When the “Mona Lisa” was stolen from the Louvre in August 1911, it was not
long before the French authorities, tipped off by the newspaper
Paris-Journal, were knocking on the door of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
The young Apollinaire, who had not yet published Alcools (1913), the volume
that would establish his reputation as one of the key figures of literary
modernism, had nothing to do with the disappearance of “La Jaconde”. He had,
however, become embroiled in a separate affair involving the theft of three
Iberian statues from the Louvre by Géry Pieret, a colourful rogue whom
Apollinaire had briefly put up in his apartment in Paris and who had passed
on the stolen goods to the poet’s friend Pablo Picasso. Apollinaire later
claimed that he had originally tried to persuade Picasso to return the
statues to their rightful owner, but that the painter, consumed by the
innovations that would give birth to Cubism, was in no mind to give them up,
being determined to discover “the arcane secrets of the ancient and
barbarian art that had produced them”. When Apollinaire was arrested, the
threat of deportation soon led him to name Picasso as the receiver of the
stolen goods. The drama reached its climax with the two friends facing each
other in a judge’s chambers. Picasso, “practically out of his mind with
terror”, according to his lover Fernande Olivier, initially denied all
knowledge of the affair, although after questioning by an increasingly
desperate Apollinaire he admitted everything. Neither was prosecuted (the
statues having already been turned in before Apollinaire’s arrest), and
Picasso managed to escape charges of receiving stolen goods.
If the exact details of l’affaire des statuettes remain hazy to this day, the
tensions surrounding it offer a fascinating glimpse into the extraordinary
relationship between two of the most potent forces to have shaped the
cultural landscape of the twentieth century. John Richardson, in the first
volume of his Picasso biography, suggests that these hugely ambitious men
“would serve as each other’s catalyst to an extent unparalleled in the
history of art and literature”, and that the period marking the first
eighteen months of their friendship, traditionally referred to as the Rose
period in Picasso’s career, could as well be called “the Apollinaire
period”. Peter Read’s impressively researched study of the creative legacy
of this relationship, Picasso and Apollinaire: The persistence of memory,
not only describes the manifestations of this reciprocal inspiration, but
also shows how the afterlife of Apollinaire’s memory continued to shape
Picasso’s art.
Apollinaire was the most charismatic figure in the glittering circle of poets
and artists that formed around Picasso in Paris in the years before the
First World War, and, along with Max Jacob, he was a key factor in the young
Spaniard’s exposure to French culture and the avant-garde. Read stresses the
importance of this milieu in feeding Picasso’s ambitions as an artist,
suggesting that the sheer theatricality of life in the Bateau Lavoir studio
– with the impromptu satires that Apollinaire and Jacob loved to stage and
frequent outings to the theatre – must have contributed to the
anti-naturalist ethos of Picasso and Apollinaire’s work in this period. In
1905 Apollinaire sent Picasso drafts of the most well-known poems in
Alcools, “Saltimbanques” and “Crépuscule”, verses which express, through
intensely lyrical images, an imaginative preoccupation with travelling
performers and the emblematic figure of the Harlequin. Picasso was similarly
engrossed by the creative possibilities of such themes, having done numerous
sketches of Harlequin en famille and painted his large-scale canvas “Famille
de Saltimbanques”. Although their creative output during this period
suggests the natural convergence of a mutual passion, Apollinaire was later
to claim some credit for planting the seeds of inspiration. In a 1918 letter
he described the terrifying effect circus performers had on him as a young
child; “they have always remained somehow mysterious for me, and I sowed
that feeling in Picasso’s soul, whence it grew into marvellous works of
art”.
The imagery of the Rose period is one of the most visible traces of
Apollinaire’s presence in Picasso’s life, and he was the subject of numerous
portraits over the years. His distinctly pear-shaped head and expressive
features provided an irresistible subject for Picasso’s caricatures (many of
which are included in Read’s extensively illustrated volume), in which the
poet appears in a series of comic transformations – by turns city gent,
coffee pot, torero, pope, Academician, and sabre-wielding artilleryman. Read
argues that, through this prolific reworking, Picasso was not only
testifying to Apollinaire’s importance as a friend but also “limbering up”
for Cubism, with the metamorphosis of caricatural form feeding into the
schematically transposed distortions of his ground-breaking “Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon” (1907).
This process of metamorphosis flowed the other way too. Apollinaire called on
aspects of Picasso in creating several of his fictional characters, from the
Benin Bird of his short story “Le Poète assassiné” (“The Assassinated
Poet”), to the Malaga-born painter Pablo Canouris in “La Femme Assise” (“The
Seated Woman”). The final verse of his poem “Les Fiançailles” sees the
enflamed poet, rising phoenix-like from a burning pyre, calling on the
artist in a conflagration of lyrical longing: “Prophétisons ensemble ô grand
maître je suis / Le désirable feu qui pour vous se dévoue” (“Let us prophesy
together O great master I am / the desirable fire devoted to you”). Read
presents the poem as a striking expression of “the poet’s commitment to
continuing creative dialogue with the painter, in the belief that together
they can shape the future”.
The image of Picasso as a remote monstre sacré, prepared to sacrifice anything
for the sake of his art, has become a critical commonplace, yet the tension
between the demands of friendship and those of art does seem to have been an
enduring feature of Apollinaire’s engagement, in both creative and personal
terms, with the painter.
Read suggests that in “The Poet’s Napkin” (1907), for example, Apollinaire
“allegorizes how in Picasso’s studio everything, including friendship and
even life itself, may be cruelly sacrificed to art”; and in his chapter on
the Iberian statues affair, he argues that Apollinaire shielded Picasso’s
reputation by bearing the brunt of the ensuing scandal – the experience
“confirmed to Apollinaire that Picasso would always put his own work ahead
of all other considerations”. The rankling memory of this affair, along with
lingering disappointment over Picasso’s failure to provide illustrations for
his collection of poems Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée (1911), were only
two of the grievances Apollinaire may have had in mind when he wrote to
Picasso in December 1916 to suggest they have a frank discussion about the
problems besetting their friendship, adding, “My friendship for you runs
deep, which doesn’t mean that it isn’t bleeding in places”.
Although Read, a specialist in and translator of Apollinaire’s work, is
generally even-handed in his treatment of the dynamics of this friendship,
it is clear where his real loyalties lie in the end. In biographical terms,
his Apollinaire feels at times like a curiously flattened and even sanitized
version of the man, a generous spirit whose capacity for befriending others
made him vulnerable to their subsequent betrayals. Read makes no mention of
the murkier aspects of Apollinaire’s relationship with Géry Pieret for
example, and his craven incrimination of Picasso before the judge is quickly
glossed over. Neither party behaved well, and if Picasso’s name never
appeared in press reports of the scandal, it was more likely thanks to the
discreet help of well-connected friends than any principled conduct on the
part of Apollinaire.
Similarly, Read takes issue with the idea that Apollinaire was initially
baffled and even alienated by Picasso’s turn towards the fractured,
proto-Cubist geometry of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. The fact that
Apollinaire never discusses this key work in his extensive writings on art
is explained by his reservations about the capacity of language to express
the effect of Picasso’s new paintings; they only serve to convince him, Read
argues, “that something essential in them eludes ekphrasis”. An equally
plausible explanation, though not one Read will entertain, is that something
essential in the new works may have eluded Apollinaire, a suspicion hardly
allayed by the voluminously vague – if poetically evocative – “ekphrasis” of
Les Peintres cubistes (1913) and other writings, which led an exasperated
Georges Braque to claim that “he couldn’t tell the difference between a
Raphael and a Rubens”. In the end, Read’s assertions that “available
evidence indicates that [Apollinaire] was awestruck by Picasso’s work in
1907”, and that Apollinaire’s rejection of “Les Demoiselles” is a pure myth,
fail to convince.
The decades following Apollinaire’s death in 1918 saw a long, and at times
rancorous, campaign to establish a memorial in his honour. A committee was
convened, and from the outset it was understood that Picasso would provide a
design for the tomb at the Père Lachaise cemetery. Predictably, the
radically innovative forms of his sculptures ran up against the more
conservative expectations of the committee. If the grossly distended
swellings of his female bathers (described by one committee member as “a
bizarre, monstrous, mad, incomprehensible, almost obscene thing”) failed to
impress, so did his subsequent offerings – the intricate maquettes of wire
and sheet metal in 1928, the primitivist exoticism of “Head of a Woman”
(1929–30) or the angular menace of his welded-metal “Woman in a Garden”
(1930). In the end, the tomb project led to an impasse; unable to produce
the kind of classical monument the committee were hoping for, Picasso
eventually withdrew, and in September 1935, under the direction of Serge
Férat, a tall standing stone of Breton granite was finally placed on the
poet’s tomb.
Picasso’s monument to Apollinaire had to wait another twenty-four years, for
the unveiling of a bronze sculpture at Laurent Prache square, just across
from rue Guillaume Apollinaire in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Près. The
French daily France-Soir welcomed the essentially figurative style of what
it described as a bronze bust of the poet, though the sculpture was in fact
Picasso’s “Head of Dora Maar”, a work dating back to 1941. Picasso had
always been haunted by the idea of the monument conceived in “Le Poète
assassiné”, where the Benin Bird, impatient with the traditional pieties of
bronze or marble, resolves to create a “statue made of nothing, like poetry
and like glory”. The feeling at the official ceremony in 1959, which Picasso
did not attend, seems to have been a collective sense of relief that, after
long years of campaigning, they had procured something decidedly better than
nothing.
Peter Read
PICASSO AND APOLLINAIRE
The persistence of memory
334pp. University of California Press. $49.95; distributed in the UK by
Wiley. £29.95.
978 0 520 24361 3
Justin Beplate teaches English at the Université Paris 2
