel and Louise Leiris, his neighbors on the rue des Grands-Augustins, the play had an impressive cast that included Sartre, Raymond Queneau, Maar and Beauvoir, with Albert Camus as the Chorus, introducing the characters and describing the imagined décor. The occasion was recorded by Brassaï.

Picasso’s paintings and drawings were also sold discreetly at the Leiris Gallery and occasionally at Drouot auctions. Was his art as detached from the war as that of Bonnard and Matisse? Heller, though hardly an expert, wrote of the paintings he saw that “in the cruel decomposition of forms, in the tragic violence of colors, the horror of the war (while never directly expressed) was present in a manner difficult to bear.”
²⁰
Certainly, while the violence of
Guernica
did not reappear in his painting until after the liberation, there is ample anguish, even tragedy in
L’Aubade
of 1942 and in numerous still lifes, some of red, gray and black skulls baring their teeth, others of skulls and leeks suggesting skulls and crossbones. Picasso also made one hundred drawings for his best-known sculpture of the period,
L’Homme au mouton
(Man with a Lamb). In 1945, he explained: “I did not paint the war because I am not one of those artists who goes looking for a subject like a photographer, but there is no doubt that the war is there in the pictures which I painted then. Later on perhaps the historians will find them and show that my style changed under the war’s influence.”
²¹

Although Picasso kept away from the Paris art scene, avoiding the visibility of, say, Braque, his shadow nonetheless continued to haunt those Fauvist artists who blamed Cubism for sinking their movement.
Vlaminck, in particular, seemed to be troubled that he had been more celebrated in 1900 than in 1940. Now, perhaps aware of Picasso’s vulnerability as both a foreigner and a “degenerate” artist and confident of his own good standing with the Germans, he saw a chance for revenge. Using the platform of
Comoedia
, the same cultural weekly where Cocteau had published his paean to Breker, Vlaminck turned on Picasso on June 6, 1942. Amid a series of gratuitous insults, among them describing Picasso as having “the face of a monk and the eyes of an inquisitor,” Vlaminck pronounced him “guilty of having led French painting into the most deadly impasse, into indescribable confusion.” Bazaine promptly responded to the charges in the
Nouvelle Revue Française
and André Lhote did so in
Comoedia
. Unsurprisingly, this diatribe harmed Picasso less than Vlaminck, who was among the artists suspended from exhibiting their work after the liberation.

Once Paris was free again, though, Picasso’s stance during the occupation was also examined. Having joined the French Communist Party in the fall of 1944, he was now conveniently on the same side as those carrying out the purges of collaborators. But he also had no cause for concern. He never claimed to have been in the resistance, but he had also done nothing to encourage the enemy. Unlike Cocteau, Lifar and Guitry, he had not socialized with the Germans; unlike Vlaminck, Derain and Van Dongen, he had not traveled to Germany as a guest of the Nazis. Gilot, who was perhaps the only one of Picasso’s women ever to criticize him and, in 1953, the only one ever to leave him, came to respect his posture. “What would have changed if Picasso, who certainly was no good with armaments, had thrown a grenade? Nothing. No, his position was being against the Germans and staying in Paris. For people of my generation, that symbol was very important. Just by being there and not losing your dignity, you could do certain things. Someone like Derain, why did he go to Germany? That was sheer stupidity.”

*
To escape arrest and prosecution, von Behr and his wife committed suicide at the end of the war.

*
After the war, Lohse admitted that he had kept—and later sold—some of the Schloss paintings destined for Germany.

*
At the end of the war, some eight thousand paintings were found in storage in Linz.

*
Kahnweiler survived the war by hiding out in Saint-Léonard de Noblat, near Limoges in southwestern France.

*
La Main à Plume
also kept up the great Surrealist tradition of infighting, well illustrated by its attacks on Éluard, including a letter addressed to him as
Vieux Canaille
, or Old Villain.

*
Jacob’s note read: “Dear Jean. I write to you in a train carriage with the agreement of the gendarmes who surround us. We will soon be at Drancy. That’s all I have to say. When Sacha was told about my sister, he said: If it were him, I could do something. Fine, so it is me. I embrace you. Max.”

In late August 1939, days before Nazi Germany invaded Poland and set in motion World War II, all the paintings in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie and other exhibition rooms were hurriedly evacuated, for the most part to the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley. (
Roger-Viollet
)